Jack in the Box Scene

After watching Abbie's blog post on the editing of the Jack in the Box scene, I wasn't quite happy with the non diegetic sound, as I felt like it didn't seem natural and it didn't fit with the hand movements. So, I decided to record the sound for the jack in the box, making it a diegetic sound.

  Click Here to watch Abbie's original edit: 

Here is the vlog, of how I recorded the sound:

Editing the sound

• The first thing I did, was to compress the sound and to raise the gain, so that the sound would be louder.

• I then created an auxiliary strip, where I labeled "reverb. This is so that the sound would have some delay, which makes it sound more natural.
• To create the reverb on the new auxiliary strip, I used the space designer and I chose the "nice hall" reverb.
• Back onto the audio strip, which contains the recording of the Jack in the Box, I sent the sound to the reverb auxiliary channel, which is also called "bus 1". 
• Where there is a circle, I could control, how much of the sound I wanted to send to the reverb auxiliary strip.

• The denoiser was used to cut out some of the frequency which is not in the threshold which I had manually set.

• I pitch shifted some of the sound so that it would sound more eerie, but I didn't make it too obvious so it would sound uncomfortable, as I had turned the output mix down.

Here is the finished sound:

  I think this sounds a lot more natural and it would suit the scene a lot more than the non diegetic sound that I made, just because it was painfully obvious that the sound of the jack in the box was a non diegetic rather than diegetic which it is meant to be.

Lighting Alteration

Here is our original first draft of our Supernatural Horror Film Opening:

After receiving feedback from peers and teachers, we noticed that most of the feedback suggested the same thing. The lighting was too bright. As we couldn't refilm out footage, we decided to play around with the clips on Final Cut Pro in order to darken them up a little to fit the genre better.

We took our already edited footage and selected an individual clip. The first thing we did was desaturate the clips. This made the footage less colourful and more dull. From our research we noticed that most horror films are not brightly coloured and exciting. I then did this for all of the clips within our opening.

Following this, I felt the need to darken the clip itself as opposed with playing around with the colour intensity. This meant that I was able to change the contrast of the shadows, mid-tones and highlights to fit the contrast that I want to achieve. The main area I had to darken was the highlights due to the fact that our clips had many very bright points within the sequence. 

 

Here is the final edit with all of the lighting changes:

Editing sound to Opening Sequence

When I had finished making all of the sound, I edited it into Final Cut Pro so that I could put it with the edited scenes

• The music wasn't quite in time with the opening sequence as we wanted to have the loud bass sounds where the credits came up, so we had to move around the credits a bit so that it would match up to the bass sounds.
• We used 3 pieces of sound, which was the jack in the box with the bass sounds but I removed the vocals to give the piece more suspense, the diegetic sound of the jack in the box and the chase scene music which I made for this opening sequence.
• I added some cross dissolve to the end of the sounds, so that it wouldn't end abruptly or start too abruptly.
• I also had to loop one of the tracks as it wasn't long enough to carry on the whole walking sequence. 

Chase Scene Music

• Whilst creating the sound, I wanted to keep it quite simple, so that there would be an element of tension and suspense within the sequence.
• At the top where you can see a blue line, that controls the tempo of the piece, which I have gradually increased and made faster throughout the piece, so that it resembles a heart starting to pump faster as they run. 
• The heart beat was made by using a drum kick, and EQing the lower frequencies to be quite high and adding a lot of reverb into it, so that it would resonate.

• I used mostly electronic sounds, as it would sound the most bassy.
• However, I did use a string bass section for the drone in the background as it gave a more eerie sound and it fitted with conventions, to use string instruments to create some suspense and tension.
• A lot of gated synths were used as they were fast paced, and would help to propel the music forward so that it would seem faster than it actually is. It would also give a sense of urgency to the piece.

Here is the finished piece:

Creating sound

• I decided to start making the non diegetic music for our opening sequence, and I wanted to incorporate some of the trials I did before, which was the loud bass sounds with a drone in the background.

• I also wanted to have some vocalisations, and I thought that the most effective vocalisations would be from indian classical music, so I downloaded one indian piece and sampled it in Logic pro.

• I didn't want the natural sounding of her voice, so I used the telephone EQ effect, by cutting out the higher frequencies and the lower frequencies, and I faded her voice in and then out.
• I only used a fraction of the piece, and I wanted some of the parts to sound weird and not from the original key with the drone.

Here is the sound:

  I still have lots of work to improve on this track, due to the editing of the sequence is not yet done, and we need to match the music to the editing. We also need to see whether the vocalisations actually fit with the sequence first.

Foley sound

In our film opening there are many chase scenes, at times we want there to be tension music playing however we also want to recreate some of the original sound to make it more authentic and realistic.

In the opening one of the victims Georgia falls and knocks of her galsses, before this she is running up the stairs. I have, with the help of abbie, recorded the sound of footsteps running up the stairs and falling to the ground.

To do this I carefully watched the oringinal footage to attmept to recreate the speed. This was extremely difficult as I had to run as well as watch the footage on a very small phone screen. I also tried to make sure that the shoes and the surface used were similar. We found a concrete staircase in our school that had about the same number of stairs and also made the smae sound. In the oringinal footage the victim wore shoes with quite thin soles and so my school shoes worked perfectly to recreate, I just slammed my feet down harded to make the sound seem more frantic.

This took many attmepts but below is one of the videos we created

Then, we moved to the scene where Joe, the male victim, is running through the staircase door to the lift. This was a very big, heavy door and so we needed to use one similar. The one we used had glass windows in it making it lighter, this was not ideal but we slammed it back against the wall harder to compensate for this. However, when we edit this on to the footage we may need to review this and use a better door.

Abbie noticed that the door was squeaky and had a good rusty hinge sound. We felt that this would be ideal because it has the eerie sound that is used often in horror films. So we decided to get a close up video of the hinge sound so that this sound can be added in and even distorted and played with to make it sound even more scary.

 

RUNNING THROUGH DOOR



HINGE SOUND

After doing this, we went back to one of the first chase scenes which happens before the glasses are dropped. This scene was especially complicated because we had to represent both the victims who were moving very differently at very different speed. As well as this, Abbie was wearing soft-soled shoes and so had to compensate for this by slamming her feet down harder. Working our timings out was diffcicult, my character was slow and followed on from the other charcater. Abbie's character was fast, heavy footed and did a sort of run/skip which was hard to replicate.

*insert video*

We are unsure about whether the footage will work well with this sound and so editing will be slightly trail and error. However, if the sound is incorrect then will consider refilming in the recording studio where the conditions are far more controlled.

Ending Titles

When I tried to make the ending titles, I used the typography that is at the top of the blog. This however, was a bad idea as the image was very small and rectangular:

Previously, I put this typography at the end of the film opening, it didn't look particularly good due to the sizing of the image itself: 

Therefore, I decided to increase the sizing of the image on photoshop, so the first thing I did was create a new document on photoshop: 

Then I changed the colour or the background to black and uploaded the image on top of the new background:

When I transformed the image, in order to blow up the image, it became very pixilated and distorted: 

As this was not up to the standard I wanted, I felt the need to re-do it. I did this in exactly the same way as I did before: http://cragmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/photoshop-named-typography.html 

Here is the finished product: 

I then decided to put this as the ending of our film opening as our final title sequence: