Editing Pt.2

For my second week of editing I have decided to work primarily on music choice throughout my film opening.  While I do tend to enjoy rap music in general, I feel a choice of classic rock will better fit the type of filming I am doing.  For this segment I am showing of the back of my boat, I am not planning on having any words, but rather just music playing as I surface from under the water into viewing the engines on my boat.  I'm still debating the type of transition I want to use when entering this clip, but I think I may end up using a quick flash type of transition with a narrow angle to add suspense.  I have encountered some problems in cutting and editing my music to fit into the video the way I want, but after like an hour I finally had some success in achieving what my desired outcome was.

Editing Pt.1

For my first week of editing I chose to focus my efforts on doing some words, titles, and disappearing information.  Since the scene shown above is a panning shot, it will be showing some text at the bottom of the video detailing the "unknown" location and other elements I am still planning on adding.  Since my film opening is based upon a film mystery type theme, I am working on having the words appear and disappear on the bottom in an FBI type of word style choice.  throughout my filming, I'm planning on using mostly plain video segment transitions since my film opening is following a fairly serious type of scenario.  I have run into some problems regarding the focus and video quality of some of the shots I have taken, so I may need to reshoot these segments of my film opening; I'm just not completely sure yet.  So far I've spent a couple of hours on developing my word choices for my film opening, and I am progressing fairly well forward.

Q3 Week 6 Filming:

For my second week of filming I also experienced many of the difficulties I ran into during the first week.  The water quality and visibility also continued to remain a challenging factor for filming during the second week.  I was also able to accomplish some new aspects of filming like videoing myself rolling off the side of the boat.  While I thought this viewing angle was cool for my film opening, it still has far more potential.  I believe if I showed myself rolling off the boat from a different angle on the boat, this angle would show more of what I want from the scene.  While I did see many setbacks I also learned a lot more about what I am going to have to do to achieve the clips and angles I want for my film opening.  My friend will also be filming by boat form the air using a drone in the following week, which should help with the progress in filming my film opening.

Q3 Week 5 Filming:

This was the first video of filming I did.  Since my film opening is based upon an action adventure type theme with boats and SCUBA diving, I experimented with lighting and low angles from the water focused on my boat.  Unfortunately, I have found that a lot of the attempted shots I have taken didn't give the feeling and wider angle shot I was expecting.  Water conditions have also been fairly poor in the gulf making much of  the underwater filming I was planning on doing near impossible.  I'm hopeful that next week I will have better water and visibility conditions.

Q3 Week 4: Preparing to Film

Actor:  I will be the only individual featured in the film.

Costumes:  I will be wearing my entire scuba outfit, and I could possibly switch into swim trunks a t-shirt at some point during the film opening

Props: The only props I will need as of right now is my boat and possibly a dock.

Locations:  Waters in the Gulf of Mexico, possibly Fort Lauderdale or the keys as well(dependent on water conditions).

Dates/Times:  The beginning shots of the film opening will be filmed just as the sun is rising, while the rest of the filming will occur at mid day.

Scripts:  Most  of the filming is focused around a mysterious action adventure film opening, so very little dialogue will be present during filming.

Filming Equipment:  Small other boat to use for photography, drone, underwater camera equipment, and, standard video camera.

NOTE: I decided to change my film opening theme to action adventure since it will flows much better with the story board that I have created.
My storyboard depicts an action type adventure with a diver(myself) on a boat, where the camera works it’s way into showing me driving the boat to an exotic location that is “unknown”, and then cool underwater pictures are shown up to the point where I find “the mysterious object”.  The camera then flips back to a view from the boat just as I surface in the water yelling: “I found it!!”  Upbeat music and specific close in camera angles will also be featured to create mystery and interest.

What others did?

"Rise" Film Opening:  uses very bold and defined lettering at the beginning and all of the camera angles are very narrow only focusing on very specific and key elements in the soccer scene shown. This focuses the viewers attention and shows a very structured mind set by the video creator.

"Dear Lover" Film Opening:  the background voice narrating while the story unfolds is very effective in drawing the viewer into the scenes.  The sudden story drop off at the end also leaves the viewer wanting to know more.

"Dare to Thrill" Film Opening:  The music and car along with camera angles with so much action suggests something bad is going to happen.  The viewer feels edgy until finally the ending appears with all of the individuals looking in horror.

"Always Watching" Film opening: poor video quality and the theme wasn't particularly appealing.  Didn't look like much work was put into the project as a whole.

For my film opening genre I chose to do a theme following guy films.  Of the several film openings I viewed, several factors that I found to be very important were music, camera angle, dialogue, and even scenery.  In several of the film openings, the video starts with thrilling or upbeat music that helps draw the viewer in.  Of the videos I watched that had slow or depressing music, these clips didn't have the same effect of engaging the viewer.  Camera angles were another factor I found to be very important.  Clips with focused and close up camera angles had a far more interesting attraction to the viewer than plain, open, or panning camera angles that didn't have a specific focus.  A further element that affected how I judged film openings was dialogue.  Clips that had bold words such as "Rise" or "Dare to Thrill" with very little unnecessary dialogue I felt to be far better than clips with continuous dialogue and narrating.  Through these two specific clips having little text, they mostly rely on camera and actions to express their goal in the film opening.  This approach was far better than many other clips I watched where characters simply talked and narrated, which quickly looses the viewers attention.  Finally, scenery was also very important to the clips I watched.  Film openings that had interesting elements such as cars and sports drew the viewer in far better than film openings with plain rooms, landscape, or hallways.
Overall, I found reviewing several film openings by other students to be very helpful.  These videos helped narrow the ideas I was thinking of for my own video, as well as showing me some definite things not to do in my own film opening.