Fifth Draft...

On this draft we put a new effect on all the present day shots of 'Leyla' in order to try and seperate the past and present shots. Also, the effect we tried (iMovie effect called Vignette) was a circular black border which gave the effect that someone was closely watching her.



Unfortunately, I do not think that the effect worked in the way we wanted it to, so we will need to play around with other effects, etc. It didn't work because it made the shots look too dark when we wanted them to have a very light, dream-like quality.

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.

Our original idea...

Here is a video of what we had edited so far of our original darkroom footage (most of it is just us playing around with different effects and colour balances to see what looked good);




The first part I quite liked as the camera slowly focuses on the man going through the door, which gave it quite an eerie effect but all of the shots in the dark room are very grainy due to the limited light that we had in there. This part is also very long and there is not much too it. The viewer can't really see what the man is doing anyway because it is so dark, and the pan shot from the pictures of the girls to the man when he drops the beaker is not smooth at all which makes the whole thing look very unprofessional. The audience would be bored by this part because notmuch is happening and we want our film opening to be much more fast paced.

The next section starts with the shot of the man walking past a house and the camera is very shaky at the start of this bit which also looks very unprofessional (we tried to eradicate the camera shake on iMovie but it did not work as well as we hoped). This is also where we tried out the 'Day To Night' effect which made everything look slightly blue which we wouldn't have used if we continued with this film. Again this shot is very long which means tension is lost, and there is no dramatic build up.

There is then a over the shoulder shot of Charlotte leaving the house which is slightly wonky which again makes it look unprofessional and the lighting is not very good here either, everything is dark. The only thing we liked about this particular shot was the fact that we'd managed to edit it so that it was all muted apart from the loud door slam!

There is then a shot of Charlotte leaving the house and the man following her and we edited in another shot from another angle of this which breaks it all up a bit, stopping it from being one long shot again but it is still not fast-paced enough to be an effective film opening to me.

The next shot is my favourite part of it all because it is the most effective of all the footage we had. It is a point of view shot of Charlotte being followed by the man. I like this bit because it seems believable and I like the framing effect we put over it to make it seem as though he is focusing on his victim. To break this part up we added in a couple of shots from a different angle but it looks very jumpy because we hadn't put the same framing effect on those shots.

That is as far as we got with editing our footage before we decided that it was not working well as a film opening. It had too much of a storyline to be a 2 minute opening and we did not have enough different shots/camera angles to make it an interesting and intriguing opening.
We have now decided that we want to film something much more edgy and fast-paced in order to make it more interesting.
Myself and Aimie found a great location in the woods (in Forty Hall) with lots of tall eerie trees and a path that is covered by trees where we could film our person waking up after having all there weird dreams (or possibly flashbacks of the night before; character's involvement in drugs, prostitution, etc?). I thought we could have a shot panning across the sleeping body of the chracter at the start without showing the location, and then close up of the face twitching in their sleep then add in loads of flashing, really fast clips of dreams/flashbacks the character is having etc. before they suddenly wake up startled then zoom out to show where they are etc.
These are just initial ideas and we need to develop them, but the fast flashing images would be almost in the style of the opening credits of 'Se7en' and we are also looking at loads of film openings to get ideas. Here are some that I was looking at;

This clip of Trainspotting is good because it includes lots of different random shots and I love the effect where the man is falling over in two different situations and then the shot of him laying on the floor could be very useful to us in our filming...


This is an AS media piece that is only good for the location and for some of the effects they used. (the dialogue and storyline isn't very good at all!) Love the delay/blur effect they used when the boy gets up from being concussed and I also really liked the tilts up to the tree tops.



This piece really made me laugh! The idea has definately been taken from the film 'Rock N Rolla' (one of my absolute favourite films, see below) but I loved the way they freezed the footage abruptly to introduce each person and I liked the 3 different shots on one screen (possibly use for dream sequence in our film?) Also loved the shot from a car right at the end and the way they showed a date in the corner of the screen making the viewer want to continue watching.

Beginning To Edit Our Film...

Today we watched our footage again and then began to edit it.
As the footage we filmed outside is very light, we tried to make it much darker/more dull by changing the contrast, brightness, saturation and balance on the clips. This worked because it meant the clouds and blue sky were no longer visible, although everything that was white in the footage became much brighter but I liked the effect this had, it made it seem abnormal which reflects the story of the film - something out of the ordinary.
We also played around with these settings in the dark room scenes and tinted them so they were more red which made it look much more scary than the original piece of footage.
We then began to select the clips of film that we definately wanted to use and then started to slice them up and mix them around to see what they looked like in different orders, etc.
We muted most of our footage too, to get rid of the sound of wind and our directions to each other, but we edited some parts so that we kept some of the noise - such as the sound of the door closing when Charlotte walks out of her front door and the creak of the door as Sarah's dad walks into the dark room.
After doing a small piece of editing we all went away feeling slightly happier about what we had and how we could develop it into something much more impressive.

Now we have to take the pictures of his victims again so that we can film the pan of the dark room/credits again with more visible pictures of us. After that we are finished filming and it will all be editing from then on.

Watching Our Footage...

Yesterday we uploaded our filming so far onto the computer and watching all of our footage to see if we had enough to work with when we begin to edit.
We were a bit disappointed with some of the footage, mainly because of the lighting.
We are going to try and edit it by changing the contrast/adding a red tint to see if that will improve the quality of our footage, if not we will be filming parts of it again.
The problem we had with the footage we got on the first day of filming was that it was sunny at the start and dark towards the end of the day. We will try to edit this too but if it doesn't work out we will have to redo that part of our filming.