Making the titles for our film proved to be a little more difficult that I had originally anticipated, but I managed to figure it out in the best and most efficient way possible. I was originally planning on using iMovie for the titles, but the titles they have offered aren’t the best and definitely not what we want to go for for our style of film, so I turned to my favorite iPhone app, Video Star.
While making the titles, I had to manually create each transition. This was most likely the most tedious part of creating the titles since I have no real way of trying to copy each of the individual keyframes, so manually was the way to go. Once I got all of the titles done, I had to export them to my computer with iMovie. Once that was done, I clicked the green screen button to rid of the green behind the titles. This allowed for just the words to appear on the screen. iMovie only had the option to use greenscreen and not any other color, so I had to use that color rather than anything else. Then, I had to place the titles in the correct place to be able to yknow, show the titles of the people who did the stuff. After this, I will be completely done. Thank god.
Researching fonts and titles became more difficult than I thought, but not something that is impossible. A lot of these titles are similar and make things simple and easy to see, so the fonts aren’t really complicated or have many patterns. Some good examples of this is Sherlock Holmes, Murder On the Orient Express, and many others that have these sort of fonts.
Sherlock Holmes (2009) has big blocky white font that makes it very clear what the movie is called and why it’s called that. That’s the easy part of the mystery, the rest the detectives have to figure out. We wanted this same sort of thing, so we found the font called Hennnigar that was perfect for our sequence that matched the simple feel that we wanted. We tried other different fonts, but it didn’t match or the words looked a little… strange for us to actually use. One example of this was an actual Sherlock Holmes font they used in one of their movies. I tried using it, but the squares behind the letters just… didn’t look right at all. So, we didn’t use that one from our sequence. Using Hennigar was the best font we thought would fit the theme and feel of our sequence.
1974
2017
Some research went into this, such as the movies I mentioned before. We took inspiration from these fonts since they’re all simple letters, but the colors didn’t really fit what we wanted. The original Orient Express showed a red font in the titles, which worked for the background behind the words, but not for our background of darker evidence and things that are somewhat like that. Murder On the Orient Express (2017) has only a few titles in the title sequence, but it’s white and simple, just like we want it to be.
Our titles will look a little something like this and be placed on our evidence portion so it won’t distract too much from the screen or the second part of our sequence with the conversation. There’s not much else to say there, so hopefully it ends up well enough for our sequence to flow well.
We wanted our title to be special and something no one had really done before, at least not recently or for an AICE Media Studies project. Being the OG is pretty nice, you know?
We had an idea for the title card for a while and we always wanted it to have something to do with a magnifying glass. This sort of bounced around in different ways. At first we wanted to somehow graphic match cut it to Becca’s eye, and that definitely didn’t really work that much, since I not a professional editor. That idea was out the window entirely. We had some other ideas in mind with different transitions that I can’t fully remember since we mentioned them once and then never spoke about them again.
But we did come to a conclusion after all! We discussed having the magnifying glass run over the words to make them “magnified”. I wish that was an actual effect, but you know, I have to do it manually. Doing this manually was pretty easy for me, but explaining it in words is somewhat weird since I just do it, but I will do my best.
Discussing this verbally will get a little confusing, so I’ll also put a video of how I actually did it. The firs thing I did was pick a font, which I’ll go into more detail in another post. Once that was done, I had to make two different pictures of the text “Into The Truth”; one smaller picture, and one with a bigger font of it. Then, I had to create a png of a cartoon magnifying glass and put a circle of green screen in the circular part of the glass. Then, I had to create one video where the smaller words were the background and the magnifying glass was the second layer on the video. I moved it across the words smoothly and made it spin almost into a period in the end of the phrase. Once that rendered, I then put the larger text as the background. Putting the new video on top with the magnifying glass now on it, I had to mask out the green, somewhat like a green screen. Then, I had to fade out the big letters so the magnifying glass would smoothly become a period. Once that was done, I had my title card finished.
After this was finished, I simply put it in the title sequence in a smooth way, and that’s through some fading and sound bridging as well.
