Jess Barnett

*Written by Jack Bradley

 

Firstly I edited together the establishing shots. This is where I wanted to have the titles overlayed including our names and what we contributed to the film and the name of our production company.

The issues I faced with this were:

• The text needed to be a suitable font, size and colour.

• The text needed to be in an appropriate place in the frame.

• Each shot needed to be long enough to read the text, but not too long due to the time limit.

• It needed to work well with the music to create tension and build up to the dramatic moment.

 

I achieved this by making each establishing shot between 2-2.5 seconds long, and I found this was the most effective length. I used the title in iMovie called ‘Gravity Lower Third’ which, as the name suggests, places the text in the lower third of the frame and over to the left. The text fades in downwards with each individual letter, and then fades downwards again almost as if they are falling.

 

Another challenging aspect was syncing up the audio from two separate clips of the phone ringing. I had to ensure that the second clip started with the ring tone at the same point that it finished at in the shot before.

 

I had to do a slight bit of colour grading just to make sure the skin tones matched up in the shots, due to the change in lighting outside.

 

I found a good time to end the music ‘Instinct’ at the point where the protagonist exits the front door and begins to smarten himself up, to show that the panic has finished and the tense atmosphere has come to an end.

 

The shot of the protagonist walking around the corner was a perfect end to this ‘scene’ as it were, so I used this as an opportunity to fade to black to signify that there was a change in time. I then decided to add a school bell begin in the blackout and carry on into the clip of the protagonist and friend walking out of school, acting as a bridge. The challenging part here was to make sure that the bell doesn’t start too early in the blackout, and is long enough. I added the school bell to show that it is the end of the school day, once again showing the audience that there has been a change in time.

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A problem I came across when editing the scene where they are walking out of school was the audio, as the wind made it incredibly difficult to hear the dialogue and we didn't have any microphones to improve it. I had to spend a while playing around with the audio and background noise until I got the best results I could, which weren't ideal but were the best I could do. 

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I recorded a simple text tone from my phone and added it in just to make it more believable, and then started the music again when the camera cuts to a closeup of the phone screen. I decided to keep the background noise in for the last sequence of shots to make it seem slightly more hectic rather than just muting the audio and just having the music as this wasn't as effective when I tried it. I used the music as a sound-bridge from the last shot to the title of the film, and for the font I decided from my research that it needed to be big and bold, and should be a white/grey/metallic colour, so I used white as the other colours available didn't look as good. I made the text large and used a font that suited the genre well.