Editing: Final Cut, Lesson 5

Finalising opening sequence

In today's lesson Sonny and I realised that we was nowhere near the 2 minute mark so sat down and planned what we was going to add in to make our opening sequence longer. We found this rather difficult because when we went over our footage we realised that what we had filmed was to go with our original idea, so when the storyline changed we had limited footage to choose from.

Our initial idea was to have Sarah in a dark room, jump cut with text and transitions before the flashbacks started. When we realised this scene was hard to film we changed the beginning so that Sarah was rinsing blood off of her hands in a bathroom, followed by a close up of her crying, which led to the happy and sinister flashbacks. We kept this as the beginning to our opening sequence and worked the flashbacks around it. Now that most of the footage has been planned out we can see that we needed a lot more footage for the flashbacks as we have used most of it already. A lot of the happy flashbacks were just Sarah and James walking away together holding hands or mooching around, I can see now that we need to film a wider range of shots and angles to jump cut too in the flashbacks. Sonny and I are now going to have to go over the footage that we haven't used and see if we can change the story line a little so that we can extend our opening sequence to longer than 1 minute 5 seconds.

After realising that we needed to go through the footage and try to find some more clips to put into the opening sequence between the happy and sinister flashbacks we added a clip of Sarah and James walking, and Sarah turns around and has a go at James, acting as a turning point to their relationship, where it looks like Sarah is causing arguments, until the sinister flashbacks start and we see that actually James is the one that's hurting Sarah and using domestic violence.

At the moment I think that a lot needs to be changed in order to make our opening sequence look smooth just like an actual film opening sequence would. The transitions need to be altered so that they flow into the clips a bit more smoothly and aren't jumpy and quick, A new storyline or plot needs to be thought of to extend our opening sequence to 2 minutes otherwise it won't meet the targets required.

Once the opening sequence has been planned out properly, hopefully next lesson Sonny and I will be able to start creating our music to go with the opening sequence on garage band, along with recording the voice over, as well as drawing a new story board to go with the new clips added to the opening sequence.