Editing and putting everything together

My main role in our whole process is edit, since I’m the most experienced with it in our group.  From the beginning the one of the hardest things for all of us was choosing which clips to use, we loved all of them and if we had more time we would have used almost all of them. One way i did try to incorporate many of our shots was by sequencing when i could and using multiple POVs of the same shot. Another struggle we had was figuring out how we wanted to include the titles, we didn't wan them to take up time that we could use for something else that would add to the story. Our solution was to have them all in the very beginning dissolving in out and quickly layered along with shots of Mark's (the stalker) room. The titles begin to the intensity and the shots help establish the background. 

To the right is a screen shot of the sequence workspace in Adobe premiere pro, you can see  the titles(pink) are layered on top of the shots each having a dissolve transition on the beginning and end of the clip. I tried to dissolve each one a certain way to not match the music but go along with it instead. And as I continue editing I like how it is coming along when it doesn't match the beat right to the point. 

First day of filming

On Sunday March 15 we spent the entire day from 2:00 pm till 10:00. We began at town center near the business offices to film the scenes where they see each other at work. We filmed the same shot about 7 to 12 times shooting in different angles and capturing shots to build sequences. I did that with many shots to be able to to have more variety and more perspectives, instead of having plain old medium shots. My role the whole day was filming, we used a professional camera and tripod I have used many times and using my knowledge and experience from filming I was able to show our stalkers thoughts in a newer perspective.

This was the scene we started with, we had our group members act for us and dressed them up to look like older adults in their late 20s/ early 30s.  The hardest part about filming this scene was the lighting, it was very sunny at the time we were filming and it made it darker by the door that was under a covering. So when they would walk from the sun into the shaded area I had to adjust the iris quickly but not too fast that the audience would be able to obviously notice. Lighting in general was a big issue we dealt with especially in the night scenes.  We needed our shots to be lit but we wanted it to still seem eerie we used flashlights and the light on our phones to light up Alvaro's face.

Our final idea

All through out last week we bounced different ideas off of each other for our film opening back and forth not coming up with any thing we liked. Until Alvaro one of our group member came up with an eerie suspenseful idea for a plot involving a stalker. 

We began to storyboard our ideas for shots then came up with a solid plot line to put them all together. Our goal is to make the viewer super uncomfortable when watching our video we want them to cringe and be spooked. We agreed that we should use a lot of ECUs (extreme close ups) to make things more intense and also get multiple OTS (over the shoulder shots) to get different perspectives on what's going on in the stalkers mind. We wanted to film more shots then we would need so we could have a variety to choose from when editing. Our plan was to film Sunday from 12:00 pm till 7:00 pm.

New Day, New Idea. Whole new opening

As my group and I came to class again today and began to get into more detail about our comic book opening we began to see some problems. We thought there was a huge risk of the opening turning out cheesy. As we thought about ways we could modify and improve it Alvaro remembered a song and pitched an idea around the song. The song he thought of was an eerie slowed downed version of Happy Together by the turtles that was in the Great Gatsby movie. He pitched that we throw away our other idea away completely and start anew with a more suspenseful thriller about a stalker and his obsession with a girl that doesn't even know who he is. We started thinking of all different scenarios we could do. We wanted to make our viewers uncomfortable but engrossed in our opening we wanted to have dark shots, close ups and extreme close ups to make everything much more intense. We wanted our first shot to be the stalker singing the song lowly ,and creepier like then the version we thought of, and be in a dark room full of photos of the girl and on one of the pictures you would see the the movie title and the opening would continue from there.

Coming up with our film opening idea

 
As my group and I started brain storming we didn't really know where we wanted to start. We began naming things we liked and disliked about film openings to try and see what we would want our to be like. We then began thinking backwards and tried coming up with a story line first thinking it might be easier that way. Ideas started to pour in when one my group members mentioned a flip book concept. From there we began forming a storyline and the way we wanted to start the opening. I imagines in my head how i would edit it together knowing the amount of key framing  i would need to do to have our vision come true. We wanted out opening to start our with a little boy holding a comic book and as he opens it the shot changes to the pages of the comic. From there the shot would zoom into the boxes and video would start playing and once it ended the shot would be moved to another box and the same thing would occur. the videos would go into the background of our main character. As the shots would continue there would be a voice over narrating and at the last box the animation would change and the shot would go to the main character in the real world.