Soundtrack

We chose to use classical music in our film because it is relaxing and calm, this ties in with what is being shown at the time. The music creates a calm and tranquil atmosphere, which substantiates with the images that we are seeing of a dead girl's body.

However, the music also creates an ironic and unnerving side to the film opening as you would not usually associate calm music with scenes of a girl, just minutes after and before her murder. This will intrigue the audience as to why the girl has been killed, and what the killer does next.

Audience Feedback

We asked a number of students in our class to watch the rough cut of our film opening and we then asked them for some feedback on improvements we could make.

We received these bits of feedback from people in our target market group of 15-24 year olds, and dominantly males.

• An obvious point made was that we needed to add music to our film
• Somebody pointed out that we needed to mute the volume of the sound on a few of our clips to keep continuity
• Somebody also pointed out that the red colour of one of the title fonts was brighter than the others

We made these adjustments as our final cut. First we imported the music that we had produced and then made sure that all video clips were muted. After this we added any non-diegetic sound effects such as the sharp cutting sound when the killer is about to be revealed behind the fridge door and some diegetic sounds like the alarm clock on the killer's phone going off to wake him up.

We also changed the colour of the fonts so that they were al similar, but it did not matter if they were exactly the same as it was meant to represent blood, so varying the colour of the fonts slightly added to the realism.

We also changed the production company shown in the opening of our film from 'Twisted Pictures' to 'New Line Cinema' as Twisted Pictures usually produce large blockbuster horror films and this did not fit with our film pitch. Therefore we altered this to a more appropriate company i.e. New Line Cinema. This company is more suited to our film as they have released and distributed some successful thriller films such as Se7en starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Rough cut

When editing the footage we got from our first filming session, we realised we would have to re-film some of the killer's preparation scene. As this was meant to be very early in the morning when there would be no sunlight, we tried to darken the room slightly to produce this effect. However although the brightness of the shots looked good on the camera screen, once they were uploaded to the macs we could see they were too dark to see enough detail. Therefore we re-filmed these shots using natural daylight. But this time to produce the night time effect we applied a 'day to night' filter on the clips which meant it looked darker but the actors were still visible enough.

After we had edited all our re-filmed clips we had something we were fairly happy with, but not completely finished and polished yet. We had yet to include music or sound effect on our rough cut so this was inevitably a large thing that we would need to add for our final cut. After getting feedback from our peers and teacher, we decided we needed to cut down our opening by about 25 seconds. Usually this is quite a lot to cut out if you want to keep all of the shot in a film. However, since our film used many slow motion clips for dramatic effect, we could cut a second or two of quite a lot of the shots without actually losing much in the way of content. We also decided to increase the speed of some of the slow motion shots as we didn't want to lose any more of the clip.

We also needed to redo the credits as we weren't happy with how they looked.

Titles- Credits

In the film Memento that we analysed in our theory lessons the opening credits were overlayed on top of reversing footage of a man killing his victim and then taking a polaroid picture of him.

We wanted to do something similar to this in our film. So we decided that superimpozing the film title over the top of the blood streaks that are left when the victim gets dragged out of shot in a 'blood dripping' font with a dark bloody red colour would be an impressive way of including the film title into our opening.

We will also use the same font for the other titles such as cast, music, director, producer and editor. We will chose a dark red colour to show it is meant to represent that the words are written in blood that is running down the screen.

Shot list

Shot 1

Black screen for 1s. with the classic music in the background it creates the nostalgic and miserable mood.

Shot2
Dead Girl shown by the extreme close up constantly zooming out into medium shot with spinning. This is the longest scene as it goes throughout most of the opening. However it is split into several parts and they are put in between the flashbacks. Sound is the classical piano

Shot3 FLASHBACK
Flashback, victim goes through the door towards kitchen.

Shown by the tracking shot.

Shot4 FLASH

BACKFlash

back, victim continues going to the kitchen, however she is shown from the other view, through the window with zoom out when she comes in. Classic music continues

Shot5
One of the segments of Shot 2 appears with constantly progressing twisting zoom out from the extreme close up, also the subtitle appear.

Shot6 FLASHBACK
Continues the Shot#4 however with zoom out therefore we can see that this is the view through the window.

Shot 7
Interwoven dead girl shot continues with another subtitle

Shot 8
FLASHBACK
Shot #6 continues with progressing zoom out, shows girl reaching something to prepare her dish

Shot9
Come back to the zoom out, we can see more and more blood, soot slowly changes to the over the shoulder shot


Shot6
The victim is preparing her dish, moving from one side of the kitchen to another shown by panning shot.

Shot7
another segment of Shot 2 with dead girl with constant zooming out and spinning and another subtitle

Shot8
Victim sown by the over the shoulder however from behind while opining the fridge.
Classic music continues however another sound is added, which is a dangerously growing lauder and harder adding the tempo and tension to the scene creating expectation that something is going to happen

Shot9
another piece of shoot#2 with progressing zooming out.


Shot10
Critical moment as the killer appears, shown from behind of the victim. Classic music continues however is dominated by increasing sound effect that reaches its loudest point

shot11
Another point of view on the killer appearance, this time is by the two shot

Shot12
short black screen after the crucial moment for the emotions to calm down and to represent the time that passed until the next scene.

shot13
Glass and the egg crash on the floor shown by high angle and close up.

Shot15
Last scene of the victim dead, at this moment she is dead in the flashback as well as in the current action.

Shot16
Come back to the view on their legs, we see glass all around and now the blood starts dripping.

Shot17
Girl is dead lying on the floor surrounded with the blood, glass and egg pieces. This is the high angle shot from the perspective of the killer who is standing over the victim. In this scene the subtitle with tile appears, also the non diegetic sound of alarm clock can be heard in the background.
Also another sound is added which grows and becomes loud with time creating tension and expectation that something is going to happen.

Shot18
Man opening his eyes, dramatic zoom out, from extreme close up, alarm clock is still in the background. Increasing sound from the previous shot continues and reaches its dramatic point when eyes are open.

Shot 19
Man is getting up and leaving his bed. Shown by close up.

Shot 20
Then he is taking shower also shown by close up

Shot 21

Another close up of another action showing us the daily routine of the man




Shot 22
Close up showing another function, Notice that killer is never shown fully creating expectation and mystery

Shot 23

Panning shot showing the man's bulletin board with pictures on and newspaper extract.

Shot 24
Extreme lose up on the newspaper extract as man reads it.
Extract cover whole frame.

Shot 25
Ma moves the extract from the camera uncovering what is behind,

Shot 26

Man prepares for something, as by close ups we can see things he puts into the bag.

Shot27

Finally when we see as the man puts the knife into the bag we find out that he is a murderer and he

is somehow connected to the scene of dead girl.

Shot28

As camera is behind the bag, when man closes it, then whole frame goes black which is very effective ending, and good place to insert the subtitle.

Filming schedule

Filming schedule

As students we had to make sure we will organise our meetings so we can together work on our editing. We however had to consider each other's lesson times and find the free time that we could share.

We divided our work on blog so we could do it at home or any free time without need to consult. In case of questions we also used the telephone or Instant messaging.
We also wanted to use few shots from outdoor but we struggled with bad weather and short day times and we had to reschedule our filming on different days and we finally succeeded. We wanted to do all filming on one go, unfortunately we had to re-film some footage because of the rough cut feedback.

Animatic

After this we took photos of each frame on our storyboard and turned it into an animatic using iMovie. We used the Ken Burns effect which involves zooming in/out and panning from a still photo. We did this so that we could use this as a tool when filming and editing to remind us of what shots go where and what effects/ camera movements we would undertake on each shot.