Audience feedback

I asked someone from my target audience to watch my opening sequence and give their opinion. Here is a video of the feedback:




                          

From this audience feedback i feel that I have been successful in achieving my aims of capturing the themes and complex plot of my film and have effectively shown the genre, by taking inspiration from other Drama films.

Choosing the music

A difficult task , I found, was choosing the music, I had a few ideas of what music I would  have like to have used for my opening sequence. However I had to choose music that was copyright free, this made searching for music a long task. Because I already had in mind an ideal style of music for the opening sequence of something quite calm and soft, I searched for this.

I found that YouTube offers free music that you are able to use on your projects, so I listened to a lot of the tracks from the classical genre. After listening to many tracks that did not suit my themes or I felt just didn't sound right with my voice over, I finally decided on 'Clouds'.

Editing Process

After filming, I had to edit my footage and add the music and voice over. When combining my voice over and my music, I changed the volume of both to make sure that the speech could always be heard and not drowned out by the music. Putting the voice over onto the opening sequence was quite a long process because I had to split up the audio into multiple sections and keep constantly adjusting the placement of each section so it related to the action taking place.

When editing my footage, I felt that the clips that I had filmed were too dark as I wanted to create a dreamlike atmosphere where like colour and lighting represented Arya feeling like she was slipping away. To brighten my footage, I edited the clips curves and increased the brightness, I did this for all of the footage on the beach, I did not edit the brightness for the footage before this as I felt that if these clips were bright it would look very non-naturalistic.

It took me a long time to settle on the font that I wanted to use for the title of my film Let Me Go.
I wanted the title to not be too bold and jarring on the screen but to still be bold and noticeable at the title of my film. I was unsure of what colour to pick and at first I chose a pink colour in swirly writing but I feel that it looked quite vintage and represented a romance genre more than drama, so I played around with the font again.

The font that I decided on, I think would attract my target audience more because it looks free and relaxed.As I did not want the text on screen to be too harsh, I edited the transparency of the text and added a glow effect around the outline, this made the text compliment the footage better than it had before.

Day Three of Filming

Although I had only planned to have one day of filming, after showing my opening sequence to the class I was aware that I had not used a variety of different shots. From this feedback, I went away and planned further camera shots than I had originally planned on my storyboard that I could incorporate into my opening sequence without loosing the simplistic theme which people said worked well.

The camera shot that I planned to add were the following:

Match on Action

Over the shoulder shot and Shot reverse shot

I decided that I would film these on a tripod to have a stable image to show Arya travelling to a location alone in contrast to the latter scenes that have a hand held shaky effect to give the impression of a Arya being filmed by a friend.

The filming of these extra shots was made easier because I was aware of the costume and makeup my character was wearing, this ensured there was continuity within my opening sequence.

My Title sequence

By looking at  and analyzing other titles on opening sequence I have decided on the credits for my opening Title Sequence. I wanted to make sure that my opening sequence mirrored that of a real media product, so I researched into the what cast and crew are commonly given credit to.

Here is a list of credits that I will using on my opening sequence:

• Name of production company/companies – Starlight Entertainment, Rising Star Films
• Top Billing Actors - Introducing Emma Dewsbury and Ollie Brooke.
• With -  Aaron Stevens,  Natalie Garcia and Connie Lowman
•  Casting by – Ella Ray
• Visual effects supervisor – Harry Brood
•  Edited by – Joanna Mason
• Director of Photography – Primrose Jade
• Co-Produced by -  Wendy Adams, Amelia Pond, Joe Thatcher
• Executive Co-Producers-  Skye Ball, Lily Rose
•  Film Editor – Bethany Preece
• Music Supervisor - Natasha Jackson
•  Production Designer- Mae Foster
• Costume Designer- Abby Furmston
• Cinematography by – Helena Glass
•  Screenplay  by-  Karalene Day
•  Director - Directed by Samantha Hows
• Film Title - Let me Go

Day one and two of Filming

On the day of filming me and Emma, my actor, went to our location on Brighton Beach.  We took a slow train so I could get plenty of footage of my main character on the train, this allowed me to use a variety of angles that i had not initially thought would work. On the train there were a couple of children screaming and running about so the extra time for footage allowed my actress to be comfortable and relaxed once the children had left the train without having to rush to complete filming.

Unfortunately as it was during the half term, the train station was very busy and it was extremely difficult to get a desired shot of my protagonist standing on the train platform looking isolated and lost from reality as other passengers kept walking in front of the camera blocking my view entirely. So instead I felt that representing her on a calm beach with only her friend worked well. I feel that these shots also work better with my desired effect of the audience seeing from her friends viewpoint.

Initially I had only planned to go to Brighton and film on one day because of expenses and I had planned for my footage to only take a short amount of time. Although the weather forecast was set to be fine, it started raining as we were filming, this made it a lot harder to film as the camera I was using kept shutting off. As a consequence less footage was taken on the sea front. After viewing my footage back when I got home I realized there were some clips that I was unhappy with. I arranged another day when the weather was much better to re shoot some of the footage, this meant having to refer back to my costume, hair and makeup list to ensure my actress looked as she did the previous filming date.

Thankfully it was not raining the second time I filmed on the seafront so I managed to take plenty of footage and because of writing down how my actress was styled there was no problem with continuity. The only problem was that the natural lighting was a lot brighter than before but as I plan to edit the lighting in Serif MoviePlus  to reflect a dreamlike/ flashback state this shouldn't be a problem.

Example Title Sequence Timeline

To get an idea of what I wanted to include in my opening sequence, I looked at a film in the genre of Drama.

Film: Submarine

Director:

Genre: Drama

00.02 - Film 4

00.11 - Uk Film Council -  The National Lottery

00.20 - Film 4 and the UK Film Council Present

00.30 - In association with The Wales Creative IP Fund and The Film Agency Wales

00.34 - In association with Optimum releasing and protagonist pictures

00.42 - In association with Red Hour Films

00.46 - A Warp Films Production

01.38 - Submarine