Logic - Soundtrack construction

To edit the soundtrack for our product, I used Logic pro, as this would allow me to professionally finish the effect of the base track.

By adding effects such as an EQ (equaliser) I was able to improve the quality of my soundtrack as well as edit it to fit my purpose for the final product by cutting out the unwanted frequencies.

I added a compressor to normalise the levels and avoid high and low peaks.

Final Website

(Link)

Final Poster

This is our final film poster.

Editing - colour correction

Using Final Cut Pro I colour corrected each of the shots create a theme/style to run throughout. By creating more of a uniform look the trailer flowed better and looked much more professional.

When colour editing on FCP you have control over the lows, mids and highs, allowing detailed correction to be carried out.

Some shots were colour edited differently - such as the scope and cctv shots - to make them stand out.

Editing - CCTV

To create the cctv shot i used Final Cut Pro.

The first thing i did was select the piece of footage.




















Then I colour corrected it to a green tint.

I then added some noise to create the grainy texture on the visual.










After this I added a banding effect which is usually associated with cctv monitors.  I did this by adding a square shape over the footage, changing the opacity and feathering the edges.

To make this banding effect move I used keyframes, which allows to shape to move between 2 set points in the duration of the shot.

Editing - the scope shot

In our trailer, we wanted to create the shot through the sniper rifle's scope.  In order to do this I began using Adobe Photoshop to create a png file.  I used a png because these files are image files that support transparent backgrounds.

I created a vignette in the shape of the scope.

I also added some shading to imitate the look of a curved lens.

A green tint was then added to finalise the effect.

I then layed it over the footage taken from the high angle to create the desired effect using final cut pro.

When filming this angle, we used a fast pan to create the illusion of the gun going off which matched the scope to look like the shot was from the sniper's point of view.

Poster Design- initial editing

 

For the film poster, we have decided to use closeup portrait shots of Akeldama's main characters. This idea was partly inspired by looking at this version of the film poster for Savages (below).

We found the poster grabbed our attention because of:

• The bold use of colour in the typography, a lime yellow which subverts the stereotypical use of red font for a thriller film
• The effect of layering different images was unconventional and worked well, as it draws your focus over the entire poster, rather than a specific section.
• The simplistic text "July 6"  is abrupt on the page, and the use of such sparse detail creates a sense of enigma, furthered by the use of no tag line.
• The poster is landscape; this allows for bigger typography, so the title "SAVAGES" can span the whole of the posters width making it more exaggerated, and dramatic. 
• The effect of the use of the word "SAVAGES" implies something sinister about the characters in the above closeups. The word connotes primitive behaviour or someone who is uncivilised, juxtaposing the relatively clean cut people shown in the images, with the exception of the two end images where the characters have been mysteriously masked with use of makeup, this is the only clue as to story line of the film.
• The lighting used varies, suggesting possible differences in the characters personalities. i.e. the fourth close up shows a women with bar like shadows across her face- a possible suggestion she will play the villainous role in the film as bars connote jail, or criminal activity. 

Despite the lack of text, the pictures alone give the audience a sense of intrigue and so today, I have started to begin editing some of our images in order to get a similar effect.

1. Firstly we took a close up shot of each of our characters faces and using the freehand selection tool on Adobe Photoshop, we could separate the background from the image of the person. (the original pictures)
(character Nyla)


(Character Malory)


(Character  Jesse)


(Character Drake) 


2. After this we copied and pasted the images onto PowerPoint:

 

This meant that we could layer the separate images on top of one another, too form one image which contained all of the main protagonists, also it made it easier to create a landscape picture by using a power point slide. 

3. I saved this into our shared folder, in jpg. form so that as a group we could access it easily and it would be saved as picture rather than as a presentation:

 4. So now we could edit the lighting and saturation of our picture, to do this I opened the Internet picture editor www.ipiccy.com (which looks like this:)

5. It has the basic editing tools; crop, rotate etc. But also has brightness and saturation adjustment, airbrushing tools etc. and is user friendly and easy to use. I started editing, by adjusting the lighting on the pictures, as they had been separate shots some where under exposed in comparison to others. (Below) the results of using a light filter, and increasing the brightness.

6. The first thing noticeable in the savages poster is the fact that there is no blank spaces. On the (above image there is a large white blank space above the close up shots, so I used the crop tool to get rid of the extra space.

7. By making these small tweaks in the editing stages, the picture has slowly improved, so we now have a solid wide landscape image to use as the foundation for our final film poster.

Experimenting with editing

We have all begun to edit sections of our film trailer; after having problems with final cut, we are now using imovie to initially edit and then Final cut 10. to finish our edit, as Final cut has better editing software and colour editing features.

 

One of the things we have edited on imovie, is this timer. We used a timer to create the idea that there is a time limit for the people in our film trailer, and also to connote a sense of pressure- they are runnig out of time. To add the timer we imported a clip of half an hour of a timer, and imovie split this into frames as shown above.

 

This allowed us to choose different times to include at different points in our trailer, by putting a series of times eventually giving a sense of momentum in the trailer.

 

 

Editing

I have changed footage of a digital clock counting down so that it counts from 15 minutes for us to use in our film. In our story board we showed how we want to have a count down on our trailer to show that the characters are in a game. I have also used an effect found on Final Cut Pro and exported it to imovie where we are actually editing our footage so that we can have a camera cutting out - this fits really well with the idea of the characters being watched and this being footage that is being privately filmed.

We also got a lot of footage of our characters running. We thought this would help create the sense of action and I have tried editing them one after the other so that the sense of action is built up throughout the trailer. This action mixed with the timer helps to give the whole trailer a sense of urgency and give a good idea of the general feel of the film.