The first part of our film was easy to piece together as it was mainly establishing shots to show the victim sprawled across the stairs. We incorporated long shots, close ups, arial shots and even hand held shots in this section. The hand held shot walking away from the victim was meant to be from the killer’s point of view – this was again my idea because I thought the hand held shot would contrast nicely with all the still shots we used, and make it clear that this was the view of the killer looking down on his helpless victim as though he was superior to her.
Unfortunately, the tripod we were given did not fit with the camera, so we had work around this and try to keep as still as possible whilst filming are “still” shots. In the end it seemed to work out okay as the slight shakiness of the camera creates a nervous feeling.
We made the editing of the first section of the task fast cut to build tension, and then decided that to keep the audience intrigued we would make the first scene have happened after the second, so to show this we added the “Upper” credit which displays the time 5:19pm, and the second part 4:51pm. Once watching the finished film, I noticed that the time wasn’t really on show for long enough but I suppose this is a learning curve; that we have to be aware that some viewers may not have noticed it as soon as others as it only lasts 2:4 seconds! We wanted the beginning of our film to be silent, to enhance the victim’s weakness and helplessness as she is unable to move let alone call for help or answer her dad’s phone call, so we did this by muting the volume of each of the clips, but then having to import the sound of her phone ringing back in as this was muted within the clips.
Unfortunately Tilly and I didn't get much say in the second half of editing our film, as we had class whilst Claudie and Ellen edited it. But a lot of what went into it was our doing, such as finding the corridor with the flickering light... We were on our way out of the school because we finished filming but I noticed the faulty light at the end of the corridor and thought it would make a good shot to film the killer walking towards it, as the flickering light seemed eerie. They picked this clip to follow on from our first bit of film, which I think works well as the previous shot was the hand held shot walking towards the door, so this just made the clips run together smoothly as we then saw him walking from a long shot towards the classroom.
During our next lesson, we watched our finished preliminary task, but I thought it might be worth playing around with different effects, as I discovered that when you double click a clip, a box comes up which allowed you to edit the colouring and brightness. I suggested the colouring should not be too different to the original as this would make the whole film look unrealistic, so we fiddled around and decided upon changing the brightness to 190 and the saturation to -33. The result was a gloomy dark colouring, but with the whites made extremely bright, contrasting with the shadows. It also made the blood very dark and solid, which helped us as it made our fake blood look more realistic. The bright whites emphasize the victim's innocence which creates sympathy to the audience.
The final addition to our film was to add a title. Claudie thought of the name 'Detained' which means to keep someone in a place under control. The font we used looked like the font of a typewriter, which was called 'Courir'. By use of the 'Soft Fade' transition, the title stayed in the centre of the screen whilst the two clips merged together.
I think editing can make or break a movie, and for our first time and not much help with the software, I think we did a good job at making the film run smoothly whilst also creating the tension needed for a thriller genre.
