Test Titles -Futher Testing

Our next test for our titles is to decide how to present our title. We tested out the bold, the italic and the normal versions and these were our ideas. The top three are the normal fonts without italic, but different thicknesses, and the bottom three are all italic and different thicknesses. We found that the fully bold titles were just too much. But at the same time, the ones without bold werent bold enough. To change this, we deicided to make the first letter of each word bold, like we initially wanted. We think that the second from the bottom is the perfect font and thickness for our film.

Practise Titles - Font Colour

We tested out lots of different colours for our chosen font, overall these were the ones that we liked the most. We wanted the colour to be simple but stand out at the same time. All of these colours are really neutral and they really reflect our film perfectly. The white versions we liked at first but looking at them more, we decided that they were maybe too bland, and not very eye catching. The grey version really doesnt stand out very well so we dont want to include that in our film.
The version we chose overall was the third from the top. We decided to use this because as soon as you look at the picture, thats the image that jumps out at you. We want our title to really be seen, and as it will be appearing over the top of our actual film we need to to stand out over different colours.
Our next job is to test the thickness and size etc. of our font. Our initial ideas are to make the first letter of each word bold, but we are going to play around and see what we like and what stand out.

Practise Titles - Font Ideas

 

Because our film is drama, we wanted our titels to be as simple as possible. Selected these fonts so that we had a wide range to pick from.

Each practise title here that we didnt choose, we thought were really nice and plain, but they were just too boring. In general they were all just TOO simple and TOO plain. We decided we wanted to have a font that was quite dainty but also edgy at the same time. This would really reflect the films storyline and the emotion of the film. Some of the texts we saw were really nice but they just weren't what we imagined, so we decided to keep looking until we found the perfect font.

Another source of research we used to find the perfect font, was a website in which it told us what fonts, oscar nominated movies had used and how they were changed so they would be individual to that film. This gave us the idea that we should maybe change something with the text to make it more unique to our film.

In the end we decided to go for Papyrus. We really liked this font. It jumped out from the page as soon as we saw it and we automatically knew that we had to use it as our font for our film. It was just so much more interesting that all the other fonts we saw. It was exactly what we needed and what we wanted when we started looking.

Now that we have chosen a font, we are going to play around with it on Photoshop to see how we can change it and make it more unique. Our initial ideas are to make the first letter of each word, a font size larger to make it stand out, but we are hoping that we can do something a bit more complicated.

Program Choice - Post 2

A few weeks ago we decided to use our own program to edit our film.  Sony Vegas Pro 11. This proved to be extremly difficult for us for two reasons. The first reason is because my laptop was extremly slow which made it hard for us to see what the outcome of our editing would be. And the second reason is because when we previewed our video at full screen, it was extremly pixleated. We tried rendering it to see if it would do that when it has been saved but the rendering took extremly long and eventually failed. This was when we made the decision to change the software we are using to edit our film. We decided to change to Adobe Premier Elements. This was a hard decision because it meant we would have to redo our whole editing process, which would take a long time considering the work we had already done.
I think we are going to have to work extra hard now to get the editing done on time but i think that changing the program now was a good idea because it means we have time to make our film as good as it can possibly be. We didnt want to carry on using Sony Vegas, for it to go wrong at the last minute and ruin our film.

Editing - Hour 1

When using Sony Vegas Pro 11 for the first time we came across various issues however we expected this as this is our first time using the software. Firstly we uploaded the monologue into Sony Vegas Pro 11 and listened to it without anything playing over it. We were really pleased with how good the quality was and how clear it sounded. This made us glad that we decided to go to a professional recording studio as we are not including any dialogue in our opening, therefore we needed to make sure that our monologue was perfect. When listening to our monologue you could clearly hear the breaths that our actress was taking. To get rid of these we split the sound file before and after every breath and deleted them. When we played the monologue back, the pauses still remained but the sound of the breaths did not. This made it all the more clear.

The next step was adding the music. Sony Vegas Pro 11 has grids to allow you to seperate different sound and video files so you could edit them individually. This therefore meant that we could have each individual component playing at the same time. When we added the music, at first it didn't fit well with the monologue, so we cut out certain parts of it and moved it around so that it would fit with the pauses and the volume adjustments in her voice. When we listened to this back we were amazed at how it fit together perfectly. The music really brought out the emotion in her voice.

Our next step was inserting the video files. We decided to preview it in full screen before we started any editing, the quality was not good. We found that the video was pixleated. We searched online how to overcome this issue and we found that after rendering, the video quality will come out better. We decided to render our project with only one unedited video file inserted. This would then indicate to us whether what we found online was infact true and we certainly did not want to spend hours editing our project for it to fail on us at the last hurdle.

Tick List

	Done?	Comment?
RESEARCH
Genre Research and mind-maps (3 posts)	D
Uploaded YouTube videos of openings – analysed (10 openings)	D
Opening titles analysed in detail – font researched	D
Uploaded YouTube videos of similar genre openings analysed in detail (3 posts)	D
Costume and location research – google earth and pictures you’ve taken. (At least 2 posts)	D
Actors and props photos and interviews	-	Ask our actor to do an interview. Do an interview with one of the directors about what went well and what didn’t go as well.
Soundtrack research (non-copyright music)	D
Audience Research and Profiling (typical audience member and similar films)	D
Institution research (Paramount etc)	D
Certificate research	D
PLANNING
Own film idea brainstorm	D
Own film treatment	D
Relevant Online Tutorials (on filming and editing) and Comments (At least 2 posts)	D
Documenting of influences on production	D
Shot lists	D
Consideration of representation in your film and stereotyping – use theory from G325.	D
Questionnaire (and feedback) Get some feedback on your initial ideas!	D
Diary of filming/editing etc with photos and screen grabs (At least 3 posts)	Half Done	- We will need to do various screen grabs of our editing process. We will also need to call back our actress to do a diary of our filming.
Mood board	D
Script	D
Practice titles created and uploaded	-
Storyboard – animatic.	-	We decided to create our storyboard after the editing process.
Time Management Schedule – what you did& when, problems you encountered& solved	D
Codes and Conventions featured in your Opening Two Minutes	D
Ensure that all posts have a title, detailed comments and relevant pictures which are commented on.	D

 

Program Choice - Sony Vegas Pro 11

The program we decided to use to edit our film is Sony Vegas Pro 11. We decided to use this program because it is easier to understand than some other choices we had. Also i already have it on my laptop so it would be easy to get work done at home.
we decided to use Sony Vegas Pro 11 rather than Adobe Premier Elements, because when we tried to use premier elements for our premilimary task we found it extremly difficult to get the hang of and it gave us alot of problems saving our project. We didnt want to risk this happening again so we decided to change our program.


Sony Vegas is a popular editing software which allows you to get the best quality out of your videos.
One of the features of the program that would benefit us is the way you can make your video look alot more professional. Our video is obviously filmed without the best equipment so it doesnt necessarily look professional at the moment, but on Sony Vegas you can change the colours of the video and the size of the video. you can add on filters and add text into your video with all kinds of transistions and you can also reduce the camera shake manually. 
We chose the program just because of how simple it is to use. There are many tutorials online to show us how to get the best out of our film which we can use if we ever get stuck.