Rough Cut 4 - Without Music

This is the 4th rough cut without any non-diegetic music. In this rough cut, you will be able to see how I have changed the length of some of the shots and the use of some special effects to create a bit more tension to our film opening. Ofcourse it is a horror genre movie and so it is usually hard to create tension, without the use of non-diegetic music.
However, the audience that we got audience feedback from, a year 13 class from our school, told us that they thought it had quite a lot of tension, despite the fact that there was no music yet.
This was already a very good sign that we had a good setting and shot variety.



Although, we did not get a lot of negative criticisms from our primary audience on what we could change, I decided to convert and modify some things before adding music to it.

Firstly, I added a special effect called "Bad TV" in Final Cut Pro. This made it look more creepy within the basement scene by signifying that it was all recorded on tape.

There were also shots during that video recording, of Casey Crane tied up to a chair, connoting that the killer probably films all of his victims and films how he kills them. 

I thought that this entire special effect would work well with the genre. Later on in my evaluation question, you will be able to read on how I was inspired for this special effect from the film "Poltergeist", which I analysed back in the beginning of the year to look into the conventions of the stereotypical horror genre.



Furthermore, Bronwen re-edited the bathroom scene, such as for example the shot of her (Casey) closing the door again after taking the nail polish. This was done, since our audience feedback from our own class had told us that there was a lack of continuity. Bronwen also decided to use other shots, with a better shot quality. In it's entirety, Bronwen managed to transform the bathroom scene into a scene with more continuity and flow. There is a post on Bronwen's blog, where she describes what she changed and why she changed it.

We did not change the church scene, after Jonathan had edited it the first time. We thought the shots were good and we were especially given praise for our close-ups of the matches.

During the final scene, which I edited, I was given a lot of feedback on how the shots should be shorter, but the scene should be longer to build up even more tension. I managed this, by creating a better shot variety, such as using shots that were taken behind the church of Bronwen walking. Moreover, I made the shots shorter of when the woman is walking up behind her so that the false scare would come more accross to the audience.

What I also did to create more tension, was to cross cut between the shaky footage point-of-view shot to the shot of the killer. Shot, reverse shot. At each reverse shot, I zoomed in a little bit on the footage and was able to get a close-up of the killer everytime using Final Cut Pro. This was useful since it denoted that he was moving closer and closer to his target. I was inspired to do this, after having seen and analysed the film "Friday the 13th", where there was shaky footage of the killer's point-of-view when he walked up the stairs. I thought it created a lot of tension. You will be able to see how I created all of this later on in a post that I am going to do on the final cut pro X tools and effects I used.

The next post, called Rough Cut 5 will explain exactly how I worked with sound and why I have chosen to put on the non-diegetic soundtrack that I did.