To understand how to improve our own film opening we have looked at some previous film openings made by other students. This will help us to see which areas of our film opening have been misses out or could be better.
This film opening is a based around a very different subject to ours, and is in a different style. It covers many characters and a wider time period, introducing the general situation and group dynamic effectively in a fairly short time span. While ours focuses more on the beginning of the overall narrative arc of the film as a whole (which we did plan out before shooting), the technical side of it has helped us to go about improving our own film opening. They use a quick editing style which gives the clip a fast pace, contrasting with the long, wideshot that concludes the opening. This contrast was very effective in making an impact on the viewer, making them want to continue watching, so from this we decided to add a greater variety of shot lengths and camera movement, as most of the shots in our opening are fairly similar.
The mise-en-scene of their film opening was also striking, giving the audience more details of each character and their situations effectively in a subtle manner. The setting of our film opening was our school, which we chose to reflect the trend in zombie movies of being set in familiar places, adding to the fear of something unnatural invading them - something that features a lot in all types of horror movies. While we did attempt to add to the mise-en-scene by adding zombie warning posters that we created, these were not very clear when we edited together our first draft. Watching this film opening made use decide to get better shots of these posters to add to the atmosphere of the film opening, which will also help to build up the tension before the zombies are actually introduced - this build up in tension also adds to the comic effect when the Little Guy is suddenly knocked out.
The music of the completed film opening that we looked at also made us decide to add more sound, to contribute to the build of tension as well. While they had music running throughout, we had already added suitable Western themed music to our film opening. We had also added sound effects, but we decided to add more to increase the effect of the opening, as it had to immediately engage viewers. So we added a heartbeat and breathing sound effect as well as improved sound effects of the zombie being hit, which we created ourselves as none was available for free on the internet.
Monday 30 January 2012
Feedback and changes to our film opening
After getting feedback on our film opening from the rest of our class, we made some changes to improve it.
No credits other than the main title board – to include credits of the people involved, as are generally found in the opening of films, we layered text over the video in an editing programme. We chose to only include a few names, as credits are clearest over still shots. The majority of our film opening is of a character running, with unstable camera movement to create the effect of her being chased. Our opening shot after the title board is the steadiest so we put the credits over that. We attempted to stay with the theme of the font used in the title, but we weren’t able to because of problems with the editing programme, so we used a clearer font. We used red lettering to keep with the horror atmosphere that our opening begins with.
General editing – there were some problems with the editing of our opening. We managed to fix the glitch that occurred in the split screen showing the two zombies, as well as tightening some of the transitions between shots by removing some unnecessary moments that stopped the pace being so smooth e.g. the removal of a close up of the zombie before she falls to the ground.
Improvement of sound – it was suggested that we could add more sound to build up the tension when the Little Guy is running before he is knocked out. We thought of certain sound effects that would relate well to the setting and situation and added them in. They included heat beat and breathing sounds, to emphasise the character’s fear, and the sound of the zombie getting knocked out at the end to make it clearer to the audience what had happened. We also made the previous sound effects smoother, making them continuous rather than broken by editing them in Audacity.
Shot of Little Guy – after this character is knocked out by running into a lamppost, there is a shot of her from above panning upwards to display what has happened to her. Though we wanted this shot to be fairly unsteady rather than smooth, to convey confusion and the danger she is in from the zombies, we realised this didn’t translate well. To make this clearer, we used an effect on the editing programme to distort and blur the shot, which more clearly connotes her unconsciousness in a more interesting way than just showing her passed out.
No credits other than the main title board – to include credits of the people involved, as are generally found in the opening of films, we layered text over the video in an editing programme. We chose to only include a few names, as credits are clearest over still shots. The majority of our film opening is of a character running, with unstable camera movement to create the effect of her being chased. Our opening shot after the title board is the steadiest so we put the credits over that. We attempted to stay with the theme of the font used in the title, but we weren’t able to because of problems with the editing programme, so we used a clearer font. We used red lettering to keep with the horror atmosphere that our opening begins with.
General editing – there were some problems with the editing of our opening. We managed to fix the glitch that occurred in the split screen showing the two zombies, as well as tightening some of the transitions between shots by removing some unnecessary moments that stopped the pace being so smooth e.g. the removal of a close up of the zombie before she falls to the ground.
Improvement of sound – it was suggested that we could add more sound to build up the tension when the Little Guy is running before he is knocked out. We thought of certain sound effects that would relate well to the setting and situation and added them in. They included heat beat and breathing sounds, to emphasise the character’s fear, and the sound of the zombie getting knocked out at the end to make it clearer to the audience what had happened. We also made the previous sound effects smoother, making them continuous rather than broken by editing them in Audacity.
Shot of Little Guy – after this character is knocked out by running into a lamppost, there is a shot of her from above panning upwards to display what has happened to her. Though we wanted this shot to be fairly unsteady rather than smooth, to convey confusion and the danger she is in from the zombies, we realised this didn’t translate well. To make this clearer, we used an effect on the editing programme to distort and blur the shot, which more clearly connotes her unconsciousness in a more interesting way than just showing her passed out.
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