I was given the hefty task of editing the color of our title sequence, and iMovie really wasn’t doing what I needed it to, so I took to the app on my iPhone called Video Star. I had to pay money for the things I needed, but luckily I paid for it over a year ago, so it worked out well for me in this class.
After loading the video into the app, I clicked the Multi-Layer button to load multiple layers into the video section. For the first layer, I put my actual video in for the first layer. Then, for the foreground, I put in a completely black picture, so it would be dark for the blending process. In Video Star, there’s a blending option that does different sort of combinations. I tried all of the different types of blending and they all just ended in a completely black video, but luckily there was one that gave us the exact lighting that we wanted. Since we had the lights on suuuuuuper bright because we were shooting at night, I had to edit in the dark lighting so it didn’t look so bright and not spooky like we wanted. After watching it through to make sure it was blending correctly, I clicked the finish button and let it run through one more time.
After I showed it to Sitara she noticed the bed seemed a little over exposed, which I hadn’t noticed before, so I went back and lowered the exposure a bit while also making the video just a little bit darker and it looked much better than before. We didn’t want the evidence to be blinded or to take the audience’s attention away from that evidence because of a super shiny bed. That would be embarrassing. I tested different things in video star to be able to make the video a big darker and not as exposed, and I ended up lowering exposure in that one spot and also putting a picture of totally black color on the foreground of the video and made the transparency to about 50% so it would be a faded, dark color.
Original
Color Corrected
For the office scene, I didn’t particularly need to change a whole lot, since that scene is meant to look more neutral and calmer because it take’s place in an office, and office typically have bland colors that aren’t meant to evoke too much emotion. So, when color correcting, I just turned down some exposures and made certain colors darker/more neutral if they really stood out too much. Doing this mostly brought the attention to the conversation taking place between the two characters rather than anything else that might be distracting in the background of the office or even the window. I know it looks like there’s nothing done but I swear some colors are muted and less of an issue to make the people stand out. I can’t make this stuff up.
Color correcting wasn’t as big of a challenge that I thought it was, since I have some experience in it before when just editing certain videos for fun. I’ve actually done something similar to this project a few months ago using the same editing software, but was a bit more inexperienced. I created a music video to the song How Long by Charlie Puth. The sound is also not so great in that video as well, but the experience gave me a better understanding to simply edit this title sequence in the best way possible.
All of my posts are completely out of order because I basically can’t be as organized as I should, but it’s fine I’m totally okay, you know?
Struggles
As I just mentioned, I’ve been in a rush to get all of the blog posts that I need without dying or being too stressed out with everything else I have going on in my life (other AICE exams, life, sports, etc.). This reflection is even being written before the 7th one because I don’t remember what happened that week besides that I slept 5 hours one of those nights doing all of this and everything else, but it’s fine I am. Fine. I’ve been editing our title sequence for a good two weeks and still have to include titles within the thing, so I have to do all that to be able to actually finish and then brush up on some sound leveling with ambient sound and the dialogue, which has proven to be an annoying thing just hanging over me and taunting me. I also have been struggling to actually keep up with posting since I have been simply editing for so long and creating the best thing I can when editing our sequence. But, I can get things done yknow, eventually. I’ve struggled with uploading some videos to YouTube and them constantly getting taken down, but it’s alright since I can just upload them as “unlisted” thanks to Becca showing me how. Very creative in that aspect.
Accomplishments
I feel like there’s not much to say here besides that I got a lot of editing done and talked things out with Sitara. We still have yet to figure out the title fonts, but through some quick research it should be alright for us to establish it.
Well, that’s it. This is the last week and I have yet to start a director’s cut or a CCR. This is fine.
With ambient sound, I had to get a bit creative because I didn’t even know I needed ambient sound, but to make the sequence seem more realistic, I had to record certain things to make the scenes more realistic and to even sound better that way as well.
