AO2 & AO3: EDITING TO CREATE STYLE AND MEANING

In order to achieve the strobe light effect for the opening sequence, I had to play around with the lumetri colours and layer a grunge overlay on top of the original video clip. This contributed to making my opening sequence stand out against the rest of my film as it was colourful– almost giving a false hope to the audience by making it look much more jovial than what the actual narrative is. To continue my branding identity throughout my different products, I made sure to use the same exact font for my film title as well as my postcard and website. I added an extra element that is familiar and gives a continuity to the branding– the film reel border. Not only does it hint at the film's narrative, but it also gives it a classic finish.

For my opening sequence, I have also used footage from the original film itself and combined them in a way which would relate to the titles shown on screen and act as a background to the storyline as well. This keeps my viewers from getting their attention diverted as they are already viewing footage from the actual film and are getting introduced to the actors playing the characters within it. It helps establish the basic outline of my film within just a few seconds of the opening credits.

As shown in the above picture, it seems as though the female protagonist is being spied on with a pair of binoculars. I achieved this simple shot by importing a transparent jpeg file that had an image of a binocular view frame. This adds more of an element to the film and supports the shot beforehand in which my protagonist views her through his binoculars.

Colour grading is the process of improving the appearance of an image, in this case a video clip. Colour, saturation, detail, black level and white point may be enhanced when colour grading a film. For my film, I reduced my original footage to cool tones so it looks much darker and sharper. By increasing the sharpness, there was a much more clear difference between the highlights and shadows, increasing the contrast in the shots. I preferred this change since it suited the mood and emotion of the narrative itself more so than the actual colours.

There is a particular scene in which the protagonist whistles the same song that is being played in the background of this film. I had taken a voice recording of me whistling and then imported it to Premiere as an mp3 file. The problem I faced is that my whistling did not match my actor's whistle– so to sync them both together, I had to cut various parts and join them together, in order to make it more realistic.

Since the protagonist in my film is a photographer, he develops pictures and therefore I had to set up room that could closely resemble a red room. Using the TV studio at my school, I shifted all the equipment aside as to prevent any harm to the equipment and other wires lying around. I used a single yellow backlight that I had dimmed so that it wouldn't be too bright for the scene. When importing the footage on to Premiere, I used a colour matte, which is a solid colour that you use as an overlay or as a background. In this case I used the colour matte as an overlay and set the colour to red. This helped disguise my footage to make it look as though it was shot in an actual red room.

In this particular scene, the music was evidently more intense as the instruments increased in pitch and multiplied. To heighten the effect, I cut my footage to the beat, showing the disruption within the protagonist. This is a convention of thriller and horror films as they are fast paced and usually cut to the beat when presented with a heightened emotion of anger or disbelief.