Editing

So we have begun editing with Melissa at the front of the group but we are already experiencing some problems, we initially decided to use Final Cut as it is a more sophisitcated program but unfortunately not even the teacher could work it and on the Macs we have it is not the most efficient program to use. We experienced many issues from the simplest things of uploading our footage to adding black and white filters. Print Screens can be seen on Melissas blog of us attempting to use Final Cut [here].

However, we have decided to stick to using iMovie as it can do 99.9% of everything that we want to do when editing our footage. Although, there is a clip that unfortunately has Jessica in the background of so we will be uploading this specifically to Final Cut as the program can crop clips.

Assesment Criteria So Far..

This is the marking criteria for the highest levels as I am aiming to achive quite highly, to assess my work so far I have gone over the criteria and highlighted it in blue if I feel that I have achieve it and amber if I feel like I am in the midst of achieving it. The ones that are left black are ones I need to focus on starting and getting done.

VIDEO
Specification for -
Level 4 48–60 marks A*/A High B

There is evidence of excellence in the creative use of most of the following technical skills:
-holding a shot steady, where appropriate;
-framing a shot, including and excluding elements as appropriate;
-using a variety of shot distances as appropriate;
-shooting material appropriate to the task set;
-selecting mise-en-scène including colour, figure, lighting, objects and setting;
-editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer;
-using varied shot transitions and other effects selectively and appropriately for the task set;
-using sound with images and editing appropriately for the task set;
-using titles appropriately.

RESEARCH AND PLANNING
Specification for -
Level 4 16–20 marks A*/A High B


-There is excellent research into similar products and a potential target audience.
-There is excellent organisation of actors, locations, costumes or props.
-There is excellent work on shotlists, layouts, drafting, scripting or storyboarding.
-There is an excellent level of care in the presentation of the research and planning
-Time management is excellent.

Lighter Refilming

Unfortunately when looking through our film we noticed that in the shot of the lighter dropping you could see Jessie in the background, Ellen has tried fixing this using FinalCut to crop the shot however this effected the quality when expanding it to fit the screen. I therefore took the role of going up the city to refilm this part. This has made me realise that when filming you can never have too many shots, after all it's better to be safe than sorry! So I took about 10-12 different attempts at dropping the lighter to make sure we had at least one to choose from that worked perfectly.

We Filmed

So as director I think we had to get some filming done as fast as possible so I arranged a morning for all of us to take and go up the city and film on Elm Hill. It went well because of our previous dummy filming that me Jessie and Ellen had done. There was a few changes in the filming that I had instigated such as having a shot of a 'moving subject' where our femme fatale walked into the shot when walking towards our Anti-Hero, this was to break up the continuous shots we had of her walking towards the camera with the camera back tracking her which could potentially bore the audience and did nothing to achieve our modern take on shots. Of course the camera was in the hands of Ellen so taking a look at these shoots on our Mac will be the next step to see the full quality of them before we start putting them together.

Another job we have is to film the very beginning of our OTS in the room of our femme fatale which is on the top of our list!

Re-Assessing our Authentic Costumes

Although we were very organised in giving out our roles I don't think we did it soon enough as we found it very difficult sticking to our brief in being conventional in film noir costumes. When arriving at Jessies in the morning before filming we were set on taking a modern twist with our costumes in stead as this would be more practical. As a director I did express my ideas and gave the briefing as long as we had flowy and elegant clothing for underneath on our femme fatale then we would be fine. I did manage to get a hold of a fur coat for our femme fatale to wear and Jessie and Melissa had a good idea in giving our Anti-Hero my denim jacket as a more modern twist. Ellen had her input in styling also, grubbing up his top with mascara to look like oil stains while Jessie focused on the femme fatale. I had previously briefed our actor on the basics of his costume:

As this is Jessicas's role, this is the link to her post on styline:
Jessica's Post on Styling

Revising Shots and Inputting Sound

I spoke to Melissa briefly as she is in charge of editing and also Ellen as she is camera operator and have expressed my ideas concerning the introduction of our OTS.

We initially decided to make our OTS modern through the editing and shooting but I felt like we weren't achieving this to its full potential. At the beginning of our OTS our femme fatal is shown distressed and upset, our aim for it to act as a hook begging a lot of questions in the viewers minds as to why she is in such a state. Because this won't last for very long and probably only last up to 15 seconds as a whole I have discussed an idea that would excel our aims..

Instead of the close up of just our femme fatales face following on from a high angle shot to show her low status at this point I believe that having something a bit more fast pace would draw the attention of the audience in more immediately. My idea was to have lots of choppy shots from different angles of our distressed female to establish her character as very unstable - shown through the different shots at different angles and different distances - this in turn would make the audience feel unstable and therefore becoming in touch with her feelings. This hooks the audience because it makes them have to concentrate to establish their view of each shot before it has quickly changed, it also acts as a preview into how the film will end so it sustains the storyline and doesn't completely spoil the ending.

From the comment below you can see that the issue has been raised that because our femme fatale is a protaginist within our film the audience should establish a relationship with her and therefore would conventionally spend a long time looking at our distressed character however, because our storyline progresses to the point where the audience fully realise how our femme fatale feels about being trapped these choppy shots allow this preview without them feeling too sad and slow paced. The fast paced shots also foreshadow the action that will come within the film.

I then thought of how we could contrast this against the very beginning of our OTS and at the same time set the scene in a very mysterious manner (something that would stay true to our crime, romance drama) - the idea I had was to use the back of Jessies house as the aesthetics aren't too modern and zoom slowly forwards closer to the door of the house. Following on from that I thought it would be a good idea to then zoom up the steps and then towards the door of the room that she was in, this would act as an initial hook that sets the location and the scene, giving the audience a chance to be as though the camera is their point of view, walking to our femme fatale and becoming part of the movie as quite a personal experience. The slowness acts as a false sense of security when it is then contrasted against the fast and choppy shots.

As my role of being in charge of sound I also thought of something we could add in the beginning to make our OTS more dramatic and give the audience a taste of what would happen if they were watching a full length film. As we have thought of our whole story line and our basic storyline is our femme fatale driving our Anti Hero to death after a period of crime and lust gone wrong I thought a way of foreshadowing this would be to have echoes gun shots repeating during the shots of our distressed femme fatale. This will mean that I will have to take up the role as a Foley Artist and reproduce the sound of gun shots using props, record them and add them on during editing.

Dummy Run

From the very beginning of this video you can see one of the problems it has helped us notice. You can hear other peoples conversations very clearly which distracts the viewer from what they can see on screen. Because of the very intimate settings of the café we will have to try and work around this and capture a time when it is quiet or as my idea stands at this point in the OTS we are supposed to get a sense of the femme fatale being in her own world so no sound could work quite well at this point or just quiet background noise of the café.
The second problem you can see is that when we are backtracking the femme fatale rummaging in her bag the camera is very shaky, experimenting with shots will have to be done to overcome this. We could even put the camera in one place and zoom out as the femme fatale walks towards the camera to give that back tracking feel but with a more steady frame.
When it comes to editing it is clear that letterboxing could also be an issue because of the different clips, I will have to talk to Melissa about possible leaving all letterboxing till the very end to avoid any problems with different sizes of letterbox styles.

Doing this has given us a good opportunity to gage on how long it will take to film as well as how many different shots we have to remember. It will help us because we can refer back to our film or visually remember it instead of just a shot by shot list (which we will also have there to help us).