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.

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.

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.

Split Screen/Picture-in-Picture Technique...

Our group got told about this interesting concept that is used in the film '500 Days Of Summer' to show the character's reality alongside the character's expectations. We could possibly use this technique in our own film opening to show what really happened to our main character (or our main character's friends) the night before alongside what our main character wished had happened.
Here is a simple video on how to create this Picture-in-Picture technique on iMovie;

Editing Our Film...

In wednesday's lesson we continued to play around on iMovie with our films to see what did/did not look good. I found the different video effects we could put onto our footage and one of them was Day To Night which we thought might solve our problem about the footage being to light in the outdoors scenes but it made everything look blue so we'll have to keep changing around the colour settings etc. to see if we can make it work.

There was also a setting which put a blurry black, circular frame around the shot so we added this to the section where the stalker is following a victim because it emphasized the fact that it was a point of view shot and made it stand out as different from the rest of our footage.