Opening Titles Analysis - Sherlock Holmes

These credits are some of my favourite film credits of all time. They are incredibly creative and they work extremely well, holding the interest through the entire credits. Admittedly they are ending credits, but I think that they are suitable to  analyse for opening credits, as they complete the same purpose. What I really like about these credits are they way that they show bits of the action and then pause it, change the image to look like parchment, throw in a credit and then carry on. We used this technique in the credits for one of our edits of the preliminary task and it looked extremely cool and stylish.
However, as with Skyfall we cannot do this in our opening sequence, as we have live action and this is partly animated. In a way I wish that we could have more time to add an animated titles sequence in afterwards, as I thik we could do this in a very exciting and interesting way inspired by these examples I have been analysing. The font in this isn't really what we are going for either, as the old style, handwritten font is good for period films, but not necessarily for modern action films set in the present.
Overall there isn't a lot that I can take away from analysing this titles sequence, as I can't do the font or the animation, but I thought I'd share it as this is a good example of a very strong titles sequence, but not one that we are going for. It isn't the right style and we can't afford to use up some of the time on the animation, which is a shame, but if I were to make the full movie then I would definitely take some inspiration from this titles sequence.

Opening Titles Analysis - Skyfall

I have decided to analyse some opening credits sequences in anticipation for ours, seeming as we have to add titles to our opening. I'll be going through what I like and dislike about the titles and what I can take inspiration from.



All James Bond films are notorious for their extravagant opening credits sequences, however the latest - 'Skyfall' is set to top them all. In these opening credits you can see that the whole thing is animated with seamless transitions between the different sequences, all flowing together to make a very interesting animation. Of course, we wont be using animation in our opening two minutes, but I can take inspiration from this for a later project.
The part of this sequence that I do want to analyse is the text that appears over the top of the video. The text has the effect of being tilted away from the audience, giving the impression that it's in 3D, even though it's not. This is a very neat effect, but I don't think that it is suitable for our film, seeming as it will be going over live action and wont look nearly as good. Over live action I think that it would look very cheap and would lose the high brow look that it has on James Bond. It would make it seem as if we had tried to make it look impressive with a high production value, but gone over the top, and ended up tipping the other way. Instead what I like about the font is that it is a very neat, classic style font without too much to it. If it is going over live action then I think that a more normal font would be suitable so that the audience isn't distracted by a cheap visual effect. It would give it much more of a high-brow look, which generally gains a wider audience, and is what I prefer to look at as well. I would be very put off by a font that was bright red and dripping blood as that is the sort of thing that amateurs put in films to try and make it look better, but it ends up looking worse.
Overall from these opening titles I can see that in mine I would likea very clean, suave font without too much effect added to it. I think it is alright to have the title of the film looking different and exciting, but I don't think that the font for the credits should be in this style otherwise it would look very over-the-top and the action would be forgotten.

ADR Research

We decided to scan the internet to see some other media tasks where they have replaced the dialogue after the shoot, and we found one which we could particularly learn from. In the above clip it is obvious that the dialogue has been replaced in post through ADR, and there are a few things that make this obvious and detract from the realism. I will examine these to learn what I can!
The first, most obvious mistake is the fact that the dialogue is unnatural. Whenever there is talking unaccompanied by music the clarity of the voice and the microphone quality seems out of place and almost 'too good'. It doesn't have any sense that it was spoken outdoors at all, and sounds very much like it was recorded in some sort of studio. The actor's facial expression and passion does not match the weight and volume of the dialogue. It is almost as if the actors are only going half into the dialogue for the sake of not making too much noise. At points where the actors are meant to be shouting, instead they are just talking normally, and this looks very strange and unrealistic. We can learn from this by making sure that all the dialogue that we record is recorded in roughly the same circumstances as the ones where the dialogue was filmed. In our case this meant going outdoors, where the sound doesn't bounce off the walls so easily. It also means recording the dialogue with the same camera in order to get a sound that matches the picture.
The next mistake that I picked up was the foley in the background. There were too much bird sound effects in the background, which sounded very over the top and almost cliche. In the case of sound mixing cliche isn't always a good thing, as it detracts from the realism, and it just sounds plain bad. The birds in this case are almost like they are there solely to fill the space, when there wasn't much other sound in the scene, like a cover up. Also, on the note of foley, there are very inconsistent footsteps. Sometimes when the mother is walking there are sound effects of her footsteps, but sometimes there aren't. As much as this is only noticeable when you examine it closely, sub-consciously the audience realises that something is slightly off, and it, again, detracts from the realism. It also makes the audience start to wonder what is wrong, and while they are being distracted by this they lose concentration on the action on-screen. From this we can learn to make sure that we add in all the background sound effects that are supposed to be there and not add in any background noise that isn't there. If we disobey either of these rules then it would end up sounding odd, and all the effort put into the composition of the picture would be lost entirely. We are not trying to be creative, we are trying to repair something.
We should be able to download a royalty free sound effect of London from somewhere on the internet, so we'll use it to put in the background, and the perhaps mix in sound sounds of the Trafalgar Square fountains.

