My Media Evaluation

Finished Opening Title Sequence

So this is our finished piece, my evaluation will follow this so you can review how I feel about the planning and production as a whole - ENJOY!

Update & Sound Info

Been in Berlin the last few days so was eager to find out how the rest of my group had done in terms of filming the part I had come up with concerning the femme fatale looking distraught but this time featuring snappy shots from different angles but also containing the slow establishing shots zooming into the house.

My job was to come up with music to pair up with this part as well as create the gunshots which you can see I have done within recent posts.

So my brief when it came to the music was to keep it modern but also intriguing as we wanted to pair the hooking intro with hooking music. 


My first thought was to use Audio Bullys remix of the 1966 cover of Shot me down my Nancy Sinatra which although it tells the story of a relationship where each partner 'shoots eachother down', I felt that I could take a 10-15 second piece which also played my gun shot sounds over the top and it would work will with the beginning of our OTS...



If you listen to this video from 1:19 - 1:34, I thought this part of music would suit the establishing shoot as it is quite slow which will emphasize the slow zoom into the house in contrast to the last 6 seconds of the selected piece where it would emphasize the choppy and fast shots of the piece. After thinking about it a bit more I thought that the lyrics of the song would be too obvious and although we do hint at the ending of the story with our OTS we did not want the whole thing to be 'in the audiences faces'. The other problem with this is that it's a woman singing about something that depicts our storyline very similarly so it might seem that the voice has to be similar to the femme fatale in our piece or that it is actually her singing. The lyrics 'I used to shoot you down' also give away too much and could confuse our audience if they were to watch the whole piece as it wouldn't suit our storyline of the femme fatale driving the anti-hero to death whether it be him shooting himself or her shooting him or even someone finding out about the romance and not allowing it to the point where someone kills him to stop it from continuing.

I then thought that the best thing to do was to choose a song without lyrics but that also had the same qualities that I wanted so I started searching youtube...



If you listen to this video from 0:57-1:12 you can hear a part that would be perfect to our piece in a hugely simplistic way. It was originally created by Bernard Herrman for a movie called 'Twisted Nerve' which creates the problem that it isn't actually modern music but the whistling within the piece is very timeless and therefore it can be considered an 'ahead of its time' way of creating suspense in a very chilling way. This song has also been used on many other modern films and is favoured by Quentin Tarantino for his films 'Kill Bill' (2003) and 'Death Proof' (2007) showing this song is suited to what our OTS is trying to do - bring old fashioned film qualities to modern cinema. The chosen extract does have a climax to pair with the choppy shots but it might not be quick enough so when adding the sound to our final piece I can play with the speed of it to suit it.

Our Questionnaire for Final Audience

This is a printscreen to show the questionnaire that me and Jessie had previously created but published on facebook.

I created an event and added Melissa & Jessie as admin and made it public so that it would come up on all of our friends walls. This will ensure that a vast amount of people see our questionnaire increasing the chances of getting a lot of results back as we cannot promise that everyone will want to fill it out.

Edited Gun Shots

So my plan was to use iMovie HD to edit my manipulated gun shot sounds so that they sounded muffled. It was my aim to effect the audiences senses with this muffling effect but also to resemble what our femme fatale is hearing and how her senses are also being challenged because of how she is feeling at the precise moment in our OTS. I used audio fx on iMovie, changing the pitch, I chose to use three gunshot sounds to emphasize the repetition of the noise within the femme fatales mind to create the sense that she cannot escape from it. These are the finished sounds:

Sound Experiment...Sounds!

Untitled from Kieron Marchese on Vimeo.

This clip shows the three sounds, A, B and C after I cut the in between noise. From this experiment so far I have eliminated B (the second sound) because it is too high pitched and slap-like. My plan is to now go onto editing Sound A and C using Audio/Video FX on iMovie to make it more like a gun shot whether that means increasing and decreasing the pitch, slowing it down or speeding it up etc.

Sound Design Experiment

As the soundman for out OTS I will be conducting an experiment on how we will create the sound we need - a gun shot. So I have decided to conduct an experiment with the following equipment:

• A - Oxford Dictionary with Metal Corners
• B - A Plastic Ruler
• C - A Boot with Hard Sole

With each item I will be smacking it onto the table whilst recording the sound, I will then upload it to iMovie and extract the audio slowing it down to make the realistic sound of a gunshot. I will then compare the sounds and choose which ones sounds the best.