Monday, 15 March 2010

Editing The Title Sequence

After we had uploaded our footage and began to edit it, we noticed one minor flaw in continuity that we had not picked up on whilst shooting. In the transition between the first two shots in our sequence, the characters hand moves position quite noticeably. In the first shot he is asleep on the sofa, and his hand is covered by the blanket, but in the only shot that was usable as a follow up to this, his hand can clearly be seen by his face:


However annoying, it is unfortunately unavoidable; the first shot is the only shot we took experimenting with the focus effect and so is needed, and in all other shots of the character getting up, he rolls over the opposite way - thus the current shot is the only usable clip which would prevent the presentation of a far more prominent continuity flaw. It took us multiple plays to actually determine what felt off about the transition between the shots, and other people haven't seemed to notice it quite as evidently, so hopefully it will not seem too much of an obvious slip in the overall finished sequence.

Overall, continuity has been fairly successful, as each scene appears to flow unperturbed, and we have roughly kept to the 180° rule. However, at the end of the sequence, we have decided to deliberately disrupt the continuity. After filming all of the walking shots, we came to the realisation that the character does not always walk in the same direction. Instead of making this into a problem, we decided to combine the shots in such an order so that he walks in a different direction each time. This could help to make the sequence more visually interesting to the audience, disrupting them from the smooth flow they have become accustomed to throughout the previous segment of the sequence.

Whilst watching the sequence back, we decided that the shot of the character utilising the toiletry facilities seemed a little too long, and ended up dragging the pace of the sequence down. To overcome this, I suggested cutting the shot into two segments, and inserting some form of alternative shot in the middle, just to keep things visually entertaining and help continue the pace. We attempted to use a short clip of the hallway that we had seen before this shot, but unfortunately all our efforts were unsuccessful as the clips ended up being too short. Eventually, we found a way of creating a still frame from the previous shot, and inserted that instead. It worked well, as it was exactly the right length of time to help uphold the pace. We decided to add a sound bridge over the top, as the diegetic sound of the character urinating had came out quite well in the shot, and we didn't want to risk losing that. We cut a clip of the sound, and copied it to the still frame, dimming the volume slightly to help enhance real time and realism.

To help elevate the period feel of the piece, we decided to make the entire sequence black and white, taking inspiration from Anton Corbijin's 'Control'. To achieve this, now that we have finished our rough edits and collation of the footage for the titles, we are beginning to apply this effect using iMovie. We will be combining the black and white effect with the brightness and contrast effect, to again enforce and promote the intended time period - whilst taking inspiration from Shane Meadows' 'This Is England', we noticed that films revolving around the 1980's often have an overall saturated and high contrast appearance, which helps to promote the feel of the era - an effect that could possibly be lost if the film quality were to be as smooth as that of more modern films.


The addition of these effects has also helped us to overcome the prior predicament we had encountered with the overexposure of the film - in multiple shots, the problematic white balance resulted in us losing most of our characters face. However once these effects had been applied to the shots, the problem was relatively eradicated as we managed to regain some of the lost space, and blend the shots in with the rest of our sequence.


We finished by adding titles to our sequence. We made them integrated, as we felt that would be the method that would best fit with the style of our film - at the end of our sequence, we had four walking shots, and as there were four members of our group, we decided to give each group member their own frame. We used the font Apple Gothic Regular, as we felt a simplistic font would emphasise the time period best, as well as keeping the names small and in the corner to better reflect the arthouse style of the piece than a larger, more brash titling may have. We intended to colour them white so that they would blend in with the colouring of the rest of the piece, although upon watching our film on another screen they actually appeared blue due to a technological malfunction in the screen of the computer we had been using. However, this was quickly corrected before it could cause any major problem.



Our sequence finishes with a black screen containing the name of our film. We decided on the name 'Boho', as it was a frequented 80's slang word, thus further serves to accentuate the period that our film is trying to represent. Additionally, it is short for the word 'bohemian', which means 'unconventional in especially appearance and behavior'. We felt that this successfully represented the attitudes and values of our film, and so would be suitable to use as a title. Channeling influences from 'Control', we made the title white on a black background so as to empathises the word, and the importance and significance for its meaning. We again kept the text fairly small, and in the corner to make it that little bit different from other films - as you would typically expect a title to be bold and central to the frame, whereas this would drawn the attention of the audience to the corner.


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