Editing: Tape recorder sound effects.

I downloaded some free to use music to add into our opening. I felt that jazz music would be the most appropriate considering our genre is film noir and this is common convention for the genre.

I dragged the audio from the downloads in to final cut pro. I used the blade tool to cut it at the same time the tape recording started so that I could adjust the volume of that section independent to the rest of it. I reduced the volume so that the voice over could be heard more clearly along with the tape recorder's clicks and whirring. I felt that this music did not fit the second part of the opening where the detective was getting ready to meet the kidnapper, so I had it cut off at the same time the tape recording ended, which additionally created more tension and had a nice dramatic effect.

I think this music was the most fitting I could find and is adequate for the first part, but we need something more tense for the second part.

Editing Cigarette Glow Effect

I added a glow effect to when the detective lights his cigarette, more specifically, I darkened the rest of the clip, as in my deconstructions, I found lighting was very dramatic. I also felt like it emphasised the sound of the lighter lighting.

I started by copying the clip on to a new layer above the current one. It lined up exactly and was completely identical. This was within the nested clip which had the black and white filter over it, so it appears in colour in the previews.  I adjusted the lighting of the clip underneath to be darker using the colour correction and exposure levels.

I then applied a vignette mask to the clip on the top, and moved its centre to be over the cigarette lighter. I then adjusted the falloff and size until I thought it fit, and it was complete. I did ideally want to apply this effect to many clips within the opening, but when I tried, the preview rendering dropped to unbearably slow speeds, making it impractical.

I like how this effect looks, but I think it makes too much of the frame too dark, so if I were to do it again I would lighten the top clip instead of darkening the bottom clip.

Editing: Focus blur animation

In our film opening, shortly after the blinking animation, I edited the footage to imitate someone's vision slowly focusing on an object, as it adds a sense of realism and helps reinforce the narrative.

I started by selecting the focus blur from the blur filters and applying it to the clip I then centred the effect so that the focus was on the actress' face. I preferred this to the other blur filters as it blurred more at the edges than the centre, which is more realistic. I set the time to the point where I want the transition between "out of focus" and "more focused" to begin.

I then adjusted the values for the focus blur to obscure the image more, to resemble a person's vision shortly after waking up. I then toggled keyframe animation for the "amount" and "softness" values (+ icons in the diamonds).

I then moved the timeline forward slightly and toggled the keyframes again, and adjusted the values. I did want to adjust the interpolation of the keyframes, but I could not find a way to do so in final cut pro. The result can be found at 2:13 in the opening. The effect ends up only being about a second long, but I think it adds a lot to the piece and makes the events clearer (makes it more obvious that he has been struck in the head). If I were to do it again, I would most likely make it longer.

Editing - Colour Correction

Colour Correction

Most film noir has a very high colour contrast within the black and white and I aimed to recreate that using colour correction in our footage. The high contrast creates a more shadowy effect which I think is very effective for the genre. 

I found that an easy way to achieve this was by altering the exposure of each of the clips. This had to be done individually as each of the clips had slightly different lighting so was quite time consuming. A good setup usually was to lower to exposure of the shadows and highlights while raising the exposure of the mid tones. This created a good contrast between the darker and lighter areas without getting rid of the details. The amount varied with each clip.

One place I felt this worked particularly well was on the shot of the feet walking in front of the fence as the shadows are very prominent. 

However, one place where this wasn't as effective was on the shot of the money in the briefcase. As the money was already quite overexposed, adding the 50s TV black and white effect made it so white that even bringing the exposure all the way back down could not bring back the detail on the paper. This might make it difficult for people to understand what the shot it meant to be showing.

The same problem also occurred with one shot of my dad's face as he's quite pale. To rectify this, we removed the 50s TV effect from that particular shot and instead lowered the saturation to give it a black and white effect. Although this made the shade of black and white slightly different to the rest of the film, there was no extreme difference. 

