2020 Film Blog

When we were writing our script we knew that it would really only be a guide line and we would do a lot of improvising on the spot to make the scenes feel more natural and when I was going our our cut I realized we barely used anything from it. I do not think this is a bad thing though because we designed the characters to be as close to us in real life so when we went to play our characters and shoot our scenes we felt that we should input what we would actually say in the situation and say what felt natural. We decided on this because when we tried to stick to the script everything felt very wooden and didn’t sound good at all but when we were able to improvise and come up with things on the spot and go with the flow, everything seemed to come naturally and sound better and I feel the opening became better because of it. We stuck to the main scenes we thought of and we shot all the scenes that were in the script but we found also that our opening was gonna be very short if we didn’t add some more clips that showed and fleshed out the characters more so we decided to add some scenes that weren’t in script like the jar throwing clips. I feel this was a amazing decision because those scenes just came naturally and fit in well with the high school teen tone we were trying to go for. So I feel by combing our script with the improvisations we did that our opening was made better.

As we have been working on the final cut of our project I have been tasked with doing a lot of the extra sound work that is not covered in editing. So I have been getting sound clips and creating a music sting. Overall though knowing this is one of the last things for our projects and it is almost over and our hard work has almost payed off. Anyway I have been working on a few sound clips that I feel will really make our film better.

Sound 1: Music Sting – This was probably the hardest clip to create because it was so intricate to get all the effects of the fade in and out to work and have the different layers of instruments fit well with the volume of the clip.

Sound 2: The Bang- This clip is to be one of the most important sound effects of the entire opening because it is the sound that transitions between the climax of the music and the title screen and is supposed to be very alarming to go with the title screen. The making of this clip involved a real bang sounds and a lot of weird effects in order to transform it.

Sound 3: The monster noise- This sound is also very important because it is the only time you really here the monster and clip is supposed to be one of the big scares. This clip was also very hard to make because it called for a lot of distortion and layering of effects.

Sound 4: The Sniff- This clip is supposed to show that the monster sniffed the camera and show the cause of the camera falling after we dropped it at the end of our opening. I had to make sure that the sniff sounded scary enough that it seemed like it was coming from some sort of monster.

In this cut scene we wanted to portray young ignorant teens messing around in the woods. So when we were thinking about what teens would do in the woods Logan thought it would be a funny and good scene to hit Scott with a stick in the back. So we grabbed a stick and hit Scott in the back, unfortunately we hurt Scott a little too much and his reaction is actually all natural (Sorry Scott). It made for a good scene though but unfortunately we couldn’t find a good spot for it in the cut so we decided to cut it.

As we have entered the post production process we have begun to trim down and refine our rough cut. So we have a different iteration of our cut that we will most likely be the main cut with all the scenes we will use for the final cut.

Here is out new and hopefully final iteration of the rough cut.

So after reviewing our rough cut we decided that we needed to re shoot some scenes and get some more scenes as well so we went out to go film again and shot some brand new scenes. Here it is

Today we had a peer evaluation day and we had Scarlet Jones watch our rough cut and comment on it. This is what she had to say

1. What is the setting? The forest/woods
2. Who are the characters? Three boys
3. What is the movie going to be about? The movie is about three boys going into the woods/ forest and finding a dead body.
4. What genre is the film? The genre is horror because of the blood and severed hand that was found in the woods, half of the shots were taken at night and that’s a convention that’s typically used in horror.
5. To what extent is it readable as a film opening? I know what is going on and the genre that is in the film. I can understand the rising problem, considering the dead body found in the woods.
6. Overall, how might the clarity of meaning in the video be improved? The clarity can be improved through the use of just editing and just creating your genre and incorporating it into the film.

Thanks to Scarlet for helping reviewing our rough cut and giving us feedback!

After filming for only one day we have put together a very rough cut. There is still a lot more work to be done but so far I think its going to come out very well.

While we were filming we noticed that a lot of our audio was coming in really really low so we decided to do a quick sound test in order to hear what levels we should talk with.