Twelfth Draft with GarageBand track...

Here is the twelfth draft of our film opening, probably the penultimate draft, due to a few small issues with the sound that we need to edit. Other than those few issues, this is pretty much the finished product!

We turned the volume of the birds down and made the fades in between sections of sound much smoother but now I think the music is too loud so we will need to turn that down too in order to be able to hear the voiceover clearly. I really love the sound of the birds when it carries on going even after the screen has gone black. We also got rid of the random shots of Charlotte that were at the end of the film opening before. Ending our film with 'Leyla' walking off down the path is much more effective.

Eleventh Draft - Background Music...

This is the latest draft of our film opening which has the background music on it. We decided that the film needed some music behind the voiceover, otherwise there was too much emphasis on the voices and not enough on the visual elements.
This draft sounds very rough because we recorded the track over the moving images on iMovie, rather than actually putting the GarageBand track onto the film permanently. We just did this in order to be able to have a rough draft with just the music on it.
The recording is bad quality (will be much better when we actually use the GarageBand track itself) and the fades in between different parts of the music are not as smooth as we want them to be but we can edit that to make it much better.



I particularly like the bird noises at the end when it fades to black, but for some reason the bird sounds are slightly too loud but we can edit that too.

New part of the script for our voice over...

We had previously written part of a script for our film voice over and we recorded that part with somebody else who was not available for recording the new part of the script which we had written yesterday. Therefore we had to record the whole thing again with different people, so to make it easier for us Charlotte was the police officer and Aimie was 'Mrs. Richardson', our main character's mother.
We recorded it yesterday and began to edit it but cutting out all of the times that anyone said 'Richardson', and putting a distorting effect on that word, in order to create the mysterious/creepy effect that we first discovered on a song called Suzanne by an artist named Plan B.

Here is the second part of the script that we wrote yesterday when we realised that what we originally had was not long enough to fill the majority of the film opening;

(after Mrs. Richardson says: Maybe you should be talking to her boyfriend, not me.)
Police: Why? What was he like?
Mrs. Richardson: I didn't get to meet him. She never let me.
Police: What about her friends?
Mrs. Richardson: I only really met Sarah Underwood and Stephen Land, but they haven't been to the house in months.
Police: Do you know if she is still in close contact with them?
Mrs. Richardson: No, like I said, she never told me anything like normal daughters should.

We are going to add effects to this voice over and edit it all to fit in perfectly with the moving images on the screen.

Tenth Draft...

Here is our tenth draft of our film and this one has a sample of the news report voice over that we recorded and edited (to distort Leyla's last name) on it. We have not put the whole track on yet because we've got to edit the whole track before we put it on the film. The recording is not very good because we recorded it on iMovie from the original recording on GarageBand.

Ninth Draft...

This is the ninth draft of our film opening, we have experimented with using the clicking sound when the title appears and we also changed the role in front of Charlotte's name to 'introducing' rather than 'starring' because we felt it looked more professional.



On this edit, the sound is very loud and not very good quality because this is the one we recorded on iMovie. We have recorded and edited a better one on GarageBand but did not want to attach it to our film yet, as it would then become difficult to edit.

Examples of Sound...

I was listening to my ipod the other day and 'In Regards To Myself' by Underoath came on and the start of the song gave me an idea for something we could do in our film opening.

I thought the clicking sound at the start of the song would be quite a good noise for us to use right at the beginning of our film as the names are appearing on the screen. This way, it would sound like the noise of the policeman recording the interview.

I think this would be an effective way to start our film as the sound could be quite creepy.

Click on the link to see the video In Regards To Myself - Underoath

Sixth Draft...

After watching our fifth draft a few times and getting other people to look at it, we have decided to make the present-day shots of 'Leyla' much slower and change the effect to an iMovie effect called Romantic which makes the shots much lighter, and slightly hazy around the edges. This definately gives us the dream-like effect we were hoping for and the slowed down shots definately make it seem much more like an actual film opening rather than a film trailer which is what it looked like before.

Also, when we were editing we decided that we wanted a black screen right at the start with sound over the top of that, before you even see anything happen on screen. Just as a trial run, we layered some walkie-talkie noises over the top of the very beginning of this draft. I quite like the effect this has, but we will obviously play around with this a lot more when we record our voice over.

We also made the 'Filmed and Edited By' a bit longer as we got told it was not on screen for long enough and the audience would not have been able to read it in enough time.

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).

Voice Overs...

Whilst editing our film we were trying to think about what sort of music we were going to eventually put with our footage and we got given the idea of using a voice over/narration over the footage rather than making a piece of music that wouldn't really fit the images on screen.

I really like this idea because we could have the narrator talking through whats happening on screen so that it confirms what the storyline is to the audience and because quite a lot of films open with a voice over.

When we were having a group discussion about the idea of using a voice over, we had a slightly different idea which was to make the voice over a police interview, so that the audience is more aware of what is going on and the darker connotations of the plot are more obvious to the viewer.

Here are some examples of film openings with voice overs that I found on a website of top ten voice overs;
http://www.film.com/features/story/top-ten-movie-voice-overs/27339682



"The genius of the narration in Election is how most of the characters are saying the exact opposite of what they really think. You listen to them rationalize their immoralities or completely kid themselves into accepting delusion."
said Dre Rivas on his blog.






I really like the idea of using a voice over with some music in the background (we thought perhaps the beep of a hospital machine as we discussed the possibility of calling our film 'Pulse') and I hope we get to use this idea successfully in our film opening.

GarageBand Training...

Yesterday we went to a GarageBand training session and got taught everything about how to use the programme so that we know what we are doing when it comes to adding music to our film opening. We all got the chance to play around with creating different pieces of music by adding in loops, etc. Our group came up with a few different things that we really liked the sound of but now we have got to make sure that the different parts of the track we eventually make fit in exactly with the action on screen to give our film opening a tension building effect.

Here is a picture of our group (minus Aimie!) at GarageBand training;

Garageband...

Here is a video on how to use Garageband, this will be really helpful to us when we begin to add sound to our film.

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.