Author: Taylor Moore

We. Are. Done. I’m so excited.

That thumbnail does not represent my feelings about this project at all, but here’s how I see myself within my project. I’m so glad that this is uploaded I had so much trouble getting it up because of how long it was. But, it is here. Thank goodness.

If a transcript is needed, it can accessible here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L8Iy6Q_6N6i0-rXAwPuZCJam1XUsUZ1POy2TtYFHghM/edit?usp=sharing

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.