Editing our film (Audio)

Whilst creating the audio for our film we decided against using Adobe After Effects and using Final Cut Pro X instead as we agreed it was more user friendly and had a larger range of sound effects. Prior to creating our audio, we had all spent large amounts of time on different royalty free websites trying to find the appriopriate music. After numerous different discussions on what type of music genre we wanted for our film we finally decided against the idea of using loud, driving dramatic music and instead went for a more subtle piano piece called 'Ghostopalypse 8' that set an eerie tone for the film.

We used this for the main body of our film but also used two other tracks near the end called 'Hush' and 'House of Leaves.' These two tracks add to the drama of the piece as they build up tension and cause the viewer to feel uncomfortable. We also used a sound effect from Final Cut Pro X for the lighting of a match at the start of the film and another track for the Jazzhands Productions company logo called 'Bent and Broken.' All of the music we used was taken from Kevin Macleod's website: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html/index.html?genre=Horror

What we decided against (Editing)

Whilst editing we experimented with other effects and transitions that we later decided were not fitting for our movie. This was generally because the effects were to flashy and evident and we wanted our film to be more subtle. We also decided against the idea of having a frantic ending shot where many shots are merged together and are sped up for one final scene. However we decided against this and thought that simply revealing the films name against a black screen was the most effective way of finishing our thriller opening.

Gausian Blur (Editing)

Another effect we did in order to reveal text is called the Gausian Blur. This was done for the shot where the antagonist dips his pen in the red ink and a rack focus in used on the ink pot. For this particular scene the text is always present but it is blurred out. When the  man dips his pen in the ink in order to write the text becomes clear and the credit for casting is revealed.

Transitions (Editing)

In order to move from one particular scene where a piece of paper is burnt to another we used a burn transition where we basically filmed the burning of flames. In order to make this transition work we used an opacity dissolve transition between the two clips that allowed the dissolve to take place from one scene to another. We chnaged the opacity from 0-100 on both scenes so that they faded into each other. We used a swipe transition when the antagonist moves the diary to introduce our production company name. This was a fairly simple process that included using the sidesweep effect in order to control the timing of the sweep so that the whole of the text is revealed.

Vignetting (Editing)

For the editing of our film we decided to use Adobe After Effects CS5.5 and CS6, due to the fact we had to work on to separate computers, one in school and one at Ryan's house. Primarily we downloaded all the footage onto the computer and chose the shots we wanted for our film. Once we had chosen the appropriate shots we went about ordering and cutting them, so that we basically had a rough draft of the film.

Once we had the rough draft at the film we went about enhancing our film with many different editing techniques and effects. We used vignetting in our first shot in order to create the effect of the hands coming our of the darkness along with the lighting of the match, instead of just having a silhouette of the hands before the match is lit. We used a vignette in order to change the brightness of the video and created a mask on that video clip that framed the brightness and contrast, so that the light changed when the match is struck and the fire becomes present.