Category: Production

These are our ideas and thoughts for what our title sequence is meant to turn out like, and why we chose certain cinematographic aspects over others.

Mise-en-scene:

Costuming: white and innocent for victim, lighter colors for male detective, darker colors for female detective
Props: pieces of evidence to show murder, police tape to show crime scene, newspaper to provoke conflict
Decor: bedroom and vulnerable feel, office for a working feel
Setting: bedroom and office
Hair and makeup: victim made to look dead, detectives made to look official
Lighting: dark for evidence, normally lit for office scene
Blocking: victim looks powerless, female detective has somewhat little power over male detective
Framing: open for both evidence and office scene

Cinematography-

Establishing shot: door in evidence, newspaper for graphic match in office
Close ups: evidence to show entirety and vulnerability, close up of newspaper to show conflict
Mid-shot: shows conversation between two detectives
POV Shot: from drawer to show less power
Over the shoulder: between two detectives
High angle and low angles: during the conversation to promote power between female and male detective
Canted angle: tilted on male detective to show that he’s in the wrong
Pan: across crime scene to show it
Pedaling shot: across evidence to show all of it
Handheld: show nervousness of person observing evidence
Center framing: to keep the audience’s attention on the middle of the action

Editing-

Cuts: lots of cuts to show the movement of one scene to the next
Pacing: slow throughout most of it to provide easy story-telling
Graphic match: between newspaper and door, then between drawer in multiple areas
Continuity: purposefully kept
180-degree system: kept well
Shot-reverse shot: conversation from detectives
Dissolve: between evidence
Fade: fade to black at end of each scene

Sound-

Diegetic: dialogue, door, ambient sound
Non-diegetic: soundtrack for evidence
Offscreen: office sounds
Onscreen: dialogue, door
Synchronous: purposefully kept
Ambient sound: printer, phone ringing, small conversation
Incidental music: music during title card

Re-shooting was a huge success! At least I like to think it was. With enough time to get all of our shots in and being able to redo certain shots with experimenting with angles and movement was really helpful. Our setting was better as well since it actually reflects a sort of office and detective feel we are really going for.

However, this isn’t a project with Taylor if she didn’t forget something.

I had made a nice looking newspaper with an article and everything, and I left it at home. That’s a neck. I don’t even know how I left it cause I spent a good hour on it too. But it actually worked out for the better since the newspaper is now black and white and hints towards the fact that it’s an older time period, even though we kind of ditched that idea but it still reverts back to it as well. We also made the newspaper better since the back of it was obviously not our “newspaper” and the pieces of paper I used were a completely different color than the front.

To create this newspaper, I first printed a picture of the screenshot that we needed, the bloody hand print, and sized that well enough to fit a reasonable newspaper sized picture. Then I printed the heading along the lines of a murder at the Moore Manor. I made sure this was big, but not bigger than the name of the newspaper (Wolff Daily). I created a small article to fit on the left side of the picture just to give some context, but also to make it look more like a newspaper since I’m not a newspaper manufacturer. I covered up the rest of the exposed newspaper space with scrap pieces of white paper. Once this was finished, we covered the backside of the newspaper with a different newspaper as well that was still the same color. We were recording our scene and noticed the extreme discoloration of the whiteness of our paper compared to the newspaper when Tommy grabbed the newspaper. It wasn’t appealing at all to say the least, so easily making that change was a good idea.

The amount of blank white on the newspaper wasn’t completely intentional, but it brought more attention to the picture and the headings as well, so it worked out well in the end. Our printer also didn’t have any color toner, so it just happened to be black and white but that gave the idea of an older sort of time period which works well for 1990’s. It also had a few more features than my old newspaper had, so making this one made things easier for us in the longrun. All things happen for a reason I guess.

Experiencing this loss of a prop made me realize how difficult it can be on an actual set if a prop is lost or something goes wrong that isn’t supposed to and suddenly filming is delayed. Thank goodness I’m not actually spending $10,000 on all of this. I would cry.

I was watching over my rough cut and set up a few questions for myself so I can reflect and improve on my next cut of the opening. I will also have a classmate of mine look over it and I’ll ask them a few questions to indicate if they can tell what my title sequence is about.

