Rough Cut

First Rough Cut of Devotation

Feedback

''The camera shots within the first sequence are very good, I particularly liked the last shot with candle in the foreground and the background out of focus. From the opening sequence you can tell that the genre is period drama.'' 

- Jack Johnson.

''I enjoyed the opening sequence although I felt like the titles dragged on a bit too long. Aside from this the camera work is very smooth and all the shots are very clear, the whole opening sequence looks professional.'' 

- Joe Haddow.

Evaluation
I am happy with our first draft. I think that the opening shot has a range of interesting cinematography. I really like the last shot of the lit candle in shot with the writing of the letter in the background out of focus, I feel as though this shot symbolises the confusion Billy is experiencing when writing the letter to Elizabeth, is this the right path to take? Nothing is clear to Billy. From the feedback one of the things that was mentioned was the timings of the credits and the opening sequence where Billy reads the letter people said that they were too long, we agreed with this statement and we have sped up our titles and removed some of the speech Billy makes within our final version. Apart from the timings of the credits and Billys speech I'm really happy with the font and I'm pleased with how the images came out on the parchment background. Overall I am impressed with our first draft and how professional it looks.

Preliminary Tasks

At the beginning of the course we had to film a variety of different preliminary tasks to get us used to working with the camera and equipment.

Task One - Match on action
Our first task was to film somebody walking through a door, we had to make sure that we got a shot of them walking through the door and then another shot of them in the room, the door closing behind them. This can be difficult to edit together as you need to make sure that you see the door opening and closing behind the character.

Task Two - Shot reverse shot
The second continuity task that we had to complete was recording a conversation between two people, we had to make sure that the camera was 180 degrees apart so that we could record both the faces of our subjects.

Our final preliminary task is below:


I filmed the task, myself and Miranda both edited and Miranda did the sound.
The 'shh' sound at the end of the sequence was myself making the sound which we recorded and embedded onto the clip.

Title Sequence - Final

Changes

• We decided on changing the colour of our titles, we felt that the images lacked vibrancy and the rich 'period drama' feel. 
• We also changed some of the screenshots so that all of them were taken from our film, we did this as we felt some of the shots didn't tie with the others.

Final Title Sequence Video



Final Title Sequence Grid

Evaluation
I am pleased with how our final title sequence looks. All the images we chose are suitable and give the audience a brief understanding of our film before it is played. I particularly like the editing and quality of the photos as they look vibrant and hand-drawn, you can tell what genre our film is from the titles. The music over the top of the credits fits in with our genre and ties the whole sequence together perfectly. The one issue I have with the title sequence is that we need to seperate our job roles (directed & produced by) so that myself and Miranda have a role each, this way we are following traditional conventions of other films, we will make this change within our final film.

Title Sequence - Second Draft

Research
Sherlock Holmes


Emma


Pride & Prejudice



Below I have experimented with different font types.


We finally decided on the font, 'Apple Chancery'


Why did we choose this font?

We wanted to find a font which was easy to read but also had an element of hand written style as the opening sequence depicts the main character, Billy, writing a letter and by having cursive writing for the titles it ties our opening sequence and title sequence together.

We have also made a few changes to our original title sequence.
We felt that having a continuous plain background was boring and would not engage our audience, to over-come this problem we decided to take screen shots from our film and edit them onto parchment paper to provide us with a background for out titles.
We took inspiration from Sherlock Holmes titles as demonstrated below:

As you can see we have taken still images from our film and added a parchment effect, over the top of these images will be our credits.

Title Analysis

I used the website http://www.artofthetitle.com/ to look through a variety of different films to view how the typical typical conventions of romance/period drama title sequences. I have briefly written about two title sequences which I enjoyed and then given a more in depth analysis about the Sherlock Holmes titles as I will be using them for inspiration to create my own title sequence.

Blue Valentine

The titles appear over the top of fireworks displaying images, the titles are in a bold white font which makes them stand out against the black background. The actors names appear with their second names more enlarged than their first names, this makes the font look interesting and engaging for the audience. The titles appear for three seconds and are three seconds apart. The sound of the firework bangs are in time with when the titles appear making the whole title sequence fit in together and look very professional.

Days of Heaven

The film starts with a sepia tone image with the title of the film in a big capitalised white font with a black border. The film names takes up the whole screen and fades in and out. The screen then shows a variety of different pictures, scrolling up or down and displaying actors names in the same font as the film title. The titles last for seven seconds and have a five second gap between them. The music playing fits in with the titles and overall the title sequence flows well.


Sherlock Holmes

The Sherlock Holmes titles is our main inspiration for our own title sequence.

The Sherlock Holmes title sequence firstly introduces the audience to the time period of the story this is indicated by the sketched images and the font of the titles being a messy hand written font. The pace in which the titles are displayed is fast perhaps indicating that the film will be quick and spontaneous. The images which are used throughout the title sequence are from the main events which happen throughout the film, this gives the audience an indicator of what is to come throughout the film and attract them into the storyline, making them wonder what events are going to take place. The images are also used to introduce the audience to the main characters and show the close friendship between them both, this is used to set the spectator up for events which involves the two friends later on in the film. The images go from moving scenes within the film to still frames which are transformed into sketched images on parchment like paper, the colours change from greys and blues to muddy brown and red colours, again introducing the audience to the time period the film is set in. The way the images suddenly are captured and transformed also hints at the genre of the film, mystery, the audience want to know what is going to happen next which gives the opening of the film a sense of wonder.

I personally enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes title sequence because of how it introduces the audience to the film and engages them without giving any of the storyline away. We have decided to take still images from our film and transform them into hand-drawn looking images for our title sequence, hoping to achieve the same effect on the audience in which the Sherlock titles do.