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.