1. How much continuity does the video have? Can it be improved anywhere and how?
   1. The continuity is alright in the beginning, but gets rough around the 1:30 mark. The conversation between the two detectives gets a little weird and rough because of the cuts and positioning of the camera. It didn’t flow as well as we wanted it to, but a re-shoot with some adjustments, it would be very beneficial.
2. To what extent is the video readable within your chosen genre? Can you tell it’s a horror/thriller/comedy/coming-of-age etc.? How can this area be improved?
   1. I’m a bit subjective to my own film, but it does fit as well as we wanted, to my own eyes. To someone else, it could look a little different, but it shouldn’t be too far off from our own genre(s) that we picked. With some music and editing, our opening should easily fit the genre of mystery, not much with our actual footage might be able to fix that.
3. To what extent is the video readable as a film opening? Can you understand that it’s an opening? Why or why not? What can you do to make it more readable?
   1. Again, I’m a bit subjective, but it introduces the characters, shows the struggles the detective is going to undergo, as we outlined in our proposal, shows the beginning of the plot, and doesn’t go into too much action or show the film as trailer-y as some other sequences have been. Also, adding our title and names of who did what are essential to a title sequence.

Next we consulted two students in our class, Ava Chandler and Kyler Dickerson, to watch our rough cut and give us some constructive criticism for our rough cut.

• What is setting (time and place)? How can you tell?
  • present time because of the newspaper and authoritative looking office people
• Who are the characters? How can you tell?
  • one who got murdered, lead detective and lower rank detective, main character is female detective
• What is the movie going to be about? How can you tell?
  • about finding the truth of a murder, because its a detective scene
• To what extent is it readable as a film opening?
  • felt like an opening to a tv show, started with murder
• To what extent is it readable as a [insert genre] film?
  • yes very readable, dead woman, detectives, pretty much a crime thriller mystery drama
• Overall, how might the clarity of meaning in the video be improved?
  • call her a detective to make it more clear that she is

This will be pretty helpful considering we were a little shaky on what we wanted for our rough cut. Once we improve some audio parts and some continuity errors, we will be alright.

So, planning our reshoots after seeing our rough cut was definitely in order because of how… awful it was. That’s the nicest way to say it anyway.

So, instead of our school building (and instead of having half an hour to shoot), we will be at our local city hall for about two hours. First, the city hall looks much more like the office we were going for. We only settled for the school because that as the only thing we could get in the time frame we were given. It’s also a lot more spacious so we will be able to roam around more and possibly have more angles to work with. Having this plan and also being able to finally reshoot will give us the best possible location we can get. We can’t get pictures of city hall unless we actually went there, so there aren’t any pictures quite available yet. Though, I imagine it looks how we want to for the type of location we’re going for.

Edit- 3-4-19: Okay so apparently I have other priorities to attend to that day, so now we are shooting the 9th at my mom’s work office, so hopefully that could work in a way. I’ve seen some of it and will provide pictures when I get the chance to, so it will be a good place to shoot. It is an office setting, so we also achieve the office-y feel we want for our title sequence. Having so many plans change is kind of irritating, but you gotta do what you gotta do. #mediaismylifeatm And even planning out our shot-by-shot has given us a lot of leeway with what we want to shoot this coming weekend.

I now know why the rough cut is called a suicide cut in the media. This is awful.

Okay, it’s not the absolute worst, but it could be 10x better than it actually is. I don’t want to sound like a broken record or anything, but it really was the small time constraint the people allowed at the school: 30 minutes. Had we had been granted more time, we would’ve been more preapred. It was also our lack of preparation with not having a super clear shot-by-shot which is what we should’ve done, but it slipped our minds to have something like that readily available.

For the blood we used some spray fake blood we bought from Party City… which ended up running out, so we had to improvise with some ketchup. We probably should’ve prepared with more blood, but I didn’t really think I would need that much, but we made it work. While I was at a thrift store that day for getting a few other things for our set (shoes, a sheet so the blood wouldn’t get on the carpet, and a shirt), I saw some cheap pearls that would work for the sort of victim we were looking for: an innocent, vulnerable classy girl helpless in her room, her most vulnerable place, and killed… that got dark really quick. I ended borrowing a carpet from our Media Studies teacher that he, for some reason, had lying around in his class room, thanks Engle.

Although… it was the dustiest thing I’ve ever encountered in my entire life. We had to stand outside and air it out for a good 20 minutes before it didn’t look as dusty anymore. It was so heavy too, so it was hard to even hold onto most of the time.