Learning ADR

To help us in the ADR process, we watched several tutorials on Youtube and found this one particularly useful:

ADR

ADR stands for Additional Dialogue Replacement. It is the process of replacing the dialogue in the scene when it isn't clear or there is a lot of unwanted background noise. This is a big problem with our first edit, and a lot of the time you can't even hear what the characters are saying, so we will have to go through the process of ADR.
The first step is to give the footage to the actors and ask them to listen to the lines a lot, so that they know exactly how to say each line, how fast, and where to put the accents. If they speak at a different speed or put emphasis on different words, then it would not work very well and it would be obvious that the dialogue has not been recorded live, breaking the illusion. We gave our draft edit to the actors, and they looked through it a few times.
The next step was to pick how we were going to record the lines. We considered using a RODE microphone in order to pick up crystal clear sound, but after doing a few tests we decided that it sounded out of place. Instead we are recording the dialogue using the camera's internal microphone that we used to record the sound live. It is pretty decent quality so it wont make much difference, but the lines will sound like they're actually in the scene, rather then obviously ADR.
We then chose the location to record the sound. The first place we tried was inside my house in the kitchen as it is quite an open space, but isn't too noisy. Unfortunately in these recordings you could hear the hum of kitchen appliances so it didn't sound so good. The next location we tried was just outside my house in the street, so that we got the sounds of the outdoors and it was a more open space. This sounded a lot more natural, and it fitted the scene much better.
Now it is a case of adding in the dialogue that we filmed, and adding in the foley sound behind it, in order to make it sound properly in the scene.

Sins of the Martyr - Draft Opening

To celebrate the new year, we have a draft edit, of sorts, of our opening sequence for "Sins Of The Martyr", compiled of the footage that we shot last Thursday in London. As is stands, the current cut of the opening is a lengthy 3 mins 52 seconds, almost twice the length of the alloted time. However in the final edit of this sequence, editing will be tightened and the music (that I have taken from Hans Zimmer's score to "The Dark Knight Rises") will be replaced by an original score by my friend, James Richardson. There will also be significant ADR (Additional-Dialogue-Replacement) in order to make the lines more audible and there will be effects added to them to emulate telephone voices for the earpieces that feature prominently in the sequence.

For now, though, see this rough edit below:

Post-Production

Post-production is the part of the filmmaking process that is the least exciting. It involves sifting through thousands of clips for a few seconds, realising you've forgotten to shoot a shot and painstakingly editing the soundtrack so that it matches up to the film.
Although the film is already shot, there is obviously still quite a lot to do. The first, most obvious thing to do it to check through all the clips and upload to the computer. We had the choice of two editing softwares - final cut studio and adobe premiere, which are both industry standard. In the end we chose to use adobe premiere as windows computers deal with the higher quality footage better then macs. I am not very used to adobe premiere as I prefer final cut, but my colleague is very good at it, so he will be holding the mouse during the editing process.
The clips all looked fairly good. There were a lot of things that could have been done better, such as there were raindrops on the lens in some of the shots, however these shots weren't the most important, fortunately. We also missed out a few shots, such as a shot of the top of the National Gallery, which we would have superimposed a sniper onto, to make it more obvious that there was a sniper in the square. This isn't too much of a problem, however, as the story still runs fairly well without that shot. Other then that it seemed that we had all the shots we needed and a lot more! On the day we had shot about 1hr10mins of footage for just two minutes! This was obviously a good move, as it meant we had a huge choice of clips, and it meant that we missed nothing. Our editing choices seemed endless!
The trouble with this, however,was that the first edit we came up with was 3mins 52 secs long, which is much too long. To counter this we cut out the lines about the case that Jim was carrying, and this cut out a lot of time. We also cut out a lot of shots from the underground, which greatly reduced it, as before it took over a minute for Davidson to get into the square.
We created another draft which should be coming soon, but there is still a great deal to do.