Titles

We've made our titles finally and we made these by using the accidental footage that we have from the stalking shots. These shots are generally of nothing in particular and are just accidental or are in the five seconds before the acting started. For example here's one:

Each of these last for 2 seconds because we couldn't fit the whole name and job title onto a 4 second clip so we split it in half. We also did one each for the actors and this brought our whole time up by 12 seconds so we've finally reached our time limit!

After we had shown it to our teacher she pointed out that there wasn't a an actual title in the whole sequence, so that meant we thought we had finished again but instead had one little thing left to do. We couldn't think of a name and asked our teacher and someone from another media group to think of one. We were all thinking of titles to do with time and clocks when our teacher said 'Femme Fatale'. This relates to the film noir genre of women seducing lovers to kill their husbands and we liked it because obviously our killer is a woman. We were all happy with this and it adds some mystery and class to our sequence because the title's in french.

Feedback sheet

To see everyone's progress and to get feedback from our finished products, we all did a screening of our opening sequences and gave a feedback sheet. This is our feedback sheet:


1. Is it clear that this film is a thriller?                                            Answers:

Yes    No                                                                            Yes - 6      No - 0

2. Were there any conventional aspects of a thriller in it?

Yes    No                                                                             Yes - 4    No - 2

3. Was the acting:
Poor     ok     good     excellent                                         poor - 0      ok - 1       Good - 3      Excellent - 2
4. Was it clear when the time jumped?
Yes    No                                                                            Yes - 3    No - 3
5. Were there any continuity errors that you noticed? If yes, what?
Yes    No                                                                            Yes - 0   No - 6
6. Do you think the music matches the film opening?
Yes    No                                                                             Yes - 5    No - 1
7. Is there anything you would change or improve?
Yes    No                                                                              Yes - 0    No - 6
8. Do you think it was effective using a man as the victim?
Yes     No                                                                              Yes - 6   No - 0

Time limit

So we've put all our footage together but it's too short! It's only a minute and a half which is strange because we've done so much filming and re-filming. We tried to add one or two more seconds on to each of the dead floor shots but that can only boost up the time by so much and by the time we'd done this to all of them, it had only increased by five seconds.

We were going to do a graphic match from a clock or watch face to our main character's eye but we didn't think it fitted and we filmed it at a wrong angle so the continuity would be disrupted and the transition wouldn't be believable to the audience.



Alex filming the eye shot


After uploading this onto the macs, we decided that we could use it at the beginning because it's blurry but is pulled into focus and pulled out of focus so it creates mystery and confusion to the audience as to what's going on. We also decied to use it at the end to convey that it goes back to the beginning; the character and the audience have to find out who killed him and why, just like in Memento which was our biggest influence.

As we had put these eye shots at both the beginning and end, it made the whole thing longer by twelve seconds but still we need more in able for it to be two minutes!

Music

We obviously needed music for our piece as we couldn't just have it silent all the way throughout and after asking for some websites from our teacher we started traipsing round copyright free music websites. We went onto http://www.audiojungle.net/ and found a track that fitted so well with our sequence. It was called 'Four Suns' and we were so amazed at how we thought it fitted with it that we knew we just had to get it for our project. Unfortunately it was $14 and although we did really like it and thought it was perfect for this, we didn't really want to have to pay $14 for it so somehow I manged to download it but it kept saying 'audio jungle' throughout the whole song. We tried to put it into Garageband to cut these out but it wouldn't let us.

At this point we were almost in tears. Beth and I actually made some music in Garageband and I'm glad we did because we think it fits better than 'Four Suns' did! We went onto the choice menu of 'loops' and put in a loop of strings, then some 'jazzy' drums came in and then finally an action style bassline came in. Eventually one by one these fade out towards the end and at the beggining and end is an organ style chord which creates tension and mystery even before it's started! So we're all very happy with the music, finally!

Voiceover

We decied we wanted a voiceover in our sequence so we started looking up time quotes. After trailing the internet and finding some weird ones, we found one that fitted really well. It was: 'Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them'. We thought this was perfect and decided to have it at the beginning over a black screen so the audience would be more focused on it therefore conveying the importance of it.

Originally we were going to have our teacher do it but he refused to do it, probably because he'd already let us film him for our whole process, so we recruited a friend and we managed to do it quickly and in the first take! We wanted to have a second voiceover but we thought this might be a bit too much and it would have taken the importance away from the first one so we just left it at one.

Continuity finally

We've finished our continuity exercise! We put in the last angle of our match on action and here it is:

Editing, editing, editing

So we've edited the flashbacks and the beginning and we've just put together all the bits in between. Between each flashback and the previous shot we've put in a transition of fade to white.

 The shots directly before the flashback scene are the same so that was quick and easy to do which obviously gave us more time to edit the rest like our match on action.

We've editied our match on action! We originally filmed a previous match on action in the old 'dying' room but it was too distracting, didn't fit in with our storyline and there was an 180 degree rule error.

The 180 degree rule is something that is the most basic but crucial continuity rule in filming. It's when there's two subjects and in order to keep the continuity, they have to be filmed from the same 180 degree semi circle, hence the name. If they're not filmed using this rule, then the audience will see them from what is called the 'reverse angle' and it will disrupt the continuity.

This match on action took us a while to get right because at first the clips from each angle were either too long or too short so we were constantly editing them to different lengths.