All in all, it’s not bad for a rough cut, but after seeing everything together, we definitely need to reconsider some aspects of our title sequence.

So we finally shot today! It was way more stressful than we thought it would be. We scheduled it to be at our school and when we got to the office we needed, the doors were locked. So after finding some people and calling who we needed, we got to shoot in there for half an hour.

Let’s just say we are going to need to reshoot some things since we were in such a rush to get everything done so quickly. The shots of our conversation between the two detectives weren’t the best. The shots weren’t horrible, but if we had more time or ways to make things a bit easier to actually get the kind of shots we wanted. The shots we got were okay, but they weren’t the best and when edited together, the continuity is pretty off and cuts are in weird places, so its not the best thing for us to have at the moment. We were also pretty rushed, so next time we reshoot we will have plenty of time to be able to get the right angles and distances that will fit our film.

For the shots of our evidence, they turned out really well. They were smooth, slow, and at the right distance and angle that we wanted. When edited and faded together, they looked really smooth and really mysterious since the audience wouldn’t know why there’s a murder in a house with all kinds of evidence. Shooting this sequence was pretty fun but time consuming for the most part. Setting up the mise en scene took and hour and a half and actually shooting took another hour and a half, so it was three hours that we spent shooting. It took a while but we had a great outcome of what we wanted. There was a few struggles trying to get some of the objects in place, and to get the right blood patterns. We also eventually ran out of fake blood (my hard earned $10 down the drain…), so we had to resort to some makeshift bood; ketchup. We did mix it with the tiniest bit of fake blood we had left, so it wasn’t awful looking, but it smelled quite awful. We also sprayed a ton of blood on Sitara’s carpet in which we had to clean up so her mother wouldn’t eradicate us. After all of this, Sitara’s room smelled like a disgusting mix of ketchup, cleaning supplies, and chemically blood. I felt bad for leaving her room with that smell, but you gotta do what you gotta do. After we edit some color correcting and getting everything in order, it’ll look exactly how like we pictured it to look.

Our shots are similar to or inspired by different aspects of mystery films, but we’ve taken a lot of inspiration from our two favorite mystery films (and the ones we are relying on the most), Murder On the Orient Express, both the 1974 and the 2017 version. We also had some planned shots/takes from the title sequence of Crooked House, but I’ll go into that a little bit later.

• 

• 

• 

• 

The shots of our evidence comes from the opening to the original from 1974. While the color correcting isn’t completely done, we want a darker lit feel to the evidence so it looks and feels more mysterious. That’s the whole idea of a murder mystery anyway. The 1974 version showed the crime actually taking place, or the background of another crime anyway, while ours shows the aftermath of our victim being slain. We’ve ultimately decided the blue hue wouldn’t make the scene as sinister as we want it to be, even with the music. It would give the scene less of the creepy and shock factor than what we would want. The scene with the evidence is following a lot of our thriller conventions, and mystery as well with the unknown factor of who is observing the evidence, is it a detective? a policeman? the killer coming back to move the evidence? The audience has no idea.

• 

• 

• 

• 

The long shot at the beginning is also inspired from different shots of the crime scene happening in the original Murder On the Orient Express, since you saw many different things happening in just one shot. While there are multiple shots like this in their sequence, we only have one sort of establishing shot like that so we wouldn’t run out of time in that sort of way. The second part of the sequence with the dialogue between the two detectives is inspired by the scene in the beginning of the 2017 Murder On the Orient Express where you see the detective (his actions indicate that he is one) conversing with different minor characters as they bring him food, run errands for him, etc. This not only pushes along a small narrative, it also introduces the detective in a subtle way as well. Our plot for our female detective, Rebecca Conn, converses with her superior, the male detective, Tommy Wolff. Through the use of dialogue and certain blocking aspects, we made sure to show the audience that Rebecca was in fact a detective. We thought of this idea from others watching our film, and we are glad we did since we would not have thought of that ourselves.

We also had a trial and error shot where we decided to try and do one long take of observing the evidence as Crooked House had the same sort of thing, but after looking through editing and post-production, it would’ve been too long since we wanted to include a lot of different stuff with our sequence with our dialogue and what not, so it was a better and more mysterious choice on our part to go with the dissolving into one another rather than the one long take, even though I personally thought it looked pretty cool, but alas Cambridge restricts us once more.