Sound Draft

I used Sony Vegas to create a basic sound draft of our opening up until the scene that we have refilmed, it is embedded below..



...because we refilmed some scenes after this and I didn't have this footage I decided to only edit the beginning half, we are also probably replacing the ending of this soundboard draft with a two person dialogue and cutting out the headphones edit where the music plays as the character puts in his headphones, and putting this scene at the start as I didnt have this footage I just put a title in with the possible audio on top of it. In the actual thing we may have the first song play for slightly longer and have Sean put in his headphones and it gradually builds up as if the audience is also putting on headphones, and then he continues to skip songs. This will then play through right up to the phone call where until the chase scene it will be entirely ambient sound, when the chase starts we may play a non-diegetic fast paced music track as Sean runs. I think I've built a good base to build from and we can use this to really polish the soundboard for the final draft.

We might be changing the soundtrack to "Pyscho Killer" by the Talking Heads as I feel it builds up more tension within the scene, as well as foreshadowing a literal "Pyscho Killer" as the person who chases Sean subliminally through the lyrics. The rhythm of the song also goes really well with our opening.

Filming (28/02/12 and 01/03/12)

Our final draft is due in a week today and today we carried out some filming. We filmed the narrative from the perspective of the other character in the dialogue, shot some scenes while bearing in mind extra actors names. We just have to refilm a few more shots which we plan to do on Thursday.

In the mean time I have decided to get a basic draft of a sound track that can help Eric in the final editing. I have downloaded the current video and I will edit the sound up until the time lapse, I will then try to add some sound after that however it will just be a basic draft and is a way for me to convert any ideas that I have into a media format to more easily show what I mean and help Eric to make similar sound additions in the final edit.

Title timing analasys.

Some feedback that we got when showing our opening was that we didn't have enough titles, we have decided as a group to each look at a film opening and see how many, and for how long titles appear. I decided to look at "Panic Room" and Eric looked at "Scott Pilgrim: "

Panic Room is embedded below



Before any of the film begins, the Iconic "Colombia Pictures" intro is shown. This is the equivalent of our opening shown below. The Colombia Pictures actually lasted a lot longer than I expected, raching a length of almost 20 seconds long. Another title is then shown immediately after of "Colombia Pictures" really reinforcing there brand. Any other producers are then shown each title lasting from 2-4 seconds. After about 10 seconds into the actual opening the main actors names are shown, I assume it is the 4 most important characters as these take up a larger amount of screen than actors shown later on in the opening.

After around 30 seconds into the opening the main title is shown, this is shown for 6 seconds (slightly longer than any other titles). The 5th actor who I assume is important is now the final character to be shown alone. This happens as the entire opening (including the colombia pictures intro) passes the one minute mark, so in this opening all main actors and producers have been shown in the first minute. Once again the actors name is displayed for 4 seconds. The actors now begin appearing as two in each scene (i.e two names one on top of the other) still gaining 4 seconds screen time, 4 more actors are shown this way, all actors names have been displayed by 01:08. The casting, costume designers, film editors e.t.c now begin to be shown each taking exactly 4 seconds screenn time. This is consistent throughout the whole opening and the only thing with any more screen time than 6 seconds is the title.

Plans for third draft

What we need to improve on..

• We need to refilm the middle scenes as the audiences can't understand what is happening in the scene

I think the opening is perfect up until 01:06 at this point the storyline becomes unclear, the dialogue can't be heard and I think we need to record the dialogue over a microphone, I also think that we should have the person on the other line of the phone showed, this will then add more significance when the body of this person is seen when the chase first ensues. I think that at the moment it appears that Sean just runs for no apparant reason, we need to make it clear that he see's his friend being mugged and is then chased by the person who can teleport. This takes us up to 01:50 and I believe that no improvements need to made to the footage outside of this time range.

• More titles so we need to add in some shots where titles can be added

These need to be done at the very start of the scene, so around the train station area. I am going to complete an analasys of a real text to establish how many more titles we need to add.

• Wider range of shot distance's and camera angles
  • e.g at the start of the chase scene when Sean reached the canal, we could use a dutch/cant angle to create a feeling of something being wrong
  •  I feel like we had a majority of medium shots it would be good to shoot a few extreme close ups or extreme wide shots
• A more realistic soundtrack, as opposed to just a constant song we need to add more ambient sound such as footsteps, cars, breathing e.t.c

We will be using http://www.audionetwork.com/ as well as possibly creating some of our own sound effects. We've been thinking about this as a group since before even filming and we have found lots of possible effects already.

•  Although it isn't a particular area for improvement we are also going to change the effect of the disappearing effect as we feel that it could add to the opening. 

After some previous research into possible teleport effects I mentioned a "Nightcrawler" effect I saw while browsing through YouTube videos, after showing it to the rest of the group we liked the idea and it was a lot simpler than the other teleport effects, yet at the same time seemed to work best with our opening, a link of a short video extract (Edited by Eric) is embedded below of the effect.