Script For Voice Over...

Here are some rough ideas of what we could use as a script for our voice overs...

Policeman/woman: This is PC Smith interviewing Mrs.- concerning the disappearance of her daughter Leyla -. Time is 12:43.
(possible questions he/she could ask)

Mrs. -, when was the last time you saw or had contact with your daughter?

What was her mood like?

Did she say or do anything that you consider out of the ordinary?

Is there anyone that you know of that would have a desire to harm your daughter?

etc.

Mrs.-: (possible answers)

She was at home yesterday, we had a cup of tea and lunch together. Just like we always do.

Well she's a typical teenager, how do you think her mood was?!

She was on the phone for a long time, probably to that boyfriend of hers, and she wasn't paying me enough attention. I shouted at her for getting all tarted up in those heels and she stormed out. That was the last time I saw her.

No. Maybe you should be talking to her boyfriend, not me.

News Report;

Concerns are being raised after the disappearance of a 16 year old girl, Leyla -, who was last seen a week ago in North London. The police have stated that the case is becoming more serious than they initially thought it would be. Mrs.-, Leyla's mother is urging people to come forward if they have any information on the case. All those closest to her are being questioned but so far the police can't seem to find any suspects and no-one seems to know anything about the mysterious disappearance of Leyla -.

Discussion on Voice Overs...

Yesterday, after editing we had a group discussion about what we were going to do about our sound/voice over for our film opening.
We wrote out a spider diagram of all our possible options about who would be talking in the voice over (i.e. police interview and who's talking to them - 'baddie', Leyla's friends/family, Leyla herself? just narration by Leyla? news reports on a missing girl? etc.), people we know who have suitable voices for our voice over, when and where we could record the voice overs and what the script would be.
Eventually we came to the conclusion that we could do a mixture of all these things, so that the sound was just lots of different sound clips put in sequence to emphasize the chaos that is created when somebody goes missing.
Below is an example of the kind of sound clip we want. It is a song by Plan B and can be heard at 2:58-3:24. It is a news reporter reading out news of a girl who was murdered called Suzanne. We all thought the way they had edited the sound clip to blank out certain words was very effective and quite creepy. (The song is extremely graphic and horrific but he definately gets his point across).

Fourth Draft of Our Film...

After having a few technical issues with our film on iMovie (and thinking we would have to edit everything again!) we managed to get on with editing again and this is our fourth draft of our film opening.
We discussed the name of the film again and decided it would be most effective to name our main character and then just use her first name as the title of our film and we ended up calling it 'Leyla' as we wanted something slightly unusual to reflect the odd situation the character finds herself in.
We took out the shot of the necklace at the end because we felt that it didn't really work with our initial concept. We also added in a couple more shots of 'Leyla' in the woods to emphasize her situation to the audience. We have also sorted out the credits now and made sure that they are all timed correctly, etc.

'Alice In Wonderland'

I went to see Tim Burton's latest film last night at the cinema and was really looking forward to seeing it because of how much I had heard about it and because it was a Tim Burton film and I generally love all his films but after the film I realised that it was very different from what I had expected. I enjoyed the film quite a lot but it was not what I thought it was going to be. I think that they could have made it more obscure and it didnt seem as odd as the average Tim Burton film. There were some very funny parts of it and I thought the effects that were used on the film were incredible but I still left feeling that it could have been slightly more interesting but that is just personal preference. Having said all that, I would still recommend the film and Johnny Depp gave an amazing performance as expected!

'The Bank Job'

Watched this film the other day and really liked some of the fast paced camera shots of the cars as they speed off and they reminded me of the shots that we have in our opening.

Third draft of our film opening...

Here is the latest draft of our film opening which we have temporarily named 'Pulse'. We spent a lot of time trying to perfect our credits and I am really happy with the way they've turned out although we forgot to add in an 'and' before the last name and we might have to seperate 'Filmed and edited by' from 'Aimie Condon' just so that it does not go on for too long. We made sure the timing of the credits was not too long and not too short as well, and decided that about 4 seconds was just enough for the audience to be able to read the name in time. We chose a suitably odd font from a font website and used that for our credits and we made the font a different size each time and spaced them differently each time.

We also cut up the shot of charlotte walking away down the path at the end so that she disappears and reappears which I think creates a really nice effect.

Also, we've added in the shots that involve the symbolic clock/necklace so that the opening feels like it has darker connotations and raises questions in the audience, such as, who is swinging Charlotte's necklace at the end of the opening? We also changed the parts of Sarah (the 'baddie') to colour so that it appears as though she is causing Charlotte's situation.

We cut out a few parts as well after hearing some audience feedback about there being too much repetitive footage from the car so we edited it accordingly (and got rid of the clock shot which was really out of place because of the lighting, etc.).

I am really happy with how it looks at the moment and cannot wait to get started on the voice over!

Group Discussions...

We decided as a group that we had to change the flashback footage from being completely black and white to being slightly drained of colour, because the completely contrasting effects between the flashbacks and the present were too different and made the film seem very inconsistent. We then changed the flashback parts by adding a different effect on iMovie to them which is called 'Old World' and then manually changing the colour settings to drain some of the colour from the footage to give it a dream like quality.

We tried all the other effects on iMovie but none of them really gave us the dark, atmospheric look we were going for.

We also wanted to make sure the audience would be very clear about which parts of the film were supposed to be the present day (Charlotte waking up) and which parts were supposed to be flashbacks so we thought the best way of doing this would be to use a fade to white before every flashback (where necessary) although, when editing we found it quite difficult to get each fade to white to last for the right amount of time, because iMovie kept automatically changing it so we need to figure out how to fix this eventually.

We also were deliberating about how to fill in a gap between two particular shots at the end of the opening where Charlotte wakes up, and then where she walks away so we experimented with all the different transitions on iMovie and found one which we thought looked the least obvious, where the two shots overlap each other.

Another thing that we discussed as a group was our credits. We wanted to attempt a similar style to that of the 'Se7en' credits because we really liked the creepy way that the writing flickered around the screen. So we tried out different ways of creating this on iMovie and came up with our own interpretation of this by adding in multiple textboxes in quick succession but changing the font size, letter spacing, etc. each time so that when it is played all together it appears as though our names are moving around.



Finally, we got round to talking about the name of our film and somehow we thought of simply calling it 'Pulse' because of the close up shot of Charlotte's hand at the beginning. We still are not sure about this name and whether it is right for our film or not but we have left as that for now and will change it later if we want to.