The first sound I had to record was the office sounds since that was the place that was definitely going to have ambient sound no matter what. Without that there would be a very quiet office and it wouldn’t feel real. The cinematic invisibility wouldn’t have worked in that way for that scene. The first thing I needed was the people talking in the back of the video. I simply set my phone to record the talking of some of my classmates in one of my classes to get the simple sounds of an office. If there was no talking, it wouldn’t really be an office. After that, I had to layer a phone ringing on top of it. I got one of my teachers to call another teacher of mine so I could record the ringing the of the phone. I just had to awkwardly stand there while my teacher just kind of… watched me record his phone ringing. It’s show biz, you know? Lastly, I had to record the printer printing, so I printed some random paper, sprinted to the office where the printer was, and recorded the printer sound as well as I could. Then, going back and watching the sequence back, I realized a door creaking would work for the evidence part of the scene. So, I found a squeaky door in my house, closed it slowly and recorded every part of it. Once I got all of that sound layered and leveled well, the title sequence really came together in the end.
Now that the sound is done, working on titles and color correcting is the very next step as well.
Bloopers were pretty funny when editing them, and seeing how much we messed up is hilarious. Though, it allowed us to really fix our mistakes of what happened before the best shots possible. If I really wanted to, I could put our entire dialogue scene in from the first rough cut into our bloopers… just kidding.
So here are the bloopers from all the filming we did, from all three times we filmed. From these bloopers, we figured out better angles, better blocking habits, but ways of delivering our message, more careful camera work, and much more with that as well. My favorite blooper is when Sitara fell on Becca when we were testing out different endings for the ending, which I will go into a bit later. They also kept laughing during this sequence when attempting to do it.
So with the endings, we wanted to try a few of them. One was the one where Sitara fell on Becca. We wanted to zoom in on Becca’s eye and do some sort of graphic match cut with a magnifying glass. I realize that my capabilities are limited to special effects editing, but I wanted to at least attempt it, but we scrapped that entire scene, ergo I’m not really doing it anymore. We also wanted Becca to gasp and then walk out of the frame, which is seemingly pretty simply, or we wanted her to say something. That comes with “Guess if you want something done well, you gotta do it yourself” line we gave Becca in the second part of the office scene. This made for a few funny bloopers, but a good ending that is better for us as well.
In order to find the right sound I needed, I had to listen and find out what sort of sounds mystery thrillers have in their sequences. Looking at the movies I’ve been using the whole time (Murder On The Orient Express, Crooked House, Kaahani, Sherlock Holmes, Murder At the Gallop, etc.), this shouldn’t be too hard of a problem at all.
Looking at the 1974 Orient Express, their title sequence had mostly non-diegetic sound, as it only outlined the crime actually taking place rather than showing the evidence itself and the silence and suspense of it all. No ambient sound was really used, most likely to show how stealthy and quiet the criminal had to be to commit the crime in the first place. The soundtrack behind it has high pitched noises mixed with bass to create a suspenseful and high tension atmosphere, since a crime is taking place at this time. It gives the sequence a more suspenseful feel to it since its such high stakes for the criminals to actually complete the crime they’re aiming for.
In the newer 2017 version, there are plenty of different sounds from ambient to diegetic to non-diegetic to on-screen and offscreen and if I were to list all of that it would be enough for one post. Unlike it’s parent movie, this version has much more dialogue included in the title sequence to introduce the main character, Herucle Poirot. So in order to introduce our character, it would be imperative to use these techniques to introduce our own detective, Rebecca. There is only a soundtrack during certain parts of the sequence where there is no dialogue necessary, like when the little boy ran to get more eggs, so we included certain soundtrack sounds under dialogue parts and where there is no dialogue anyway.
Crooked house has few sounds that are extremely obvious, like the footsteps, the faint sound of the syringe, and some mysterious coughing in the back. With the creepy soundtrack in the back and the few diegetic sounds that are heard throughout the first two minutes, it creates a suspenseful and mysterious atmosphere and the audience isn’t sure what to think about it at first. We wanted this same sort of feeling, except the audience would come to figure out that the scene is a murder, but not who did it and or who’s observing the scene. Taking this kind of inspiration led to our sequence being easy to apply sound and be able to create the feelings that makes the most sense.
