Post production: Part 1

Last Monday we began editing our opening sequence on Adobe premier pro using the skills we had learnt in the editing workshops we did a few weeks ago. We started by watching through all the footage in the rushes folder. This allowed us to select which shots we liked the best and we named them so that we remembered which was which. For example, we named selected two versions of our opening shots that we liked. There were some shots where we had made some errors. For instance, in some shots the pans up and down were either too fast or too slow.  Additionally, we had to crop some of our shots. These included one shoot where wanted to give the illusion that the belt was tied around the woman's neck but her arm could be see holding it. Additionally, in some of the shots with the woman with the funnel inside her mouth you could see a fire exit at the top of the door which we cropped out as we wanted the set to appear as if it was part of the man's house, and not a boarding house. After doing this, we went through our shots again and narrowed our choices down even further. With all of our shots chosen. We started dragging them into the timeline and cutting them down to our desired length. We had to choose which shots we were happy not to include given that the opening sequence had to be under two minutes.

On the first day of editing, we had already made many important choices in regards to visual aspects of our opening sequence. Firstly, we decided not to include some shots that we had filmed in order to keep to the time limit of the opening sequence, which needed to be between approximately two minutes and two minutes and thirty seconds. One of the shots we chose not to include was a shot of multiple berries chopped up as we felt that it wasn't necessary in advancing the narrative. Furthermore, we wanted the title sequence to be in a wide screen format and so we added cinematic bars in order to do this. We did this by adding an adjustment layer and then going through each shot and cropping it accordingly. We filmed one wide shot at the end of the day when the lighting was much dimmer from the perspective of the man's desk looking towards the man at the table making the poisonous berry mixture. However, we were unable to adjust the colour in a way that meant the shot would fit seamlessly into the sequence and so we decided not to include it, which also helped with making the opening sequence shorter. We also made the choice to keep the fizzing shot at its full length as we felt that this shot was visually pleasing, and that it was crucial in indicating a mood change.

Once we had finished the picture cut and we began looking at potential music for our soundtrack. We decided that we we wanted a classical cello piece. However, we didn't want this to have too much of a sinister tone or upbeat tone in order to maintain a sense of mystery at the start. We looked through pieces by Bach on Spotify and created a playlist consisting of a few that we liked.We finished the day by creating a list of titles following the traditional format, in the font Didot. We inserted our own names for the roles we took on for the shoot and then made up other names for the rest of the titles and began experimenting with different positioning. When adding the titles, guidelines appeared on the screen which helped us with positioning. We made sure to keep all the titles in the inner box in order to ensure they wouldn't be cut off when watching the sequence on a screen with different formatting.  We weren't completely set on the timing and positioning and font of the titles and so we decided to revisit the titles in a few days after we had finishes with the soundtrack.