The Midnight Siren: Finished Film.

After all the research, planning, filming and editing my group and I can finally say that this is our finished film opening.

Editing: Adding Titles

A big part of our film was the first 40 seconds, which involved the credit/opening title sequence. We began to plan what names and roles we had to include in the credits and we spent quite a bit of time making up names to put into the titles to make it seem real enough. We thought of quite common everyday names at first such as Raymond, Martha and Stephen. We then thought of quite common last names such as Clark, Turner and Campbell. We then began to think outside the box and thought of quite different and unique names such as Gertrude, Mildred and Frank. Thinking of appropriate names was not too difficult and before we knew it we had a long list of names we could put into our film. The roles we put into our credits were things such as Music Score, Director, Starring, Screenplay and more. We used the font Helvetica for the credits and this looked quite art deco because it is bold and it has quite square edges so it stands out and is easy to read also. We added the titles and there was also a drop shadow added to the text, of which had to be the same for each bit of writing, because during watching the film, Molly noticed that one of the names had a higher drop shadow than the rest and so we had to ensure they were all the same.

The text was finally complete with enough text on each credit shot that we planned and the whole film overall is coming along extremely well. It will soon be uploaded and marked.

Feedback: Part Two

As you can tell by the title, our Media class watched all of our films again to get some more feedback. However, this time, our films were also watched by a year seven class. This gave us more feedback from a broader audience of a different age group. Surprisingly, they had some really good things to say and it really helped us with what else we could change. Some of the feedback we got was the same from last time because we didn’t have time to change it, but there were a few new points to add on from before.

This is a list of the criticism we received:

• At one point of the film opening, there was a strange, unexpected sound jump that we didn’t plan, so we need to get rid of that and ensure there isn’t one in the finished product.
• We must make the femme fatale brushing her hair shorter because it drags on for a bit too long and there is a bit where she flicks her hair and it looks a bit too acted and so if we got rid of it, the clip would be short and simple and straight to the point.
• The cigarette shot is still a bit too long. We already got this bit of feedback and we did make it shorter but it seems that it still dragged on for a bit too long and so we shall make sure it is a bit shorter.
• When the femme fatale opens the door to greet the detective, there is a slight shadow in the background on the wall. This was the shadow of one of us during filming in, either me adjusting the camera or the microphone rod moving down.
• The ident still seems to say “revel”. The choice is we can either change the ident, which would take a lot of time, or we can evaluate it and just accept the ident title to be Revel.
• The femme fatale’s first line of dialogue was a bit too quiet and didn’t sound authentic. However, because it is a two-shot and her back is to the camera, we can most likely dub the video and add in some extra dialogue to make it sound better.
• The music is also a it too loud over the dialogue so we will need to pull the sound of the music down a little bit to ensure the audience can hear the characters speaking.

All of the feedback we received is extremely helpful and will guarantee that we make a film opening to suit the audience.

Feedback

In yesterday’s Media lesson, everyone had finished their draft of the film, and so all we had to do yesterday was to watch them and to give feedback on what was not so goo, how they could improve it and what worked well in the film. My group was first and so we played our film opening and then gathered feedback, which were as follows,

1. The Cigarette shot from the title sequence was too long, so we need to shorten it down a bit so it doesn’t drag on.
2. The editing from the femme fatale’s lips was not right and so we need to change it a bit to make it look right.
3. The part when the detective knocks on the door was out of sync, so we need to zoom in on the edit and make sure that all the knocks are in the same place as the actual knock that we see.
4. We were asked about the two doors but we had to explain that. There were two doors, one on the outside, which is the white plastic door which leads into the porch and to the other door which is wooden and red. The wooden red door is the appropriate door for our film as it is old fashioned and the style of it is old compared to the modern looking PVC door and so we had to ensure we the detective walking through the first door and getting to the second.
5. Some of the shots, for example the femme fatale brushing her hair and her puttng perfume on, were too long and so, like the cigarette shot, we will nee to shorten them down.
6. The first shot which was the cocktail glass for the title sequence was a high angle shot compared to the rest of them which was an eye level shot. This is turn made it look a bit odd and so we will need to reconsider which cocktail glass shot we can replace it with.
7. The ident of our film is a cocktail glass and behind it, it says “reel”. However the cocktail glass is placed in-between both “e’s” and so it makes it look like as if it should say “revel” because of the shape of the cocktail glass. We need to re-place the name of the ident/logo.
8. The last criticism we got was that the music cut off quite abruptly. Therefore, we were told that to make it better, instead of cutting the music off completely during the dialogue, we could fade the music out but keep it running under the dialogue very slightly so it can just be heard.

