Sixteenth Day of Editing: Making the improvements from the feedback sheets to our OTS

In our feed back sheets, the last question was 'What improvements overall do you think we could make in order to improve our OTS?'

One of the answers was 'Lengthen the sound of the gunshot.' even before this answer me and Sophie have tried many different things to do this as we have noticed it finishes too suddenly; we have tried stretching the clip but instead of lengthening the sound it adds noises from the clip that we trimmed back in, we also tried changing the speed of the sound from normal to 'snail' speed and that distorted the sound too much that it didn't sound like a gunshot anymore, we have also tried overlapping the gunshot with the same gunshot noice twice but this also didn't work. We may try to record another gunshot sound, add it to our OTS and see if that sounds any better.

A second answer was 'I wondered if having the gunshot noise at the same time as the killer raises his arm would be more effective.' originally me and Sophie did have the gunshot at this point but having it when the music stops and just before the title of the film created more of an impact and we found more effective, plus it still makes sense, so we have decided to keep it where it is.

Another was 'The background noise.' particularly when me and Zach are talking in the wedding dress shop, however we needed to raise the sound of the clip up high enough that you can hear me and Zach over the music but also low enough that you don't hear the fuzzy, crackly background noise. I think me and Sophie have got the clip at a volume where you can hear both me and Zach but also not really notice any background noise.

Update: As one of our feedback repliers in the second focus group had mentioned making the sound of the gunshot last longer because it comes to a sudden stop, I tried finding new ways to make gun shot noises instead of a staple gun, my brother has two gunpowder balls which when she smack them together they make a sound similar to gunshot so I recorded the sound but a problem I faced was sending it to Sophie so that she could add it to our OTS because the recordings cannot be sent to anyone and I can't record it by video because adding a video to our OTS would play over top of our video. So I have asked if there is any way that she could try making a sound that sounds like a gun shot to add.

Update 2: I have found a recording app called 'QuickVoice' which I can record sounds on and send to Sophie in an email the recording of the sound for her to add to our OTS. So I tried making the gunshot sound with the two gun powder balls again and have sent it to Sophie in an email. Now, it is up to her to add to the OTS and decide whether it is any better than the gunshot sound we already have.

Recordings of the new gunshot foleying sounds.

Sending the recording to Sophie in an email.

IMG 5394[1] from Emily Smith on Vimeo.

Update 3: After trying the new recorded foleyed sound of a gunshot in our OTS it didn't work as well as the one we already have so we're keeping the original one. Above, is a video of what the new recorded sound sounded like in our OTS and as you can hear it sounds too weak to be a gunshot and doesn't really create an effect or impact.

Fifteenth Day of Editing: Feedback sheets

Me and Sophie made feed back sheets for our second focus group to fill out when we showed them the second draft.

Feed back sheets.

Below are the questions that were on our feedback sheets and the average answers for most of the questions.
1. Is the story line clear to you?
Every single one of our replies said 'Yes'.
2. If you answered no to question one, what confused you?
No one answered this question as they had all answered 'Yes' to the first one.
3. Do you think that the Film Noir genre is evident throughout the OTS?
Many didn't know what the Film Noir genre was but after explaining it they answered 'Yes, it is similar to the Film Noir genre explained.'
4. Do you like the pieces of music? Do you think they flow nicely into one another? Do you think they're too loud or quiet?
'Yes I could hear the actors clearly enough over top of the music.'
5. What do you think of the titles? The font? The colour?
'The titles are clear enough to read, and the colour of the fonts fit in with the typical Film Noir conventions.'
6. Do you like the black and white filter over top of the scenes? Do you think it would look better a darker B&W?
'I don't think the B&W needs to be darker, this could make the lighting look less natural.'
7. Is the gunshot, heavy breathing and footsteps loud enough?
'Yes.'
8. Do you think their is a wide enough variety of shots to keep you interested?
'Yes.'
9. Do you think the monologue and the use of a voiceover is effective?
'The voiceover created suspension.'
10. What improvements overall do you think we could make in order to improve our OTS?
'Lengthen the sound of the gunshot.' 'I wondered if hearing the gunshot noise at the same time as the killer raises his arm would be more effective.' and 'Make the background noise more quiet.'

