Audience Feedback 3 - Titles

After having created a title sequence, we screened it for some students and our media teacher in class. This post is going to contain the videos of the feedback and the title sequence.

Here is the title sequence:




This is some audience feedback we got from our teacher and from students who gave us their opinion on the fonts we should use and the transitions we should use when introducing the titles:



Our teacher commented a lot on the font, where we were told that it would be good to use "The Friday the 13th" font, since it denoted that we were inspired from that film for our titles.

We didn't really agree with the audience feedback that we got from the students, since they really disliked the "Friday the 13th" font. However, they gave us useful feedback for the transitions.

Titles for our Rough Cut 6

After having gotten feedback on our Rough Cut 5 with music, we decided to change the font of the titles. 

As you will be able to see in the first post Bronwen did on titles, there are common conventions of horror/slasher titles in the specific movies we analysed such as "Insidious", "The Cabin in the Woods", "Friday the 13th" and many more. You can see in my link list on my blog, which horror/slasher genre movies we analysed. 

Some movies, such as Halloween, did not have the typical conventional fonts of a horror movie (look at the picture on the left). However, it is also to note that this movie was produced in 1978, and the technology to create fonts such as the ones from the movie "The Cabin in the Woods" did not yet exist. 

After the feedback that was given on rough cut 5, we had to change a couple of things including the titles. Since Bronwen had created the titles for rough cut 5, I wanted to do the ones for rough cut 6 so that I could learn how to use Final Cut Pro X to create titles. 

I decided to use the font called "Friday the 13th", which I found on dafont.com. I considered this font to be just the one, since our coursework has something in common with all the "Friday 13th" movies. The killer in the friday 13th movies is called Leather Face. It is a typical slasher convention, that the killer is a psychotic masked person. Therefore, I intended to use this font as a connotation that our film opening and the friday 13th movies are in some way linked to eachother. 

The font is red, which denotes the blood and danger that is in the movie.  Also, it is written as if someone had written it with blood so that it is splashed a bit all over the screen, denoting that a lot of blood is going to be spilt. 

We created a video where we did a titles rough cut with 3 different ways of introducing the titles. This video is going to be shown to some of our target audiences, who are then going to tell us which of the 3 title sequences they consider to be better fitting for our final cut and why they think this. The audience feedback will be done soon, so that I can include it into my evaluation questions.

I also decided to do a vodcast on this post, since I thought it would help the audience to see by which titles we were inspired and why we chose these specific titles.




Furthermore, I decided to screen recording, while I was doing the titles, so that I could explain how to do those in detail using Final Cut Pro X. Before doing the screen recording I wrote down a list to make sure that we got all the titles that we needed. These were:

Starring:

Under starring we wanted to write 3 star names from movies we have been inspired by. Therefore we chose names such as Chris Hemsworth and Kristen Connolly from "The Cabin in the woods" and Adrienne King from "Friday the 13th".

Introducing: 

Under this, we used the actual names of the 2 of us that had played in the film.
Bronwen Vaughan
Jonathan Paris

Edited by:

Jonathan Paris

Cinematographer:

Bronwen Vaughan

Produced by: 

Sophie Rasmussen

Sound by 

Max Genson

Producer:

Sophie Rasmussen

Director:

James Wan


Below you can see the video of the titles I created:

BV: Titles for our Rough Cut 5

I created some titles for our rough cut. However, after some more feedback we realised that we could do better on the titles and make improvements to them. We wanted to animate them by making the letters drip down like blood. This is something that Sophie looked at. 

One common trait I found was that many of the titles were in a red font over a black background. From this I already knew that I wanted to use this colour scheme in our own production as both
colours have strong connotations of horror.    
(Cabin in the Woods)


Once I had more of an understanding of which colours to use, I chose 4 of the best fonts from the horror section of dafont.com 

 I put the fonts into a word document and then passed this out and gathered some audience feedback from each option, as well as asking which one appealed to them most. 
I asked this to people who fit into our target audience.

Option 1) 

•  Fits well with horror (genre)
• Doesn't look 'scary enough'
• The 'N' is a bit unclear

Option 2) 

• I like the dripping from the letters
• Looks like blood
• This one is my favourite because the words are clear and because of the dripping down from the letters.

Option 3)

• The letters are too bold
• Wouldn't fit as well with horror

Option 4)

• Looks too similar to another horror movie
• Not very easy to read
• Would fit well in the film
• Letters are too close together

Overall, the people I asked preferred the top two fonts, so I decided to go with option 2 as i also found it very easy to read, but still in keeping with the horror genre. 

I then imported the font into Final Cut and experimented a bit with a few different colours/sizes. 

I tried to created a smoke effect surrounding the letters, inspired by the titles of The Cabin in the Woods, however i thought that this looked a bit too generic and boring. I then had an idea, inspired by the famous television scene from Poltergeist of adding an "Old TV" filter. I found that this worked very well and decided to go with that. 

For the titles we didn't really challenge conventions but instead used them. However, by using the TV filter to the titles I think that I added an individual look to our film opening.