Evaluation

Today I have been carrying on with the evaluation of the two minute opening and have started to film the director's commentary. I have also exported the film so that I can upload it onto YouTube as the quality on blogger is not up to scratch, and I will upload it later.

Finished!!

 Today I managed to adjust some minor parts of the title sequence and as a result of this I have finished editing the 2 minute opening. I will now start evaluating the film and will upload the opening soon .

Razor Tool

Today I carried on editing minor parts of the 2 minute opening, such as the way different scenes change and by doing this, I noticed that when one of my scenes changed, it was quite jumpy and ruined the flow of the film. However, I went back onto Adobe After Effects and managed to increase the length of the scene, so that it had a steady transition. Also, I realised that when the title appears during the opening, it stays on screen for no more than a second. To make it longer, I used the razor tool on Final Cut Pro and clicked just before the title appears, and just after, and right-clicked on it. I was then given the option to change the time length and I chose to increase the length by 50%. This means that the title now stays on screen for a lot longer, which is what I wanted.

Scene Reverse

For the last scene of my two minute opening I needed the actor to open his eyes, as he had finished having his flashback. However, I realised that the ending scene that I had was not as good as I had first thought and was too short, so I found a good scene, where the actor closes his eyes, and reversed it, so that he opens his eyes, rather than closes them. To do this I right clicked on the timeline in Adobe After Effects and clicked on Time Reverse (not exact name) and this changed the order of the scene, so that it was how I wanted it. The first time I tried this I accidentally clicked on the soundtrack bar, in the timeline, and the music was reversed, instead of the actual scene, but I soon corrected this error.  

Soundtrack Change

As I was watching the opening part of the film, with the titles and smoke effect, I realised that the music did not really fit the entrance and theme that I was hoping to create so I decided to change it. Luckily for me, I had 4-5 other music scores on my pendrive, which I had previously listened to and thought were quite good, so I simply deleted the current soundtrack and replaced it with a much darker sounding score, that really fits in with the opening titles. I now believe that the music has really added to the somber effect that I was hoping to create.

Titles and Smoke

Today I decided that the titles in my opening were not as good as they could be and that there was something lacking. As a result of this, I decided to add a smoke effect, that appears when the names of the actors in the film appear. I chose the type of smoke that I thought suited the film, since it is about the aftermath of a battle, I chose a smouldering-smokey effect as to give the impression that something has been burning for a while. Once I had done this, I placed the smoke over the titles and watched it as it rose from the bottom of the screen and past the actors names. However, I noticed that the smoke effect was a little bit too fast for the intro and did not suit the slow-somber music, so i decided to slow the smoke effect. This was done by stretching out the smoke layer and as a result, the smoke was a lot slower the next time I watched the titles.

Evaluation

Today i started to evaluate my 2 minute opening. I started by looking at the type of audience that the film is aimed at and the kind of social groups that are represented in the film.