Film Editing.

To edit the footage we had taken we use Premier elements 7.0 which allowed us to upload our footage on there and edit it how we pleased without being too complex for us to use. It is also the only software available to us at the school that is simple enough for us to use. 

We thought that editing our film would be fairly simple, but when it came to the editing we occurred a number of problems. The first problem we came across was that the church scenes were too dark to see once on the screen. We managed to get the lighting right for the cameras on the stairs, however, on the computer we just could not see the image we had hoped. Luckily, we managed to edit the lighting so that we could see the image by changing the contrast, saturation and brightness, we had to make sure that they were all in the right positioning to gain the right lighting we wanted to see the image.

 

Once we had fixed the issue of the lighting on the church scene, the next stage of the editing process was to cut the clips we had filmed and delete that parts which we were not going to use in our opening scene. We then had to fit our scenes in the order we thought would work best, we flashed from scene to scene to give the 'Distorted' feel we wished to achieve.

The next step of our editing process was to change the lighting and effects on each part of our film to how we wanted. We decided to make the scenes fairly dark to make our film more eerie and gloomy, making the audience feel uneasy whilst watching our film as people tend to feel more on edge if the image they are watching is dark rather then bright and colourful, which would make them feel no fear and more comfortable while watching it as nothing would be out of the ordinary.

Here is an example of this and how we made it like this effectively. It took us a while to work out how to achieve the effect and colouring we wanted from the film and we had to try different alteration in order to do so. We also, had to gain the same effect through every scene in order to keep the effects balanced through out. To gain the effects and colouring we did, we had to change the contrast of the image, the brightness and the saturation. We had to get these three controls in certain places to get the right colour and effect. This also made the blood look more realistic and less bright creating a more grousome image.

The next part of our editing was to add our 'fuzzy screens' to our footage. We added this to create a weird, unknown element to our opening scene. These screens create suspense for the audience as they do not know what will happen next. To do this, we added a blank screen to our clip wherever we knew where we wanted the 'fuzzy screen', then went onto effects and added 'noise' to the blank screens. This was more colourful then what we wanted, so we then had to change the colouring of this to make it darker and more creepy. To do this we had to change the contrast, saturation and the brightness once again.

When it came to the next stage of our editing process, we occurred yet another problem to overcome. We next wanted to add the title of our film to our opening scene, for some reason premier elements would not allow us to do so, and every time we attempted to a message would come up and then terminate the programme altogether. This became an issue for us as we found it hard to continue with our editing. We went to ICT support for advice on how to solve this. We tried many different ways of trying to overcome this issue, but none of them seemed to work. The ICT support were unsure as to why this was happening. Due to this problem we had to start over again on another account, as the titles seemed to work on other accounts. We tried to send the editing we had already worked on to another account, but this was also unsuccessful.

Started the editing again put our group back a bit, however, we managed to use the existing edited clip as a guideline to us starting again, we managed to use the previous music plan sent to mateusz for the music to get the times of the clips exactly the same as the previous clip. Working together and using the existing editing we managed to get it done very quickly and were able to add titles to our opening scene.

We then added the title of our film 'Distorted' to our opening scene in a red writing to represent blood and the gore within the film, showing the audience what they should expect from the rest of the film. We placed it on the final part of our opening scene over the image of the dead man but the title then moves onto a plain black screen making the title more vivid and clear to the audience creating a memorising image of the film title. We chose to use the font 'Papyrus' as it is easy to read but also fits in with our film as it has an aged effect and slightly different to plain text.

Once we finished all these details we decided to finally add the soundtrack for our opening scene. This is an important part of our opening scene as it creates the overall effect of the opening scene creating the finishing atmosphere. To add the music to our clip we went onto 'get media' and selected 'from files' then choosing the sound file we planned to use and dragged it into the software onto the the timeline of our clip putting it in place with our footage. The music and sounds fitted well with what we had composed, showing that our timeline/music plan we sent to Mateusz worked in order to make the ambience right in our opening scene.

Once we had completed our editing we then had to render the clip onto a disc. By rendering it, it will become smoother to the eye and be made into one movie rather then different sections. Our opening scene will then be completed.