Sherlock Holmes, the 2009 version, starts out with Sherlock running from someone or something, and it’s not completely clear why. A lot of ambient sound is used here and mixed with certain diegetic sounds, like his breathing, his footsteps, him tripping and whatnot. Though this film is more geared towards action and adventure, it still has the original feeling of mystery we kind of want to go for. Not too much inspiration was taken from the sound, but more the plot of the sequence as the detective, Sherlock, is introduced through a creative way.
As much as I absolutely love editing film, I cannot stand editing with iMovie. It’s not difficult to work with, I just feel really restrained when working with it. Though, I don’t have access to any other editing program that is 1) free or 2) easily accessible. So, here we are.
Here is my entire process of editing, so far. I first had to, obviously, put everything in place for the title sequence actually makes sense in the first place. That was the easy part of editing. Though it was a bit difficult differentiating from the bloopers from the actual footage. I had edited the evidence portion a while ago since we decided that we would keep that part of the title sequence in since 1) it took so long to set up anyway and 2) it’s kind of what we want to go for anyway, so there isn’t a big need to change it up if it works the correct way we want it to.
I don’t know how these sound editors deal with how tedious and awful editing dialogue can be, but I somehow did it. I had to import every single sound recording and file that I had, and none of them were corrupted or messed up or anything, thankfully. During each audio and video recording, I clapped loud enough so that both of them would pick up the sound and could be more easily synced. Even when doing that it was still difficult to sync dialogue. Remind me to film silent-dramas from now on. Either way, after listening with and without headphones (it de-synced when I took them out), had other people listen to it, listen to it ten billion more times, it was synced well and the dialogue was at a pretty good volume as well. This as probably the most difficult part of the entire editing process, so I was very glad when I had finished.
Layers and layers and layers and layers of sound
I’ll go into recording ambient sound in a different post, but it was somewhat difficult to make sure not one part of the ambient sound doesn’t overpower another or so. The ambient sounds I included for the office is a printer, a ringing phone, and a room full of talking “office employees”. It was actually a classroom but it sounds pretty similar to a busy office. Another ambient sound I used is the door creaking and closing in the beginning with the evidence sequence. It was kind of hard finding a creaking door since I don’t have any doors that creaked, so I just improvised with some different mouth noises and it sounded like creaking. It worked out for me, you know? Sound creators have to get creative, too.
I had to decide a good soundtrack for both the beginning and the end as well, while also including the logo of our production company, while I don’t particularly know if we need that or not. I figured it’s better it’s there than not at all. The beginning is supposed to be creepy and suspenseful, so our thriller genre conventions come more into play there as it shows the less mystery part of it. We decided to go with the creepy and mysterious music composed by Peder B. Helland. This is the same artist for the title card music at the end as well. This music gives our evidence a creepy sort of feel when observing it. Although, the POV of observing the evidence is unknown to the viewer, so that as well may add to the evidence. That’s for another post, but anyway, the end had to be some sort of introduction music, or more mysterious music since it’s introducing the title of the movie itself. The transitioning was a little rough to actually deal with in the end, but it got it, eventually. The fade is faster than I would like it to be, but you gotta do what you gotta do yknow? Either way, the music was difficult to choose since I wasn’t too keen on what to look for. Yes, “creepy” music, but I wasn’t extremely positive on what I wanted so the feeling could be brought out better in the way I really wanted it to. Though, after some discussion with Sitara, we settles on a good soundtrack for the beginning to show what we wanted for the most part.
The rest of the editing I’ll go over in more detail in a different post since I would have to describe the whole process of both color correcting and getting a lot of the ambient sound and even creating the title card in the best way possible. That’s gonna be long winded and complicated to explain but it shouldn’t be too difficult. I have so much to do oh my g-.
I really can’t say much for the past week since I’m starting spring so unfortunately, I haven’t really done anything for this project which I am definitely going to regret later.
Update: it’s later, and I most definitely regret this. Pls help.
Into The Truth 