Thriller Post Production

When it came to editing we knew we had a big challenge up ahead. Placing all the shots together, making sure the continuity was correct and composing the sound and adding all the effects.

We knew that editing this project would be much more of a task than when it came to editing our prelim task. We used the basic skills we learnt from our previous editing experience. We knew how to select the clip we wanted and then drop it down into the timeline.  We also knew how to add basic transitions to our sequence.

We started our editing process by watching all of our clips that we had shot on our shoot day and then wrote down which take we wanted to use in our sequence. Then we took all of these and dropped them in the time line in the right order cutting them in the appropriate places.

After this we kept on perfecting the clips until we had a rough cut of our thriller. After this we started thinking about adding the sound effects and really perfecting our rough cut. We then added the sound for the first part of our sequence. When we had perfected this we went on to perfecting the modern day sequence before adding the sound for this.

After adding the sound and watching our final cut we realised something was missing, so we added a voice over of our little girl laughing and singing ring a ring a roses. We added this to the end of our sequence and placed a shot of the man holding a torch. We moved the frame slightly so that it fitted against the full stop of our title. The man looked like he was hanging, giving off the idea that the little girl had killed him. We also added a flickering wide shot of the little girl standing on the bed. We managed to add these two shots by changing the opacity of each so that they appeared to be flicking and ghost like.

At the beginning of our thriller we filmed a black curtain on the genie, whilst slowly lowering down, we wanted this to look as if it were the cross section of a ceiling. We accomplished this by getting an image of bricks and a drain pipe and fading them out and darkening them on Photoshop using the burn tool. We then added this in after effects and animated it with motion tracking so it looked as if it were actually there.

We then added the titles to our opening sequence. We made up names for all the titles as we thought it would sound more proffesional and also would make it seem like a real movie. We also chose other names as we wanted to use more than three names in our sequence and thought that it would be better to make them all up rather than mix.

When coming up with a soundtrack for our thriller we weren’t sure what kind of sound to make. The war time sequence was already sorted with just special effects. It was the modern day sequence that we were concerned about. We wanted something either slightly orchestral with strings, but when it came to recording it along with the footage we felt a more sci-fi and computerized sound as it made it feel more modern which contrasted it between the war time and modern day.

We were very pleased with the final cut of our sequence. We worked well together editing and really liked all the effects that we came up with after shooting for our thriller.