AUDIENCE FEEDBACK

 

This is Sifan evaluating the strengths of our thriller and the weaknesses.

 

This is Karen evaluating the strengths and weaknessess of our thriller sequence

This is Alisha evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of our thriller sequence

Final

This is our final piece. I feel absolutely proud of our work. i felt that we gave our all and the final result is more than what i expected. i am please to say this is our final result of our thriller film "RUBY"

final titles.

we had a lot of inspiring  ways of how our title sequence should look like. we were inspired by films such as the Pelham 123.

but we realised that having all these crazy fussy words flying across the screen and dissolving would have been to complicated and wouldn't of gone with the film pace.  Therefore we decided to go with a simple style. we used serif font,  because we feel it looks professional and sophisticated, and also I feel it looks more feminine. Another reason why we felt that not using effects in the title sequence such as fade is because our film doesn't consist of any affects it was quiet natural we wanted to continue that look. 

Editing the final sounds.

last lesson me and my group had to make finishing touches to our sound as we felt that it need a bit more work on it. we decided to use a heavier base to build suspense and tension and make the audience.

therefore we decided to stick to our original sound. we used the pen tool to adjust the volume and create a clear affect. however we realised that the sound was being repetitive and we felt that we may lose the audiences attention if they kept on hearing the same sound as they may become bored. so to not lose the audiences attention but also not making the sound too complicated we decided to change the volume up and down throughout the scene. therefore it would fit in more with the change of scenes from character 1 to character 2.

below is images of how we achieved this:

re- filming our foot scene

we had to re film the feet scenes and make sure the lighting was just right and the camera was in focus as lats time the footage came out to dark and it was not focus. below is a short video of me talking about how i felt when we was told we had to re film how we did it.

bvelow is an image of what the foot scene would of looked like before we edited:

live type.

we have had a lot of lessons on live type however this was at the beginning of the project. we now have top use the knowledge that we have to produce a good title sequence. Bbecause my group still wasn't comfortable enough with the live type we still had to do it . we tried out different effects to go with the theme of our film such as fading, dissolve, typing etc.

As we didn't want the text to over power the film and distract the audience from the main  topic of the film. we then came, to a conclusion and decided to go along with the theme of having everything plain and simple. we wanted very little effects.

reason for chaning our name to Ruby

We decided to change the name from Alisha to Ruby for various reason:

• we felt that calling it Alisha sounded to ghetto and didn't feel that the name Alisha symbolised anything
• because most of our props had something to do with red we decided to call it ruby.
• the word ruby ;  is a pink to blood-red colored . which is the colour of the lipstick, wine, also we felt that is symbolised sexiness.
• we also felt that the name was quiet plane and simple.

success and difficulties

I felt that the project was reasonably easy however I felt that the editing was a bit hard but i got the hang of it at the end.

What I felt was also quite difficult was cutting down our film to 2minutes as we went over time LIMIT i felt that we had to make sure that we took out the irrelevant scenes but also kept as much as we could to allow the audience to understand what was happening. i also found the soundtrack quite hard although it was easy to do, just to come up with a sound to go with our film was a bit of a challenge this is because we didn't want our film sound to be cliché; we wanted it to be unique but also go with the theme of the film, therefore we had to experiment with various sounds to create the right sound.

I found editing our rough cut was straight forward. I also found that actually filming was quite successful after the second attempt.

Overall i found that it had its up's and downs but i felt that it was a fairly straight forward project that i believe i put my all into.

below is other difficulties we had. sorry about the ending kind of got lost with words :D

costume and props

our props we used were passports to show that her identity is hidden therefore we wanted people to suspect why she has three passports. the reason for this is to show that she is doing something she shouldn't be doing, grabbing the audiences attention.

The red lipstick, passports and wine all connote danger sexuality and love. this goes back to what we said before. these are our main significant props to show how dangerous and mischievous she can be.

 We wanted her look sexy therefore the costume was The tight pencil skirt and smart shirt and heels represents independence and allows the audience to understand why me are falling for her.

 Our working title was Alisha. but while editing our film we came across the use of the colour RED. At that moment our Media Teacher Mary suggested said the colour red reminded her of a Ruby stone. In the lesson we suggested that we should name our secret assassin Ruby as the whole story is based around her.

editing

i feel that editing is one of the most challenging tasks that i have been given.  in a way it also has helped me top develop my editing skills as i am now able to edit successfully with my group. 

We have decided to use some dissolves in our openings as we wanted to borrow some ideas from other film openings. e.g seven and stepfather. BELOW IS AN EXAMPLE

As we had so many of the same shots just from different angels it was easy for us to do match cuts as we had the advantage because we could choose from a variety of shots. we decided to do match cuts mainly because it some of the shots were not shoot properly throughout the shot. therefore we had to do a range of match cuts, as a result we wanted the match cut to fit in with the rest of the opening and not look like it had been cut to roughly.

we also used a lot of match cuts and close ups as we noticed that a lot of thrillers such as "dexter" included this in their film.

we used a lot of close ups as it showed insecurity and hidden identity. we done this to get the audiences attention and assure that they do not become bored. it also allows the audience to question the characters reasons for dressing this way; to question their identity.

About our sound for our thriller

 we were inspired by songs sound tracks such as the xx "crystallise" because it was a simple guitar beat.  It was quiet smooth and continuous through out it started to get louder as the song went on which shows good build up.



