Tzitlalith’s Blog

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Today I went back and altered the music a little bit to fit the scene, like I heard about in an interview for the movie, “Get Out” In the beginning of the scene, I lowered the volume and made it louder as soon as the scream from the shot ended. I then altered some other parts of the music to fit the more calmer parts of the scene by lowering the volume or cutting some parts out.

After the audio was adjusted I decided to go in with the opening credits and added them to scenes where I thought they best fit. For the font of the credits we decided to go with a classic font,  nothing fancy. When I went back to look at everything, I kept having problems with the glitching on imovie, therefore, I had to keeping editing the glitching out, transferring the movie to a new imovie and doing this process over and over again until I finally got a scene with no glitching an uploaded it.

Today I finished adding the transition to where they needed to be. At the beginning of this process, my partner and I thought that we would include a transition at the beginning of each shot. However, we later realized that this was unnecessary so we only added them to the parts where we thought they were crucial. For example, I added them to the part where the clips switch from her sitting on the ground to her feet running. I did this because it made the scene flow better. Without the “Cross Dissolve” transition, the scene seems choppy.

 I also decided to add the “Fade to Black” transition between each scene of the character losing her mind and what is actually happening to show the chaos and the insanity of the scene.

After I had done this I sent what I had edited so far to my partner for approval and advice. She agreed with what I had done and told her what music I was planning on adding. The original music I was going to use was “Inescapable” because it had a very dramatic beat and thought that it went well with the scene. However, my partner pointed out that it made the scene seem more like an action rather than a horror movie and recommended a song by Vivike Abhishek. When I added this music into our scene it really pulled everything together and gave the scene a tone of insanity, eeriness, and suspense. 

I began to add the sound effects that we created on my voice memo app and airdrop them to my computer and add them to the places they needed to be added to. We thought that by using these sound effects such as footsteps, birds, and leaves rustling, it would create a more realistic feel, adding to the tone of eeriness. While I was adding the sound effects, I noticed that we could not use a lot of the sounds that originally came with the videos we took, either because they were not loud enough or because there were tons of anthropogenic sounds. However, most of these were easy fixes. The only thing that I was not able to fix was the clip with the screaming. Originally, we filmed a shot of the opening scene with the screaming included. When I listened to it, the screaming was not as loud and clear as we wanted it to be due to other factors such as the wind and children in the distance. Because of this, Isabella had to record herself screaming so we could get clearer audio. Luckily, the audio she recorded was perfect and I muted the original clip and replaced the old audio with the new one. Another thing I decided to do was color correct the shots. Originally, we were not planning on doing this but since we had shot on different days and at different times the continuity was negatively affected. To fix this, we lowered the saturation and gave all the clips a blue tone to create a gloomy environment.

Today, my main focus was deciding what clips were good to use and inserting them into imovie. After all the clips were inserted, I shortened them down and cut out the parts that were not necessary. When I finished doing this I realized that the scene was still too long, it was a total of 4 minutes and 27 seconds and I knew that I had to cut more out. After various minutes trying to figure out what parts to cut out I couldn’t decide because I felt that all parts were essential and didn’t want to discard anything. Therefore, I had a couple of my friends look at the unedited scene and asked then what parts they thought were unnecessary. When this process was done I was left with an unedited scene of 1 minute and 52 seconds. Once the time was reduced, my partner worked on the first couple of transitions of the scene. She decided to use the “Cross to Dissolve” transition because we wanted the beginning ifo the scene to be simplistic and create a calm and chill tone before and then have that be shattered by a scream.

My partner and I decided that whatever we did with the editing we just wanted it to create a tone of fear and suspense. During the post production process I had the most control because we would be editing the scene on iMovie on my computer. However, we both contributed ideas for the editing. One thing that we decided to do was make most of the clips in the scene short. Doing so creates a tone of anxiety and suspense for the audience because they will not know exactly what is happening but they know that it is not something good. As I was getting closer to editing I realized that I would feel much more comfortable doing it if I did a little bit more research on it. Eventually, I found an interview from the movie, “Get Out” which is a movie I had previously analyzed. In this interview, the editor, Gregory Plotkin, was the interviewee and he gave insight into the process. Something that I learned while reading the interview was that when editing, he never altered the shots to fit the music and instead altered and cut the music and sound to fit the shots. Another thing I got out of the interview was also about sound, Plotkin talked about how no sound couldn be just as effective as having various sounds in order to create a certain tone. This made me realize that there is no one way to edit and that it is all based on the look and feel that you want to achieve.

Sources: https://deadline.com/2017/12/get-out-gregory-plotkin-jordan-peele-editing-interview-1202224801/

While shooting there were many shots that did not make it in our final product and here they are 🙂

When we began to film, we didn’t think that we would make any changes. However, as we got deeper into the process that thought completely changed. To start off, one of the things that we changed was the costume. I would love to say that we had no trouble when it came to the costuming but that would be entirely incorrect. Our actor, Isabella, went through about 4 costume changes until we found the right one.

At first we wanted our character to wear a white dress to represent innocence and the loss of it through the opening scene. However, that idea was discarded when our actor, who is also in charge of costuming, found out that she didn’t have any white dresses.

Because of this issue, we decided that any type of clothing would work fine as long as it was white because we were still caught up on the idea of innocence. So we ended up shooting all of our scenes with our actress wearing a white tank top, white shorts, and white shoes. However, after we were done shooting we decided that the outfit didn’t really match what we were aiming for so we decided that we would change the outfit.

After thinking of possible outfits, we decided to keep the white tank top, because we really wanted to hang onto the white piece of clothing for innocence, and instead of white shorts we changed them to black cargo pants. We thought that by doing this it would just be a simple outfit and would make the audience focus more on the story being told rather than the outfit. However, as we were filming, we noticed that the outfit was hard to work with. For instance, the pants made the actor slower in her running scenes and made the scene seems like it came from an action movie rather than a horror movie. Because of this we decided to change the costume once again. Sadly, this meant that we would have to discard all footage of our actor once again.

At last, we came up with the final outfit of a plain black dress and no shoes. It was simple and in a way, it still conveyed innocence since it was a dress.

We had a ton of inspiration from various movies that impacted the way we shot scenes. Although we gathered inspiration from multiple movies, one of the biggest one was, “It Follows”. We loved the way that certain shots added to the entire “feel” of the scene.

In these shots, the audience is able to tell that something is wrong because the actor is continuously looking around as they are running/walking.

In the movie, “It Follows” the opening scene ends with a girl lying dead on a beach. We thought that this created a very eerie and mysterious tone for the rest of the movie so we did the same thing. However, we did decide to change one thing. We chose to capture the death through an aerial shot. This makes more sense to our scene because the girl in our movie dies after jumping off the tower and moments before her death most of the shots were taken on the tower.