Black and white effect

 We decided that we would make our thriller opening black and white, to fit in with our chosen sub genre; Film Noir. Additionally, we put a lot of thought into our colours and what they stood for, and then we played on this and changed conventions. Thus, we thought it would look effective if we made these colours stand out against the rest o the footage which would be black and white.

As I am doing a lot of my editing out of lesson time, I found myself with no teacher in the room when I wanted to start planning around with effects, so I decided to teach myself! After having a play around with the effect and seeing what they do, I resorted my footage back to it's default settings and then started looking into tutorials of Final Cut on the web, to see if I could figure out how to alter the colour myself...and I did!

This screen grab shows me going onto effects and then onto image control. I then scrolled down to 'desaturate' and had to drag and drop this effect onto each of the shots that I wanted to turn black and white, which in this case, was every shot other then the titles. On the timeline the shots still appear in colour, but as you can see, when you play it, they appear in black and white. I am happy that I discovered how to do this, as it opened up new doors and I got to see some of the many effects that Final Cut is capable of.

Rough edit complete!

Friday March 1st was the deadline for our rough edit. This meant I had to finish the retakes of shots that did not go so well the first time and then collect a draft of our soundtrack which we recorded at the start of the week. Some of the shots that had to be re done consisted of the pan of the room (where I used the rubber band trick to make it smooth and steady), the shot of the door, and finally shots of the various posters that were used as homage of iconic femme fatale films.
I then uploaded everything back onto the computer and imported it into Final Cut, so I could incorporate it in my draft. I found the draft editing process insightful as it made me fully understand how long it takes to edit roughly 2 minutes of footage!
However, I had some difficulties with my titles as one of them kept appearing minute on the video but regular size when not on Final Cut. Therefore I had to go back on to Live Type, which is the program I used to create my title sequence, and make it larger. I then decided to increase the size of all my titles, as well as change the time span they appeared on screen for.
After about 45 minutes of frustrating titles, I then imported the new ones into Final Cut and replaced the old ones in my sequence.
Finally, I inserted the soundtrack we made and the Foley sound of the hanger swinging to give myself a rough idea of what the opening looked like with the soundtrack included.

I now have to focus all my attention on learning how to make the footage black and white, with the key colours enhanced. I look forward to completing my final edit.

Furor rough edit

Organising the footage

Once taking our footage off the camera, we sifted through it to separate the shots we needed from the shots we didn't. The ones we needed, we extracted and put into a folder named 'Opening 2'. We then opened them one by one to see what scene it said on the whiteboard and then used this to label the clip. We did this for every scene. The screenshot below shows the folder we made which now contains all the relevant footage we need to start editing.

Next, we put all the clips we didn't need into a folder called 'Mistakes'. This folder contains takes of scenes that went wrong and also extra shots we took in case we need to fill spaces or because other shots are too short, they are basically spares and backups of the shots we are using. The screenshot below shows the folder we made which now contains all the unneeded footage.

The last folder we made was called 'Opening copy' and basically contained our title sequence and the pictures taken on set of us filming. This can be seen in the screenshot below.

By sorting all of the footage, pictures, and titles out as soon as we uploaded them onto the computer, it allowed us to have all of our resources organized and ready to import into Final Cut to start editing.

Foley Artists

The name 'Foley' comes from Jack Donovan Foley, who started experimenting with his own sounds in 1927. A Foley artist is someone who creates the sounds in movies for a living. These are not just any sounds, but are the sounds that cannot be heard in the initial filming of the movie. Thus, they are creating non diegetic sounds to emphasie the diegetic sounds that were not very audible. Ways in which Foley artists recreate diegetic sounds are:

1. Dropping a phone book on the floor

2.Beating an apple with a stick

3.Footsteps on different textures

4.Banging cocoanuts

5.Using water

I found it challenging making my own Foley sounds because for some pieces it was difficult to find an object that will portray the sound I wanted. This was partly due to the limited resources I had around me at the time. However, I found it really interesting learning about Foley sounds as I did not realise that this is what people did for movies. One example we did was Andrew walking down the stairs, we recorded this and then counted the steps in which he took and then banged a shoe against the wall with the same beat to create the sound of him walking down the stairs.

I could implement Foley sounds into my thriller opening to emphasise the suspense in the movie opening, and to highlight all the little sounds to put the viewer on edge, e.g emphasising a creaking door, or footsteps in the background.

Hitchcock's The Birds

The clip we were looking at is the 'creepy scene in The Birds'.

There were 17 shots all together in this one scene, lasting only 1.28 seconds. For each shot the camera was positioned in a different place:

Shot 1: Tracking - the camera was following the woman as she walked up to the house.
Shot 2: Medium shot - it was a medium shot of the woman standing in front of the front door.
Shot 3: Match on action - The woman is seen entering the house on one side of the door, and is then shown on the other side once she had walked through the doorway.
Shot 4: A Medium Shot used to show the woman walking into the hall.
Shot 5: A Medium Shot where the camera is already in the room as she walks through the door.
Shot 6: A quick glimpse of the room and the damage that has been done to show that the house has been broken into, creates suspense.
Shot 7: A close up shot of the woman's face.
Shot 8: A Medium Shot similar to shot 6, once again showing the damage in the room the woman has just entered.
Shot 9: A Medium Shot of the woman's reaction to the state of the room.
Shot 10: A close up of a man's legs with blood all over them.
Shot 11: A Close up of the woman's face showing her reaction to the legs.
Shot 12: A High Angled shot of a dead man on the floor with no eyes.
Shot 13: A close up shot of the man showing more detail.
Shot 14: An Extreme Close up of the man's face showing his eye sockets as his eyes have been gauged out.
Shot 15: A Medium shot of the woman frantically making an exit.
Shot 16: A Long Shot/Tracking of the woman running out of the house.
Shot 17: Finally another long shot of the woman as she continues to run, and then a close up of a man who is waiting for her.

The clip itself involved an array of suspense, mystery and shock at the sight of the man at the end, it was a vile sight!