We had a lot of ideas that came to mind when it came to picking out thriller soundtracks to fit in with our film. our first idea we though of was having a typical cliché thriller sound: violins, slow tempo, to show suspense and tension.

hoverer It took us a while to come together as a group and decided on a suitable sound. we wanted a strong but not to powerfully sound as we wanted the audience to feel engaged but not getting them to involved yet, as we didn't want them to become bored. therefore we came to a decision to have an up beat sound that also included some scary sounds. This way the sound reflects the movement of the characters.

below are images of how we achieved this:

Re filming our thriller film.

the first attempt to do our film I felt that we did a pretty good job as we took time and put a lot of effort into this. however when we went back to our college to hopefully start our editing  when we look at the footage we found that we filmed in either a really dark environment or we did not switch the camera light on. i felt discourage by this as we put our all into our work. However we made a check list to show what we had to do for better results. This included us bringing light stands and making sure that we switched on the lights.

furthermore when we re filmed our film in a way I felt this benefited the group as we had other things to correct such as making sure we had enough shots. therefore the second time we shot our film  we came out with better results and i felt that it was clever of our group to film early because if we wasn't happy with the result we got we would have enough time to re shoot a second time. it also help us as we changed characters and took out some scenes. therefore i felt that us re filming a second time was an advantage for us as we had a better understanding of what we needed to do to produce a quality film.

I am happy with the outcome of our film. in this lesson we also decided to change the name Alisha to "RUBY" as the name signifies "red" and as that also resembles the red lipstick that is used in the film.

we have now finally finished our rough cut and all that is now to be done is sound and some more editing.

Text: Final Cut Pro

After trying Livetype, we were advised by our teacher Donna to use Final Cut Pro to do our titles. She agreed that putting extravagant effects on our title, would not add to the films and said that we would be better just using Finale Cut. Here is a clip we recorded when creating the titles:

I think these plain title look perfect for our film. As my research show most of the thrillers we were inspired by had quite plain fonts.

Screen Shots

 

Above is a number of screen shots from using Soundtrack Pro. Looking for sound for our thriller was a complete nightmare. Eventhough there were many sounds to choose from, it wasn't what we had in our mind. But we managed to get there in the end. We didn't want to use the violin as it didn't really fit in with our type of thriller, and many people were using this type of sound. So we came up of an idea to combine the violin like sound with an Orchestral sound to add a catching impact. We still have yet to add our sound to our Final Thriller Opening. But so far we have edited what we want to use. 

screen recording

  

We found in our final shots that there were many spaces we could use to add text along with the opening. This was a huge advantage for us, as we didn't have to stress where to put and worry about whether it blend in the background or look out of place. We still need to edit our text properly, but again so far we are happy with where we have placed it and the time frame in which it is placed. 

Every time we edit, we think about the time frame and decided where we can put certain shots, sound and text.

I think this is crucial for every Editor to acknowledge when editing a piece of filming.

Screen shots

 

Above is a number of screen shots from using Soundtrack Pro. Looking for sound for our thriller was a complete nightmare. Eventhough there were many sounds to choose from, it wasn't what we had in our mind. But we managed to get there in the end. We didn't want to use the violin as it didn't really fit in with our type of thriller, and many people were using this type of sound. So we came up of an idea to combine the violin like sound with an Orchestral sound to add a catching impact. We still have yet to add our sound to our Final Thriller Opening. But so far we have edited what we want to use. 

Thriller planning:Title sequence

As we had an idea of what ouyt film was going to be about and based on, we had to think about the type of shots we was going to produce/ have in our film, we also had to think about the style of editing would be effective and go with our film.

For inspiration we looked at films such  as Taking Of Pelham 123 although we have already used this as an example of most of our inspiration we felt that the way that they presented the film was effective. we say this becasue we loved the way that pace of the title sequence blended in with the actual film pace. making everything easy to follow and understand.

We decided as a group to have a lot of close ups. however we did have doubts about this as we felt too muc close up would be over the top. In conclusion we decided to go ahead with idea of having most of the shots being close ups. We decided to this because we was inspired by films such as Dexter which showed most of the shots being filmed close up.

The film dexter really inspired me as i felt that it created a creepy atmosphere where it made me as the audience feel uncomfortable also wanting to know more as i continued to watch the film. I felt that this was affective because it showed him doing normal daily routine eg shaving, cooking, eating, getting dressed and tying his shoe laces.  For example when shaving we see a close up of a cut with blood dripping like he's slit his trough and the meat sizzling that bring connotations of burning flesh. However by using the close ups and the slighty calm but suspicious music it allows us as the audience to think about whats happening in the scene.

I feel inspired by this although it has nothing to to do with our film topic the use of shots allowed us to make our main character of our film have a hidden identity. for example when she put on the lipstik the close up of the lips was a reason to use close ups, as we want to catch ever detail of her every movement.

Rough Cut Of 'Ruby'

This is our final rough cut thriller opening. Editing this was a little difficult as we had to figure which shots we could remove in order to shorten our opening to about 2 minutes. We still have a few bits to change and alter but overall we are happy with what we have got so far as a rough cut. :) 

Editing: Match Cut Problem

We had a bit of a problem with one of the match cuts, the two shots didn't fit together properly. We tried cutting it differently several time, and got it to look alright, but i felt it still didn't look quite right. Dissolves work quite well, but we didn't really want a lot of dissolves in the film, having just one would be random and stand out really bad. In the end we flipped the shots around to make it look like they film them from two different angels. I felt this Works really well :)

Below is a video of how we did this:

First Attempted Filming 'Alisha'

On Saturday we shot our first footage. However once we uploaded this clips to finale cut pro, we realised the footage was way to dark to use. As you can see below:

Although this was very frustrating :( it did give us the chance to watch back the footage we filmed, and see if there are any missing shots, and if there is anything else we could do to improve them. We believe the problem with the lighting was that we left the LD filter on, so when we re-film, next saturday we will make sure it is off! We have also booked a light for the camera just in case, as we are filming in quite a dark room.