Morbid Torment Pre-Production and Production Evaluation

This is the final project for my Morbid Torment short film.

The brief for this project was to create a short film. We chose the horror genre as our group already had good iseas and visions on what could be done. The first stage of pre-production was to write a story board. We quickly came up with the basic plot of the story and had our ideas written down. Then week booked the equipment such as camera, tripod and microphone. We had booked the equipment for two days so that we had an extra day to film incase of bad weather or re-takes that had to be carried out. Once we had completed these two tasks we could then book the location. We chose to film at my dads house as it has a large area in which we could perform different death scenes.

Location

This was the location for our film. The biggest risk calculated on the risk assessment was the main road located at the front of the house and the train train at the back of the house.

Filming on the day

When we arrived we quickly set up the equipment in the garage to begin filming the prison scene so that we could be as productive as possible. Setting up required moving objects out of the garage so we had a large area in which we could film, setting up the tripod and setting up the camera making sure it was white balanced and had no zebra lines. We also had to configure the lighting. This proved difficult at the garage lights were too bright and so was the garage door light which switched on automatically when the door was opened. The solution was to have the garage door open slightly with a member of our production team lying at the bottom to reduce the amount of light entering the garage. Once the door was opened he quickly rolled out of the way allowing more light to enter the garage. This was very productive as after a couple of takes we had finished the first part of the prison scene. However we did face some major issues, such as the car we needed to use for my death scene had been taken away for a couple of hours. To overcome this we filmed all the other scenes we needed so that we didn’t waste our day. This was a good use of time. However We had to re-record all the scenes filmed at the front of the house as when we had filmed, the car wasn’t on the drive so once it had been returned we could re-film. This was very time consuming however the time we had saved earlier on in the day meant we had more time to re-shoot.

Another issue was the heat. Our group didn’t take a change of clothes resulting in our group becoming very hot and dehydrated. To overcome this we made sure we took regular breaks to re hydrate ourselves and have something to eat. Another problem was the sun. The weather was a lot better than we had expected so no one wore sun cream resulting in some of the members of our group getting burned. If we were to go this project again we would make sure that we are better prepared so that we reduce the risk of these issues happening again.

Overall I feel that the pre-production and production stage went very well and smoothly, without any major issues to deal with. Also I feel that the finished project has worked really well and is an effective love story/ horror.

Editing 

The tapes were stored in the edit suite in which I was editing the film so that they could be located and used upon request. The final product had to be two minutes however due to the quantity of footage my final product ended up being four minutes 56 seconds. This is as short as I felt I could make the film as I wanted the story line to make sense and not leave any important details out, in order to this I had to make it a little longer.

11th June 2012

Today I begun editing out groups film called Morbid Torment. The first step was to log and capture the footage from the mini DV tapes. To do this I plugged the tape deck into the computer and clicked the log and capture button. When the log and capture window had opened I clicked the bath now button and the footage began transferring. Once I had transferred all the footage I saved it to my external hard drive and shared it with the other three members in my group so that they could edit their own versions of the short film. This stage of production ran very smoothly however was very time consuming due to the quantity of footage we had captured on the day.

Once this was done I had to go through all the clips in the bin re-naming them as I had named them incorrectly during log and capturing. Once the footage had the correct names It allowed to to quickly find the footage I needed and could begin editing in the timeline. Not naming the footage correctly during log and capturing meant that I had to spend even more time re-naming the raw footage, delaying the editing stage even more. In future I will make sure that all the footage is named correctly so that the editing stage flows quicker and Iam more productive.

In this stage of editing I began experimenting with different effects and colour correction tools. The effect I chose to use for the kinder version of the killer was Bad film as I felt this was an appropriate effect to show the kinder killer who regrets what crimes he has committed. I also experimented with other effects but I felt that no other effect fitted the type of feel I was going for and that they were a little bit cheesy.

12th June 2012

Today I added more footage and effects to my first edit. This meant that production on the edit was picking up pace. Today I colour corrected the entire first part of the film to give the film a darker, more horrific feel instead of a bright summers day. This was a fairly easy stage of editing and didn’t take too long to get the effect I needed.  I feel this worked well especially on the car death scene. I added a slight tint of blue to the death scenes to give the footage a cold, dark and lonely feel.  By the end of today I also completed the first two death scenes. The car death scene and the walking man death scene. I feel that the film was rapidly taking shape and nearing completion. I also cropped both the death scenes at the top and bottom creating black lines. This helped focus on the killing itself giving it a more terrorising theme.

At this stage of editing I also began experimenting on different audio soundtracks to also give the film a more dramatic, horrific and thrilling theme. If I were to do this section again I would plan in advance what kind of audio I wanted to use and the type of audio Im going to use.

17th June 2012

Today I started to begin finalising my project by editing any rough bits, cropping all the death scenes, colour correcting scenes and recording voiceovers. This was an exciting part of editing as the final product was in sight. The first task I done today was to add an opening trailer which has in bold, blue text ‘Rayne Productions Presents’. This is to give my short film a more professional feel. Today I added the dialogue to me and Stacey when we leave the house. The reason I recorded a voice over was because the audio recorded on location was of poor quality as we were filming next to a main road. I used my computer as it was the simplest way to record the audio as final cut has a built in voiceover feature which makes it quick and simple. To get over the poor film footage quality I had to mute the audio from the footage and paste the voiceover over the original audio.

18th June 2012

Today I mainly focused on the audio as most of the visuals were nearing completion. I made sure all the audio was in sync with the visuals, that it added an feel to the film and as the audio on the footage wasnt at a high enough quality. I also re- recorded mine and staeys dialog for our leaving the house sene. The reason for this was because when I recorded it on my computer it had deleted the voiceover so I had to re-record it. To do this I reorded the audio on my phone then emailed them to the computer and imported them to final cut pro. The reason for using this method was because it was one of the simplest and quickest ways to record and transfer the audio files. I was very pleased with this as the audio was now at a much higher quality than before. The biggest issue with recording a voice over was trying to sync the dialogue to the lip movements from the footage. This took a while as I had to make sure that they were both lined up perfectly.

The final stage of editing was to export the final project. To do this I clicked file, export using quick time conversion, selected the highest quality and saved the project to my hard drive. This final part of editing was very time consuming as I had selected the highest possible quality. To speed the export up I could of selected a lower quality however I preferred a higher quality video. The exported file was saved as a .mov file.

Conclusion 

Overall I feel that the whole editing process went very smoothly with no major issues I had to face. The only issue that effected the editing process was the raw footage in the bin as during log and capturing I had incorrectly named the footage which slowed the editing process down. To overcome this I renamed the footage in the log clip section. In future to reduce the length of the finished product I could use an editing technique called jump-cutting. This could reduce the length of the video by a noticeable amount.