Samantake Productions: Filming & Editing Process

Below are some of the things we did during the editing process regarding the colour, sound, letterboxing, titles and animations which helped us to complete our finished version of our opening sequence.

As we were already happy with how the rough cut turned out, we decided to just correct and enhance everything we already had. We began by adding the letterbox. Then we cropped and repositioned some of the footage so that it still fitted within the frame. Then we colour corrected all the footage including a reduction in saturation, brightness, and an increase in contrast. We then added the sound to the footage and added transitions such as fade ins and fade outs so that the audio flowed smoothly. This was followed by the addition of titles which included adding animations to each so that they would fade in and fade out. The same process of adding these animations to the text was also done with the sound.
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Adding a letterbox to the footage

In order to add a letterbox to the footage so that it would look like a professional film, we went onto ‘Effect Controls’ and adjusted the crop settings. The crop settings were applied to the whole of the film opening sequence. Whilst doing this, we realised that the new framing of the footage had cut some parts of the main character off. In order to correct this problem, we adjusted the motion settings for certain individual clips and raised them higher and lower so that they would fit within the letterbox.

Adjusting the colour and contrast

As a group, we decided that we wanted the outside clips of the film to have the colour adjusted to make it appear much more darker and mysterious to help set the overall tone of the opening. We did this by selecting one of the outside clips and adjusting the colour balance and ‘Brightness & Contrast’ settings. The saturation of the image was reduced and the contrast was also increased to provide a more gritty and dark edge to the footage.

Colour, brightness and contrast settings which were adjusted:

Adding sound to the footage

In order to add sound to the footage, we firstly downloaded royalty free music and sound clips from the following sites:

http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?genre=Horror
http://www.soundjay.com/

Once finished downloading, we located the files that we wanted to use. We then dragged them across to the side panel which contained all our footage in Premiere.

Now that the sound clips were in the side panel in Premiere, we then dragged them and positioned them where we wanted to on the timeline.

The same was done for Anthony’s screams which were added on afterwards as a sound clip at the end of the opening sequence. We also downloaded sound effects such as ‘street traffic’ from the above websites and incorporated that into the beginning of the opening sequence when Anthony walks down the road. The reason we did this was because when having cut the pieces of footage together, the sound was too jumpy.

Adding titles to the footage