More Music

We had a brief evaluation at the end of last term before Christmas and decided that we were happy with the second half of our edited trailer, but not so happy with the first half. One big improvement we deemed necessary was to add some music to the first half of the trailer.

We spent quite a while last term trying to achieve this but couldn't work out which style of music we wanted. However, Launa, Alice and I spent an hour today using Soundtrack Pro to create a mix which we are happy with and just needs a little tweaking to make sure it fits well with the moving image; otherwise we may end up creating a sense of confusion for the audience. For the music, Alice began with just a simple beat and then added extra guitar and built the layers and it sounds really good. The piece of music starts to become quite rocky at the end so that we can more easily change to the loud theme music we use in the second half of the trailer. The two pieces of music don't quite correlate however, so we are hoping to use a 'DJ Scratch' to mix them together.

We also sorted out a problem with our video too because we imported pictures from a USB to be added to the video for the 'screenshots', when we reopened the file at first the pictures had gone. This was because we had removed the USB, however we transferred the images to the Mac and then re-imported them and added them to the trailer and this problem is now resolved.

The Editing Process

Alice and I (Sarah) have learnt how to change the volume of the audio in Final Cut Pro as some of the dialogue was too quiet and we wanted the music to fade down so you could hear them. But we have now made the necessary improvements. The quick-paced frames which come in after all the characters are introduced are going really well and they work effectively with the music.

Alice has created the title screen 'Insiders' with the basic information using Photoshop.

In our group outside scene, originally we intended to freeze frame the different characters so we could overlay text with their name and a comment from their character. We decided to change this and Jess spent a lot of time using Photoshop to edit the freezeframes to give them another colour and use our house style font 'Cracked' for the text. We imported the pictures back into Final Cut and it now looks better. It was also suggested that instead of a comment from them we wrote their sentence length and so we made this improvement too. Alice and I looked at a lot of music on Soundtrack Pro, trying to find some good backing music for the first half of our trailer, but we have decided to not use any at this point in time and to use diegetic sound from the video footage instead.

Re-Filming

We refilmed some of the outside courtyard scenes today so that we had more footage to edit and so we could get the shots we wanted. We wanted the following shots and got them:

• A full pan of the characters outside


• Reaction shots to our character Harry being introduced


• A slow hand held shot from the POV of the two boys walking round to introduce them


• The group hanging out and a bit of fighting occurring

We are now happy with our amount of footage and think we can get further with our editing.

Before we went and did the filming, Alice and I created a one line bio for each of our actors to guide them slightly in their character portrayal. We based their characters on characters from Skins/Misfits/The Inbetweeners, as not only is it relevant to our targer audience, but we knew that it would help our actors who have all seen one of those programs at least. We also planned the actor's postures for the freeze frames, aiming to depict their main character trait.

Magazine & Poster

Thursday 25th November- We've decided to use this time to work on our print productions. Alice is working on the magazine front cover with the images took on the day we filmed in the half term which shows the actors in character and posing in character- this will help establish main characters to the audience and the soap.

Launa and Sarah are finding screen shots to involve on our magazine cover special because this will show the actors in character.

Thursday 25th November Problems

Unfortunately only female actors could make it in today and we're left with such short notice that would could not refilm anything today, however we've rescheduled once again and will include the male actors so hopefully tomorrow our courtyard scenes will be finished!

Editing Problems!

As a group we have decided our footage of the courtyard scenes are too windy and our actors cannot be heard and therefore we feel these scenes are unusable and would be a waste to use them.



We've now rescheduled actors to come in on the Thursday 25th of november to refilm our courtyard scenes to then be able to continue editting.

Editing Begins

Our whole group has now reviewed all of our footage as it stands on the tapes we used.

We've put every scene on the Mac's and are ready to begin editting to create our new soap trailer!

We've begun to add each scene and cut scenes to the right length and position them to create the trailer's structure, i.e. beginning with the opening establishing shot of HM Prison Canterbury and ending with the great piece of footage with the girl screaming 'Let Me Out'

We have been using Final Cut Pro 6 and Soundtrack Pro to help edit the sound together.