Titles...

When showing our piece to the teachers they said everything was great (or 'wicked' as Miss B says) but they both did comment on how bland our titles were, they didn't fit with the overall feel of our piece.

Being the only member of my group available, i decided to work on them. I went to Mr Deans who introduced me to a program, iMovie, on the Mac computer that allowed us to create animated and excting titles for our film.

We looked at LOADS of different styles and managed to pick our a few good ones (this was done a week ago with the whole group). I then narrowed it down to a couple, and myself and Mr Deans checked out which ones worked best.
Our favourite (as a group) however was a title animation called 'Bad Connection'
Looking at it again i saw it really worked and looked very effective. But when looking at this style on a black background (which we wanted) it didn't work very well.

Back to stage one...
We had to go back and search through all of them again. Then Mr Deans remembered one he thought might work, and in fact one we had looked at last time.
It was called 'static' and created an effect where the letters appeared in a random order to then create the word, but the lettters came in one by one. It looked very effective and i really liked it.

Now to choose a font..
It didn't take long to look through as i liked one called 'Bank Gothic' which worked well and looked very professional. Then Mr Deans created the titles, with me assisting, and telling him how they needed to be. And Voila! Our titles were done

I put them onto our timeline, made them the right time and slotted them in place. When watching the piece as a whole it looked great. It looked whole, real, brilliant

I really like them and enjoyed learning how to make the titles.

Drone...........

Our piece is looking good but i don't like how disjointed the individual clips sound. Some shots have more static than others, and some shots are a lot louder. We thought a way to overcome this would be to add an omnious low pitched drone over all the shots, similar to that of a computer humming.

After searching through a CD of horror sounds at number 88 (yes number 88..) I found a low pitched, horror-esque drone. It worked really well but it was too short. I had to cut it down and copy it over and over again to fill the whole piece.

I think the drone works well to portray more of a horror/thriller theme.

UPDATE

So we're nearly at the end...and I'm so excited to see the finished product
Laura's now gone away so it's up to me and Holly to complete the final tweaks and perfect our piece

At the moment we are working on 'jazzing up' our titles as in comparison they are a bit bland.
We need to warm up some shots of King and make sure everything runs smooth. We need to try and add the drone (see how it works)

CAN'T WAIT to see the finish product
x

Film Title names

We have been trying to come up with a good title, but it's not easy.

Here are some we have come up with.

• Death.com
• Caught in the web
• Caught in the net
• The Web
• The Net
• Cyber_____
• ______messaging
• Web of suicide
• No Escape (No Esc.)
• Key ______
• Dangerous _______
• Shut Down
• Alt Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
• Ctrl + Alt + DELETE
• (The) Web Of Lies

Obviously some of these are awful, but we're just trying to get our creative juices flowing...

Company

We've chosen to call our company "Handprint Productions".

We had made a list of possible names, which we narrowed down to three;

1. "Blinding Light Productions"
2. "Glass Eye Productions"
3. "Handprint Productions"

The way we chose was by thinking of logos/animations for each.

1. text coming up, then being engulfed by a blinding white light
2. a 3D glass eye rolling accross the bottom of the screen
3. a handprint appearing on screen

After talking to the technician, we realised that the Glass Eye one would take too much time to do and was too complicated, the Blinding Light one could work but it was quite simple, so we decided on Handprint. It had a nice ring to it, and we realised that the animation was simple enough to look professional.

This is the image we manipulated in Adobe After Effects. We inverted it so that it was a white hand on black, then we tinted it a dark red colour to make it seem sinister, and indicate blood and danger and horror stuff...

We chose to have simple white text (in courier to look like typing) underneath the handprint logo, and added the copyright symbol and 2009 in roman numerals to make it look more realistic and professional.

We're all very happy with the company logo :-)

Feedback on film so far

Yesterday we asked Ms Blackborow to look at our film, and she said "it's really impressive!". She also said that she no longer sees it as a student film and so isn't watching for continuity errors, but instead thinks of it as a real piece of film. She found it very frightening, and at one point put her hands over her eyes saying "this is really disturbing". This made us very happy :-)

We have to make a few small adjustments, and come up with a title, but we're nearly there!

• make a larger dissolve between the "submit" shot and the first shot of amelia and overlap the shots
• separate the ghosted shot and make it two shots
• move the first log in shot to straight after the company logo
• alternately have titles and clips
• fade down copmpany logo
• warm up shot of king
• put drone on

Progress update

Hi, back from Christmas holidays, into this snowy weather..

We're deep into our editing, ploughing through clips and takes to find the perfect ones.

We're all going to start our written work now (ish) but the main focus is still on editing (of course).

We still need to come up with a company name (or choose one from a list we made a while ago) and make a logo...

Its do-able..

Laura x