The one other problem with the exposure editing is that the face of the other man looks very dark in places. However, I'm not particularly concerned with this as I feel it makes him look like more of a villain and quite like the effect.

Overall, I'm pleased with the effect that the colour correction gives despite causing some problems with overexposure in some places. I don't think these issues cause a problem with the overall film, however.

Positive Audience Feedback for final draft of film opening

Peer Feedback Comments

These peer feedback comments didn't really have any improvement points but I got a good insight into what the audience thought was successful, and what we should keep.

 

 

I could decipher that "stereotype" also meant conventions and most film noirs are set in America, and we wanted to conform to this convention.

Positive:

• Use of sound- non-diegetic soundtrack and non-diegetic dialogue (voice over)
• Typography was appropriate and the transitions between them
• Most had identified the genre of Film Noir by the common conventions, and of those who didn't they still identified the element of crime.    
• Mise-en-scene conforming to Film Noir conventions
• effective use of black and white filter

Editing - Filters

Adding the Filter

In this post I create a grainy, black and white filter to layer over our film. This is what the filter looks like as a standalone image:

First of all, I placed the picture over the top of the film and dragged it out so it covered all the footage. 

However, this made the footage extremely grainy and dark, more than it did in photoshop, as it was a png image rather than a photoshop document which I could alter the opacities and blending modes. The footage could still be seen as the image is partially transparent.

To alter this, I changed the image's overall blending mode and its opacity in final cut pro. As the inside and outside scenes had different levels of lighting, this was different for each bit. The indoor scene is much darker, so I used the Lighten mode to bring out the light in the scene. It still looks quite grainy and dark, however it's much better than it was and the titles added over the top distract the attention from this. I also lowered the opacity to roughly 75% to decrease the noise.






















In contrast, the outside scene is very light and quite overexposed in some places, so I used the darken mode which brought the colour down to one more similar than the one seen in the first scene.























Overall, I'm pleased with the result however the quality is nowhere near as good as it was in the photoshop document. However, this was anticipated as I was aware that I wouldn't be able to edit the blending modes and opacities of each individual layer in final cut the way I would in photoshop, and this makes a very big difference to the colour and quality. To do this, I would have needed to import each layer individually into final cut to edit and if given more time I would have liked to experiment with this to see if I could improve the quality.

Editing - Titles

Editing the Titles

Examples of the titles I made using Photoshop CS5 can be found at this post. Here is one example:

I wanted to emulate the style of the titles I had previously seen in this film noir clip by having the title cover the majority of the screen and fading into each other.

I placed the first title on top of the footage like so:

I then moved it slightly further along  the timeline so I would have time to place the fading transition. I felt the white writing looked a little stark against the dark background so I used the colour correction to lower the exposure slightly, making it a faded grey colour.

I then lined up all the titles next to each other with no gaps in between so they would fade seamlessly into each other. I set them to show for four seconds each as this was a similar time period to the clip I'd watched. Like in most film noirs, I put the names of the main actors first. Instead of using the names of the real actors, my dad and Mindi, I used the names of two of the biggest film noir stars to make the film look more authentic. Then, I dragged the cross dissolve transition onto each of the titles which added a cross dissolve to the start and beginning of each one.

Here is an example of what the titles look like on top of the footage.

I'm pleased with how the titles turned out as I think they are similar to how titles in real film noir look. I think the cross dissolve makes it look particularly effective, and I like how all the titles appear within the first minute as they don't obstruct the real action of the film.

Editing- Female voiceover

Our opening scene involves voice overs. I had to edit in the female/villains voice over which we acquired from a voice actress on the internet. The script we gave to the voice actress included pauses between sentences where we would need to cut in order to fit the voice around the footage.

The image above shows the sound clip as one long clip as the voice actress recorder the whole script in one recording.

I then bladed the clip according to where we had the pauses on the script. This would then enable us to move the sound clips around.

                            

                            

                            

The most important part of the voice over was to make sure that the timings of when it said 'where's the money' fitted in with when the male actor on the screen said this. Therefore, we had to line up the sound clip and footage correctly.