These were all very fair comments and my group and I will be taking all of them into account to try and make our film opening as successful as possible. The advantage of getting feedback is we can get a real audience’s opinion about the film and because no one had seen it before, no one was bias and so all the comments and questions were genuine concerns. This really helped us as a group to figure out what we can do to improve and so we can get a good end result.

Editing & Music

The first day of editing we had was Tuesday 5th January. Since then, we had time until that Friday to finish a rough cut for our film opening. The clip above is the first day we did editing and this was done by just putting the right shots in the order they were meant to go, we did not do any other editing that changed anything major. After the first lesson, we did more editing in terms of how long the shots were, slowing down shots and adding particular filters on some scenes to make them darker to add to the mysterious ambience. We kept on editing our rough cut until Friday 8th January, of which we had to have a finished draft of the film complete with music. We did all the editing up until Thursday 7th and on the Friday, Molly and I researched music, whilst Ben and Finlay researched fonts for the titles/credits and also came up with names to put into the film to make it seem like a real film.

So, the process of finding music and adding it in was up to Molly and I. So we went to a website that I found whilst researching into Noir Music that was called 8tracks.com and it had a lot of Film Noir related playlists, that I mentioned in a blog post in my Pre-Production area. Molly and I listened to the songs I found last time and watched the film at the same time as the music to see if the music fit our film in terms of speed, instruments, style and genre. We were given another website called audionetwork.lgfl . On this we were able to search this like “noir” or “jazz” and we could also type in the mood of music, so for this we typed in things such as “mysterious” and we found a good style that was “mystery/tension/suspense”. After a long time of looking, we finally found one that was good enough to use, which was called City Solitude by Tim Garland. This piece of music was very soft and quite slow. The instruments used were quite typical in film noir music, such as the clarinet and the saxophone. There was also a light drumming in the background of the song which kept the beat quite mellow. At the end of the lesson on Friday, we had finished most of the rough edit but we had not added in the credit titles and so we did that after gaining feedback.

Importing Footage

The first lesson back of the term involved getting onto a Mac and importing all the footage from both Molly’s SD card and my SD card. We did Molly’s first as the majority of the footage was on there. We put the SD card in the back of the Mac and then we opened up the files and found all of the clips we filmed and some pictures we took for testing. The next thing we did was to make a new folder on the Desktop, of which we named “Is it noir enough” to make sure we recognised it as ours. We then opened this folder and in it we made more sub-folders. These folders included:

• Femme Fatale
• The Detective
• Dialogue
• Audio
• Still pictures
• Opening Credits
• Newspaper
• Extras
• Dressing table

We spent some time sorting the videos into the folders and then after this, we exported the SD card by hovering over the icon of it and right clicking and pressing “Export SD”. We then took it out and replaced it with mine and did the same procedure with my card.  We had to make another folder for the dressing table, which is part of the opening credits, because they were filmed on my SD card and there were already files that had the same name, so we decided to put all of the dressing table shots in a separate folder. After we did this, we created a new project on Final Cut Pro by going to “File” at the top left of the page and clicking “New  Project”. We named the project Midnight Siren after the title of our film title. When we had all the film onto Final Cut Pro, we got to editing. So far we are doing a rough edit and then we will finish it for Friday 8th January where it will be watched by the rest of the class and we will gather feedback soon afterwards.