January « 2011 « Jessstares's Blog

Resubmission of Coursework – Music Box – What and Why we changed what we did.

January 5, 2011

After getting feedback from my teacher and the examiners i saw that our final edit of ‘Music Box’ could be improved so i re-edited it. Here is our final cut and re-submission of ‘Music Box’

The main thing which i changed in this re-edit was the titles. In our original edit the titles were very basic and was shown over the actual scenes of the thriller opening, whereas these titles are shown over cutaways of the thriller making it look more like professional titles rather than amateur ones. In the original ‘Music Box’ opening titles we only had the production name and a couple of names who edited the video, whereas in the new ‘Music Box’ we have the production name, the Producer, the Director, some of the people who starred in the opening and finally the main title itself. This makes the opening of ‘Music Box’ look a lot more professional.

In our first edit of Music Box, the Production Company title, at the beginning, was made in after effects. A white wave behind the font moved like a train and the font ‘waved’ into the centre of the screen also. On all the other titles we used an effect called bullet train. We decided to change all of these fonts and effects and decided to go for a more simplistic look to the titles using a very simple font and having background images behind all of them excluding the Production Company name. which was left with a plain black background, making it look much more professional than the originals. These fonts still reflect that of a train station as we have used the same font which is used on signs at a train station, for example at 0:55 in the opening sequence we see a ‘DANGER’ sign using a similar font. These fonts were also easier to read and did not distract the audience from what was going on in the background.

Another thing which we change was most of the cross fades throughout the sequence as they were used improperly. Instead of using them the represent passing of time we used the to ‘look good’ which they did but to make it look more professional instead of using cross fades on the cutaways in the middle of the thriller opening we used straight cuts instead. This also meant that we could match the cuts up to the beat of the music making the whole thing look more professional and more interesting to the audience, this also kept continuity better throughout the whole opening. We deleted one clip, which was of one of the girls talking, due to the fact that the cross fade used to link the two clips was too long but when made shorter we could see that the clips did not match up resulting in deleting the cross fade and the clip.

In this edit of Music Box we deleted a lot of clips but then added some as well. This resulted in all of the sounds and sound effects being placed out of sync, as they were not linked together, which meant we had to look more carefully at the sounds to match them up with the corresponding clip. because of this we saw that some of the sound could have been used better and in different places, changing the volume in some places also. This meant that the sound in the re-edited version of Music Box sounds better and is sufficient throughout.

Finally, we had to change the alley scene as we noticed that when the little boy gets up to walk it jumps a little and speeds up for not even a second. This damaged the continuity and showed poor editing so we had to cut some of this clip, which also helped as it was said that the clip here was too long anyway.

Posted by jessstares

Filed in Coursework: 321:Thriller Opening Sequence