Account of Post Production

When editing the practical we had to adopt a much more critical eye in terms of deciding upon which shots, among the many, could we consider to be the best, and in what order we should place them to display a suitable smooth chain of camera angles which the audience would recognize as good continuity. However like the prelim, we used 'Final Cut' as the editing programme for our practical.

The sound we used was taken from lots of different parts of our shoot, and then layered over sequences in which we wanted to link certain characters together but also to make the change in location and shot type flow. We attempted to make Seb's 'Youtube' confession look as though it was being shot from a web cam, through editing the shots with bad continuity, and via the actors movement within the frame. The majority of the screen time was given to the suspect, due to the understanding that the film is a depiction of her side of the story, which further more identifies her as the films protagonist. Through this the audience inhabits an esscense of trust in her character, which leads us to consider a potential twist in the story, similar to the usual suspects. We employed a cross fade between our shots to signify a passing of time. We gave the video camera screen time, as well as the tape recorder, to depict one of the major themes of the production, the constant survelliance of our modern society, which can be seen to fundermentally add to the level of paranoia in our introduction. To develop an air of claustrophobia, enhancing the thriller aspect of the film, we used a lift in the opening shot to gradually draw our audience into the commotion of the story line, which can be established to be breaking down the level of space in the already small interview room.

In order to keep the diegetic sound of the speech in our thriller the same level throughout, it had to be mixed. With our discovery of the background noise of the air conditioning, we explored each clip to pick out the best quality of sound. This is eveident whilst watching the introduction, because we highlighted the more important sounds of the story by rasing its volume, e.g. the tape recorder's "Click" noise. We layered the sounds from lots of different parts of our shoot over sequences in which we wanted link characters together, and create a polished and smoother change in location and shot type. We developed this by using a sound bridge we layered over the sound of Alex's youtube confession with Kate in the interview room which reinforces the audience's understanding that they were together.

Due to the thriller being identified as 'Aftermath', our titles of the film come into play at the end of the sequence. The text of the credits are not symmetrical with each other and come in at different speeds, this contributes to the instability we are trying to depict in our characters. We reflected the high school theme of our production through the black background and white text representing a similar style to that of a chalk board. Our production company "Sirated" is represented through the uneven layout of the lettering on thwe credits, as the lines on the letters employs a similar structure to that of a serrated knife edge which falls into the association of the horror genre. Due to the fact that we are trying to draw peope into the film, we made the speed of the titles fairly slow. Given that our thriller contains no American actors and that it is set and based in England, it can be fundamentally established that it has little appeal to an American audience, giving reason as to why we choose a British distribution company, Vertigo. With the shooting taking place after math in a school we included references to the title throughout the thriller.