Fourteenth Day of Editing: Second focus group

After making the first lot of changes to mine and Sophie's rough cut, I now showed it to another person to get another perspective and a second lot of opinions/views as this will help us improve our OTS to a standard that is satisfying. After this viewing I handed a feedback sheet to Carl (the person in the picture below watching out OTS) so that he could fill out and answer the questions we needed answers to and that we felt were the main areas that we were a bit weary about. I have also asked other people to watch mine and Sophie's OTS so that they could fill out our feedback sheets as well, the more feedback the better. Sophie has also done this.

Carl watching Silent Temptation, our opening scene.

The replies and improvements people suggested are in my next post about the feedback sheets.

Thirteenth Day of Editing: Our second rough cut

After our focus group and writing down a list of things that they had asked us to change, me and Sophie took out some time to make those changes, which are listed and explained in previous posts, we're hoping to now show this to a second person/group for more feedback on anything else, to get another perspective with someone who might have different ideas or opinions and if so we will make those changes as well.

Here, is our second rough cut of our OTS Silent Temptation:
Silent Temptation Cut Two from Sophie M on Vimeo.

Twelth Day of Editing: Making the changes to our rough cut

After the focus group yesterday, me and Sophie kept in mind the changes our media class recommended so we wrote them down to remember and made those changes today to our rough cut. Hopefully, it looks and sounds a lot better and more natural now. We will now show to people of our target audience and see if there is anything they recommend about it or whether they specifically liked something.

Here are the changes our focus group recommended that we made.

We changed when the titles of people in the OTS and who helped make it appear, originally they were on a scroll on a black background but that looked too much like end credits instead opening scene credits, so we've changed them to appear over top of the wedding shop scenes, in the same font as the title of the film and in a grey colour.

Names of cast and crew now appear over top of our footage.

We also had to trim down some of our clips so that they didn't linger too long, and got rid of a piece of music that wasn't necessary and moved around some of the sounds and music so that they sounded more natural.

Moving around clips and trimming them.

Eleventh Day of Editing: Focus group for our rough cut

Today, we showed our rough cut to our media class:

We got some very constructive criticism back on our OTS:

1. Our titles of names of people who are in the Silent Temptation and who helped make it looked too much like the ending credits to a film, with the scrolling white font on a black screen, which obviously doesn't go with the conventions of an Opening Scene.

2. The gun shot is too short and comes to a sudden end which makes it sound unnatural.

3. Some of the scenes in our OTS linger for too long that it also doesn't look natural, Miss Humpleby described it as "Like in a dance you count the beats as to when you do your next move, you look like you're counting or thinking of when to move on in the clip."

4. Some of the sounds start and stop one after another and people don't hear things like that in real life. Music in the black and white titles seemed pointless and unnecessary.

Although, this focus groups main aim was to get criticism and find any improvements needed, we also got praise, they liked the style of lighting and the way is was clearly and crisply shot.

Research into Focus Groups

Tenth Day of Editing: Rough Cut of OTS

In the video below is mine and Sophie's rough cut of our OTS for Silent Temptation, we've added all clips that we filmed and trimmed them down to what we wanted. All titles, music and foleying sounds have been added.
Now, we will be showing it to our media class as our first focus group to get feedback and first opinions on our OTS, we would like to know if there are any improvements needed to be made and whether there is anything they think we should cut/add. Hopefully, we don't get too much of a bad reception from our first focus group as we would obviously prefer not to have to change much but we need opinions to know how to make it better. After this, we are hoping to show it to some or a group of people from our target audience, to get opinions that matter more as they are the audience we expect to go and see our film Silent Temptation.

Ninth Day of Editing: Adding the foleying recordings to our OTS

After recording all the foleying sounds, we finally got to add them to our OTS and sort out where they should go and adjust the volume of the sound and cut what parts of the recordings down to what we actually wanted to use.

