Editing difficulties

When editing out footage we found a number of elements difficult however there were two in particular aspects that caused us the most trouble;

1. Colour Matching:

We had to film our footage over a number of day and one element out of our control was the weather. We found that on one of the days we filmed it was cloudy and dull and on the other it was sunny and bright. This meant that the footage we got didn't match up because the colours were so different. In order to fix this problem we had to take the brighter clips and try and adjust the colours to match the other clips. We found it very difficult to match the colours exactly because of glare and exposure, however after a long time carefully testing the colours we eventually matched them enough to maintain a high level of continuity.

2. Sound:

On the days we decided to film there were high winds meaning the vast majority of the sound was low quality and un-useable. There was also a lot of background noise in some of the clips that we didn't want. In order to get rid of this we decided to mute the vast majority of the clips and add sound effects over the top. We chose realistic sound effects off iMovie and faded them in and out so that they appeared to belong. This element of the editing was very difficult, however once achieved it vastly improved the overall quality of our film opening.

Our Horror Soundtrack

This is the Soundtrack we used for our film opening...

The soundtrack had to create suspense and build up tension, this helps amplify the movements on screen and keep the audience immersed in the atmosphere. I used the soundtrack to "Jaws' by John Williams to get inspiration and focus on elements that make it effective. The steady increase in pace and volume heightens the tension and gives the affect of a oncoming 'doom'.

I used Apples 'GarageBand' to create the soundtrack, I used 'Cinematic' strings and a 'Grand Piano', I also gave the whole soundtrack a 'Psychedelic' sound, this gave distorted echo to the track and helped highlight its 'eerie' quality.

Using Tutorials

In order to actually create our horor opening we as a group had to use a programme called 'imovie', the programme imports video footage that we had filmed from the camera/memory card to the mac and allowed us to edit the raw footage into our final piece 'Shutter'.
To make the sound track for our horror opening we had to create a peice from scratch due to copyrigt issues, this meant using a programme called 'garage band'.
As none of the members in our team have had to use these programmes before we had to do reasearch into how to use them effectively. One of the ways in which we dd this was to watch tutorial videos of the programmes on youtube and follow instructions as best we could. This was a very effective and constructive way to become familiure with the softwear as we all very quickly became comfortable using it in our every day construction of the horror opening.