We wanted the female to be heard as soon as the first image appeared on the screen. So I moved the sound clip that began with 'detective number 6' into this position. The next thing I had to do was to line up the sound clip which said 'I would send them the usual ransom note' before the ransom note on the tape recorder began to play. As well as this we did not want the male voice over and the female voice over to be overlapping.

The next clip describes the detective meeting the femme fatale's accomplice in the alleyway therefore this sound clip had to be placed as the detective begins walking down the alleyway. 

The final clip shows the femme fatale walking away with the money in the briefcase as the voice over says 'a girls got to make a living after all'.
After all of the voice overs were put in place I then had to cut them down to make sure that there were't any long pauses between the each of the sound clips.

Evaluation

• Overall, the sound fitted in well with the clips and we were able to edit them to make sure they were the correct length.
• The voice over helped us to convey the story and genre more.

Editing: Adding Titles Credits

Titles credits  

In accordance to the deconstruction I had done, I decided to use the titles that had previously been made by Xena and put them into place.

Like in my research I put the names of the actors first which I put in as soon as the opening begins.

 

Then after I had finished with the actor's titles I moved onto ordering the production team's titles, with the director and executive producer's names last, which adhered to my deconstruction.

 

 

 

 

 

After viewing all the titles in order, I noticed that each time the appeared seemed too sudden and contrasted too much with the texture of the background filter and soundtrack, which generated a smoothness to tones of the footage. 

 

 

 

To solve this issue I added cross dissolve transitions to the titles so it faded out and looked more like the deconstructions of film noir that I had done.       

 

The typography itself seemed quite intense than it had done when I viewed it as an isolated picture, so to sort this out I went into the lighting control and adjustments, and moved the highlights down by -11% to make it blend into the background just a little, so there wasn't such a big contrast. I then went back and did the same thing to all the other clips.

Once I had finished I went back to view the changes, which I was happy with, then I made sure that all the titles appeared before the one minute mark because I didn't want them dominated the frame through the action scenes- or scenes of tension.

Overall, I was satisfied with how the titles turned out and fit in with the conventions of film noir, and was generally integrated well.   

Production Company Intro Selection

Selecting the Production Company Introduction

First of all, we decided that for our student made production company we were going to use the one I made as we felt it fit the genre and looks old like our production itself.

After research, we discovered that there weren't really any production companies specifically for film noir, so we would have to use a generic company instead. We decided to go with New Line Cinema, as we liked the look of the opening.

New Line Cinema have had a variety of different openings as can be seen in this video. 

We were then able to find this version of the logo through the recommended videos. We decided to use this version as it was grainy and had a slight static background noise which we felt was very fitting for the genre as film noir is a genre of the 50s, where any footage would have been specky and grainy like this.

I then edited in both of the company introductions. I used a fade transition between each one to make it more smooth.

I'm pleased with our choice of production company introductions as I feel they add to the authenticity of our film opening. The New Line Cinema opening is generic but the old grainy effect makes it seem more era appropriate, and the opening that I made is specific to film noir so fits nicely and also the sound effect in it is dramatic and builds up to the start of the film opening. 

Practical Task: Colour Isolation 2

I attempted the colour isolation technique again, despite my previous failure. This time I used a much simpler piece of footage, taken from our film noir opening. I decided I wanted the light from the tape recorder to remain green whilst the rest of the clip was in black and white.

At first it seemed to work very well after some adjustment to the "similarity" setting. The clip was in black and white and the entirety of the green light was in colour.

 

However, when I looked at this part of the clip, I noticed it had caused issues due to the similar colour values of the yellow curtains and the green light. I resolved this by using the blade tool to cut the clip and only apply the filter to the shots of the tape recorder. Here is the finished product.

Overall I think this was a helpful exercise, as I discovered that the color pass filter works in certain shots. With this knowledge I could use it sparingly in our finished piece. Typically, light coloured objects on dark backgrounds or vice versa work best.