Editing

I found that we edited our movie without any major problems, we worked well as a team and each had specific jobs to do as well as alternating between the actual editing of the footage. We started off by opening our animatic file and using the log and transfer function within final cut to import our footage into the browser. This enable us to sort out the good shots from the bad shots. Once we had narrowed down the shot selection we started to replace images within our animatic with the shots we had acquired. The first thing we wanted to do was get all of our clips put into the opening but we wanted them to cut at certain places; this is where the viewer window came in handy, first you drag your clip from browser to viewer and then you use the shortcut keys 'I' (for clip in) and 'O' (for clip out) when the playhead is at the position you want. Once you have shortened the clip to where you want it you simply drag it to the timeline. So we went through this process for each clip until we came to the end; after that was done we duplicated some of the clips that were involved in that flashback and laid them directly under the other one. Once they were in position we made them black and white so that we could fade the other clip into that once. Finally we reviewed the footage and once we were happy we exported the movie to Livetype to add the title and credits.

With the footage in Livetype it was time to add the credits, we noticed from other movie openings that there were a surprising amount of them included within the average 2 minutes. We knew that there would have to be some reference to the directors, actors, music, editors etc. We first found a font that we liked and then looked through some of the effects that were pre-proggrammed into the application, we found that none of then really suited what we wanted to do and so we created our own effect using the keyframe tool. The effect created was to make the words fade up and then slide over each other to create a sinister effect. Once this effect was created we made all the credits and then added the effect at the very end once we were happy with their positions. Once finished we rendered the movie and then exported it without the background, this allowed us to just lay the text movie over the sequence that we had already created in final cut with no quality loss issues.

Now that we had the majority of the opening was done it was time to add and enhance some sound to give the desired creepy effect to the TA. For an example of where the sound was enhance look at the shot where the glass smashes in my next post. We used the pen tool on the sound line to make the smashing sound louder than the rest of the clip this would make it clear amongst the other non-deigetic sound we were about to add. To find some horror genre music I searched on google for 'royalty free horror music' and I found a website called 'www.sounddogs.com', this is where I got the tracks used for our movie. I picked several tracks in the same key and overlaid them to create a fuller piece of music to go in the background. Finally I added a sound effect where the flashback transition would be placed to make it more obvious to the audience what was happening.

When the music was done we needed to add the transitions. Since there wasn't a default white flash transition in final cut we had to make our own. it was simple enough to do, all we did was create a block colour of white and fade it up and then back down again very quickly, we just placed these effects throughout the sequence.

When we were happy we exported the start of our movie to produce our rough cut (see next post).