Evaluation of Soundtrack

Music is an important part of creating atmosphere in movies, and is particularly prominent in thrillers. However I feel that it should not be overused to such an extent where it seems to detract from what is actually going on in the scene or even to appear to be out of place entirely.

In the opening sequence I have used sound to further contrast the shots of the forest with the chase sequence. The forest shots include ambient noises of bird song with a peaceful, calm soundtrack,whilst the chase sequence has no non-diegetic sound with just the sound of the victims breath and footsteps. There are also more subtle noises in the background of the forest scenes such as a cold wind blowing, and a quiet foreboding soundtrack on the last forest scene. I have also made the sound levels on he chase sequence higher than the forest scenes to create a sharp contrast when the shots cut between each other, increasing the tension for the viewer. The last part of the chase sequence where the victim is cornered by the attacker includes sharp, suspenseful music building up in volume to the point where it cuts out at the same time as the shot and changes to a heartbeat as the victims face comes into shot as she is discovered later on.

The first part of dialogue between the detectives has no soundtrack over it, only when they discover the lotus necklace does foreboding music begin to build up underneath their dialogue. The sound of this non-diegetic music is not too loud at first so that the importance of the dialogue is not compromised, and then very near the end it builds in volume where it then decreases in volume as the shot fades out. It is then replaced by a brief orchestral score to go over the title of the movie and finishes with another heartbeat to make the brief appearance of a lotus flower at the end more sudden and seeminlgy important.

Evaluation of Filming

Overall I am much more pleased at how the filming for the new film went than the previous one. Filming outside allowed the lighting to be much more natural and consistent, and generally made the film look more professional as a result. As with the previous filming though, there were some sound problems. The day I decided to film on was fairly windy which has led to some noticeable humming and buzzing noises in the background of scenes, some louder than others. Hopefully the inclusion of soundtrack will help to detract from this.

The most serious problem I faced however was unfortunately out of my control. The tripod that I had borrowed from my school to use was broken in several key places. Although not apparent at first glance, when it came to the filming it became apparent that one of the unfold-able sections of one of the legs had been snapped off. This led to me having to use a bucket as a prop to attempt to keep the tripod level, which meant I had to choose carefully where I placed it on the ground. It was also broken on the section where the camera itself rested, meaning it automatically slanted when placed on it, and in order to fix this I had to place an object of very exact size underneath the camera fixing to level it out. This meant I had to be very delicate when moving or adjusting the camera during filming.

Other minor problems were I have had to make some slightly unusual choices in editing between shots in some instances in order to try to keep continuity or simply to work with the footage I had in he best way. In none of these instances is it a particularly big issue though.

Overall I am very pleased with how the filming worked out in the end because of the way the footage has come out. There are only some small things that I perhaps would change if I could, but I feel overall the quality is very good.

Editing Software for New Film

Once again I am going to use iMovie for editing my footage. Eventhough my new film will contain many more instances where some sort of effect will be put into a scene, I have gone through the capabalities of iMovie's editing programmes and found them to include all the things I need. These include turning shots into grey-scale, putting more than one soundtrack over each other, shot transitions such as fades, and putting titles over shots. Also the ability to take sound from iTunes is in iMovie which I think I will need at some point, eventhough iMovie has a good amount of sound effects already in the software. Because I used iMovie editing together the last movie, I feel I have used it enough to be comfortable using these more advanced features of iMovie.