Adding the foleying recordings.

The heavy breathing and footsteps were added to the running scenes, we had recorded quite a long recording of running footsteps and chose what section of these footsteps fitted best with the scene and cut it down to that. The gunshot got added in between Danny stopping running and the titles.

The small sound clip is where we added the gunshot to the OTS.

Below is a vimeo clip of the actual heavy breathing and footstep recordings we have added to our OTS:

Eighth Day of Editing: Recording Jingle for our productions title and Adding it to the shot

Production Studios from emlouiise

Above, I have made a slideshare explaining what production studios do and why we include them in our media productions, and I have also named some of the most popular ones.

Foleying our jingle sound.

Above is how we made our jingle sound, by tapping a fork gently twice against a metal item, doing it lightly made it sound similar to a metal triangle instrument whereas when we tapped it harder it just sounded like we were knocking something which isn't what we wanted as it did not sound right, we added this noise to the beginning of our production studios logo at the start of our OTS.

Below, is a video of the foleyed jingle sound we made to go with our production studios logo:

IMG 5390[1] from Emily Smith on Vimeo.

Seventh Day of Editing: Final experimentation of foleying for our opening scene

Today, we recorded the foleying noises that we needed for our opening scene. These are the foosteps, heavy breathing, heartbeat and gunshot:
The footsteps went well, I wore a pair of Sophie's heels and we made sure to choose a pair that had a thick heel instead of a thin one as the heels I wore on the day of filming had a thick heel, so we needed to make sure the noise fit the shoe and the scene. I just ran on the spot while Sophie recorded me as the sound would be more realistic than if I made the running-heel noises with my hands.

Me and Sophie recording the footsteps.

For the heavy breathing we went with what we'd done in the experimentation foleying and I wore myself out so that the heavy breathing would sound more realistic when we recorded it, instead of it being obvious that I had made myself breathe heavily.

Me and Sophie recording the heavy breathing.

The gunshot went quite well, we used a staple gun to create the bang and we tried it on plenty of different surfaces to find the correct one that we liked most, the one we went with we'd used the staple gun on one of the noticeboards on the wall, here's a video showing us trying it out:

Update: We decided not to record the heartbeat as anything we tried didn't sound realistic enough and we decided it wasn't necessary to have it in the running scenes anyway.

Sixth Day of Editing: Adding music to the opening scene

In a previous post I linked to to one of Sophie's post about finding music for our opening scene and how she had found two bits that we both liked, today we got a reply from the person who owns the piece of music from YouTube saying that we could use it as long as we mentioned him in the credits and linked to him, and he asked if we would be able to send the video to him as well as he was interested to check it out:

Daniel Carison confirming that it is alright for us to use his piece of music.

We used the first 40 seconds of 'Forever Film Noir (Part VI) - Daniel Carison for the scenes where I am being chased and we lowered the volume of the music as it got to my voiceover so that it was still playing underneath to keep the tension but not too loud that you can't hear or understand what the femme fatale is saying. Next, we added '"Case Closed" by Chris Durian', originally we had planned to put this in with the wedding shop scenes but we found the jazz to jolly for the kind of mood and feelings that we want to come across from those scenes, so Sophie is currently searching for a piece of music that is more mysterious, dark and seductive for those scenes. However, we are using this piece for the title of the film and the credits as it is appropriate and fits with the conventions of film noir.

Update: After asking Chris Durian if we could use his piece of music in our OTS, we got a email from him saying that we could.

Asking Chris to use his music.

His email back to us with his reply saying that we could.

Adding the pieces of music to our opening scene (bad quality from the camera).

Update: Previously, me and Sophie were having difficulties finding a piece of music to go in with out wedding shop scene, but yesterday I went to hers to finish of the final piece of editing for our first cut and we looked on YouTube for a piece of music to fit it, click here to listen to it:

The piece we decided on for the wedding shop scenes.

