Film Summary

Does she kill her boyfriend?

Yes, Laura does kill Barney, who is only one of the many guys she has killed before and she takes him to the basement where she has kept the rest of the men. Here we see the more gory and murderous aspects of the film. The story conventionally consists of a detective like in Seven (David Fincher, 1996) who comes to investigate the case of the missing males in the area. He falls in love with Laura who whilst trying to seduce him, also falls in love. This is where elements of romance will be incorporated in our film. She spends her time trying to hide her crimes from him.

The film will consist of flashbacks showing her childhood and the cause of her madness. The story goes that when she was younger, her brother was drowned in the sea back Greece, and she has always held his friend to blame for this incident. She remains silent about it for years, but when she moves to London she is taken over by a psychological disorder when memories of her brother return. She begins to date and kill anyone that looks like her brother’s friend, and ends up falling in love with the detective. When he eventually finds out about her crimes, she is faced by a dilemma...

Should she kill him too?

One of my favourite shots...

Laura- Striking the Match (1.25secs)

Finishing our Project...
The film-making project has finally come to an end. Our deadline was yesterday and fortunately we managed to meet it with no problems =). We did however, make a few last minute changes to our sequence before getting it signed off.

We tightened a few frames slightly. We also re-recorded Laura’s dialogue which sounds much better now. The pause before ‘…for dinner’ did not have the same effect on the audience as we had intended so we got rid of that. Now she sounds much more sinister. We also cut the dialogues slightly so the conversation sounds more natural and flowing.

Yesterday we went through each of the titles making all the names bigger than their ‘job’ in the project for example ‘directed by…’ as this seemed quite conventional in other opening sequences.

Whilst getting feedback from Miss Blackborow, we all seemed to agree that the production name KADAM was a bit of a distraction with no significance, and that we should give more thought to the company name in order to establish ourselves more clearly. We came up with the two names:

OUTLOOK and PERSPECTIVE

We finally decided on ‘A PERSEPECTIVE FILM’ as everyone seemed to like it better. We chose this name because it signifies that as a company, we make films that give our audience the chance to see things from the perspective of different people within the British Society, whether they are from different ethnic backgrounds, or people from different aspects from society (for example homeless, disable psycho etc.)

‘Love you to Death’ is based on a psycho woman of Greek background, and therefore throughout the film there are references to Greek culture. This is what makes our company different from others.

After having placed our production company’s name on opening shot, we were ready to get signed off. Me, Alice and Mel were all very excited, and overall extremely pleased with our final sequence as we had done all we can to improve it and make it the best we can!

My Reflections on the Screening
We had our first Screening on Friday, which was very successful as we received both some good constructive criticism as well as feedback on works well. After this screening, the main feedback we received was that:

- The font colour looked too student-y due to the red glow
- The opening shots are a bit rushed
- The lipstick shot is too quick
- The volume of Barney’s dialogue needs to be increased slightly in one of the shots

We have already started making some changes for example we changed the font colour to a more professional looking grey colour. We also extended some of the shots to slow the pace down.

Things the audience liked included:
- Music
- Mis-en-scene
- Last shot
- The final title

I am really pleased with this feedback, especially as now we know exactly what to change before our Tuesday deadline. I am sure we can make most of the changes tomorrow. Mel also pointed out that Laura looked slightly yellow in some of the shots so we may have to sort out the colouration slightly as well.

First Week Back –Editing
Editing this week has been quite hectic as since getting feedback from both Miss Thrasher and Miss Blackborow, we noticed that there were quite a lot of little things we still needed to sort out including:

- Lighting on a few of the shots
- Credits- font and colour
- Final title
- Barney’s dialogue
- The glitch in music in some places

I found the teacher feedback was really useful as they managed to notice things that we couldn’t, for example, some shots were a few frames to long and needed tightening up for perfection, and that the opening fade was not long enough and didn’t give the audience enough time to take things in. It is always good to get feedback from an audience’s perspective and therefore we made sure we got a lot of feedback from lot of different people to make the sequence look as best we can.

