EDITING - Adding sound and titles.

Soundtrack.

On Thursday we had out last lesson that we could use for editing. Ami touched up the sequence and I worked with Layla and Nyomi on the sound that we would be adding at the end of our opening. We decided to have a voice over at the end of the detective talking about the series of murders that had taken place. This would help the audience to understand that the murder that just took part wasn't the only one and should grasp their attention. We asked Micky to be the voice of our detective and gave him some lines to read. We then added the sound to our sequence on Final Cut Pro after the blank screen when Ami is murdered.

We also used Soundtrack to try to find some sounds that could build tension in our opening. However, we didn't find any that fitted well with our thriller so we deiced not to use soundtrack.

We then added the soundtrack of  Calvin Harris ft. Ne-Yo Let's go that we found on Youtube. Because of copyright issues, we had to make sure that the use of the song was diegetic, this meant that it was only heard when Ami was jogging because we wanted it to seem like the song Ami was listening to. We edited the volume of the song so that it faded out when ever Layla was on screen. We also stopped the music at the point when Ami takes his earphones out. It took a while for us all to be happy with the sound, and by the end of the lesson we all started hating the song.

For the clips of Layla, we used the sound from the original footage which included birds, cars and walking. We also used the sounds from Ami's clips but at a lower volume so the music could also be heard.

While editing our sequence, we didn't add any affects, such as fades, as we were using split screens and thought it may be too overpowering to have lots of added effects. We did change the brightness of some shots as there was a slight difference in lighting.

Mezrine: inspiration for our split screens

I worked on the title sequence with Ami during lunch, we found a font that the group all liked. We used a plain white font to follow the conventions of a thriller opening. The font size of the name was slightly larger than the job title as the names should stand out more. We had the titles run alongside split screens on the blank space available, just as we had seen in Mezrine. 


I had written a rough order of the titles we would add to our sequence using previous research. However, when we began to add the titles we realized that we had a lot of time so we added a few extra which included co-executive producers and co-producers. Each title appears for a approximately 2 seconds as it gives enough time for the audience to read the titles and most titles only appear for a few seconds in film openings.

We added our writer before the actors names as our film would be low budget and funded by independent companies, meaning that our actors would not be well known. Therefore, this follows the conventions of a film opening as the writer's name appears first because he/she is more well known than the actors that appear in the film.

One thing that we disagreed on slightly was where we would place our film name. The name of the film is usually shown before the actors names, or after some actors (if they are famous). Ami liked the idea of having our film title at the end of the opening sequence as he thought it would work well with the shot of Layla walking away from Ami's body. Although this was a good idea, it wouldn't have followed the conventions of a film opening so we decided to add it to the middle of our sequence instead.