Us asking the owner for permission to use it.

And we have added the piece to our OTS as we have sent a message asking, we have also checked if the owner replies to people's comments which he does and quite quickly so as soon as me and Sophie get that reply we can add it as evidence to our blogs.

Adding the piece of music to our OTS.

Fifth Day of Editing: Creating the Production Logo and adding it to our opening scene

In a previous post I uploaded the production logo that I had created for mine and Sophie's production studio title for Silent Temptation. In that post I mentioned how the 'L' wasn't straight and how we'd both agreed that the 'L' and the 'P' don't flow into one another like how the 'N' and 'L' do, this was because the vertical lines and the 'P' went all the way down like they were blocking off the 'L' so I have created a new one:

This new one has had all the alterations made to it so that it looks better and more professional:

Now, I need to send this logo to Sophie through email so that she can add it to our opening scene, we cannot do this at school as we do not have the wifi at school for me to be able to send it to her MacBook. Once, this has all been done we will move on to creating a sound/jingle to go in the background of the production studios title.

We have finally added our production studios title to our opening scene, and we added a transition before and after it. The transition we added in before it is 'Crossover Zoom' and this makes it look sharp and clean, following this the transition after it is 'Fade to Black' and this makes it flow into the scene of me running more easily. Soon, we will create some sort of sound or jingle to go in the background of it. Below is a video of the two transitions and our production studio title in the opening scene:
IMG 5269[1] from Emily Smith on Vimeo.

Fourth Day of Editing: Final decision on music

Sophie has been looking at pieces of music to be used in our opening scene of Silent Temptation, and sent them to me for me to listen to and give her feedback on what I thought of them so we could make a decision as to whether we would use them.
I listened to the first piece:

With this piece of music I agreed that I liked it and thought it was suitable, I think it would be best fit to the scenes of the characters in the wedding shop, as it is mainly jazz which has more of a romantic feel to it which fits with the attraction between the femme fatale and the anti hero in these scenes.
From looking at other comments from people attached to this video, the owner is pretty willing to let people use the piece of music for other uses as long as he is included in the credits, so we will send him a message asking if we can use it and then we will decide on what part of the piece to use in the scenes we want it for.

However, for Sophie's other suggestion of an artist who composes his own music I didn't really take a liking to as his pieces of music have more of a classical feel to them and he also sings in all of his pieces of music so I don't feel it is appropriate for the conventions of our film.
Also, we need a piece of music for the scenes where I am being chased that creates tension, I tried looking around but it has proven difficult to find a piece, I will have a look around again and so will Sophie to see if we can find something that fits what is requested.

Update: We think we've finally decided on a piece for the scene where the femme fatale is chased at the beginning, we like the first 40 seconds of it and Sophie said she thinks it goes well with the scenes we would want it to play over top of.

Researching Music

As neither me nor Sophie are very musical and we don't really know anyone to ask who would be able to create a piece of music for us, we have decided to look around online for some pieces and we will ask the owner for permission to use them in our opening scene so that it is not classed as copyright.

Sophie was allocated to carry out this task and if you click here you can see her post on it.

I will be listening to the pieces of music that she has found later on tonight as we can not listen to them at school because the school has blocked the sites. From there, we will decide on what we like and then we will ask the owner for their permission. We have decided where we would want music to be in the background of.

Third day of editing Silent Temptation: Recording femme fatale's voiceover and adding it to Silent Temptation

Ever since me and Sophie came up with our idea for our opening scene of Silent Temptation we always had the femme fatale doing a voiceover in mind. What we decided on isn't very long, just the matter of two lines but it's effective. Click here to see what is said.

Here, is me recording the femme fatale's voiceover.

We were originally going to have the voiceover right at the start of the scene, but now we have moved it to just before the titles so that when the femme fatale finishes speaking the gunshot is heard, we decided on this because it was more exciting and connected more to the scenes she will be speaking over top of than at the start.

We've added in the voiceover and decided on what scenes we want it to be playing over top of.