As usual, due to clashes with the other classes, I did not have many free periods to spend on editing but as a group we were very productive during our lessons making quite a few changes to the sequence including:

- Adding a cross dissolve at the beginning between the establishing and shower shot
- Adding a cross dissolve between the stepping out the shower and pan of dressing table shot to take the audience in more slowly.
- Cut the music so that its original end is where our sequence ends
- We brightened, but then decided to get rid of two of the lipstick shots (picking up and applying shot)
- Instead, we went back to all our original shots finding an even better lipstick popping shot with great lighting and used the single shot instead. Miss Blackborow thought this was a good idea as she said it shows that applying the red lipstick was part of this character’s rituals.
- We also scrapped the final shot of Laura’s evil smile as the knife shot seemed much more dramatic and of better quality.
- We added slow motion to the final knife shot- this is personally one of my favourite shots now, I think it is extremely effective and looks much more professional.
- We re-arranged the order of the shots into an order that makes more sense, so the tying up dress shot is followed by a similar distance shot of Laura on the phone.
- With the help of Mr Deans, we also changed the lighting on some of Barney’s shots, as it was obvious that they were shot on different days.
- Alice also cut the sound on Laura’s dialogue so there was less of a pause before Laura says ‘…for dinner’
- Mel spent quite a lot of frees working on the sequence and managed to sort of the volume level of the music and dialogue so that the music does not drown out the dialogue, but also, so the dialogue sounds natural, therefore not too loud or not too quite, depending on the characters distance from the audience.
- The title now is also on a plain black backround as Miss Blackborow said it took the audience's attention off the knife, which is meant to be the climax of our opening sequence.

As I could not edit much in my frees, I spent my free period looking through the sound effects for good footstep sounds or sounds for a man screaming as we considered this for effect at the end. However, I was not able to find any sound effects that would go in our sequence. I also went through the fonts on dafont.com to look for a suitable font for our credits. I found quite a few and saved the best ones to show Mel and Alice in the lesson. We all finally agreed on using a font called Black Chancery as we all thought this was easy to read but at the same time sophisticated and matched our final title. I was very happy that we finally found a font as feedback showed that our credits were one of the major problems in our sequence.

Finally, after one long productive week we were ready for our first screening, Friday after school. This was quite exciting as we were able to see our sequence on the big screen but also meant we could spot more faults in it. Overall, however I was very pleased with this screening as we managed to receive a lot of useful feedback, which means we already know what changes we need to make come Monday morning!

Editing
Editing this term has been a great experience for me as I have learnt so much! During the first week of editing, I was not so confident and spent more time observing how to use the software and then having a go at it myself. Capturing shots has become very simple now, and I am much more confident with trimming and cutting each shot and placing it on the timeline. The first week of editing helped us experiment with our shots and the order that they would go in. We also edited in the shower sound bridge which works really well. Once we edited a rough sequence, we were able to see what works for continuity, and what doesn’t, for example in some shots it was raining when in other it was dry. The lighting too varied in the shots, the street becoming darker by the end, which did not look very believable or work for continuity. The first week of editing gave us an idea of what we needed to re-shoot.

After our second shoot, we added our new shots of Laura in the steamy shower into our originally edited sequence. Alice and I also began to add titles (directed by…starring…etc) and we learnt how to add key frames when using the fading effect. We played around with fonts and colours and we also added brightness and contrast to all of our shots making them look much more professional and of better quality. Alice had a lot more time to edit in her free periods as a lot of mine clash with 12E’s lessons but I try to help as much as I can during our lessons. Unfortunately, Mel had been very ill during this week but overall I think we made quite a lot of progress. We still needed to redo Barney’s street shots and add them into our sequence.

Finally, after having taken Barney’s shots we entered our third week of proper editing. Mel was back and well =) We edited in a different shot distance of Barney in-between the crosscutting. Alice, in her free period, also added in the dialogue and tried to synchronize it with Barney’s lip movement, which I think she did really well. However, unfortunately at the end Barney says something different in the Audio and Video so we may have to re-record that after Christmas. Alice also found a soundtrack, which we added on Thursday, and having gotten much feedback, everyone including Miss Thrasher thinks it works really well. Personally I love the sound track as it makes everything seem much slower and really builds up the suspense giving it an eerie atmosphere.

Overall Miss Thrasher said that our sequence is looking much better now, and that all the continuity works really well. She did however say that there were a few little things, which we could improve after Christmas but nothing major. This was a good end to our term of shooting and editing. One thing that continued to annoy us was the camera sound throughout the sequence however a helpful classmate, Nick, said that we could solve this problem by lowering the treble so we also need to remember this for after Christmas. We also plan to add in some Foley sound if we have time for better sound quality.

In general, I am much more confident with editing now, including cutting and trimming shots, adding sound, adding fonts and using effects, and I look forward to adding those final touches to our sequence next term.