Katherine's post about 'The Sound Within Our OTS'

http://katherinewarnes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/sound-within-our-ots.html

Storyboard Animatic

Editing problems

Katherine spent an afternoon re-fixing and re-editing the OTS, another problem then arose when she tried to save what she had done. It was not allowing the OTS to save because it 'did not have permission' and then the program  proceeded to suddenly close down, causing all the work she'd just completed to be erased. 

After a few days the problem has finally been sorted and we now have to rush to do what should have been done a week ago.

Here is an animated example of a film noir, it has key aspects of a noir but is not conventional.
The main difference of this to a conventional noir is that this is animated, however it still has film noir characteristics. The main character is a detective, however this clip shows him in a humorous way whereas a traditional film noir wouldn't. The majority of scenes are very dark with little lighting, however it's not black and white. At the end of the clip the old woman and detective are sitting around a circle table, there is a light shinning on the top which reminds me of a poker table that could be used in a film noir. The narrative of this short film is about crime but the twist is that the crime is in the detectives imagination, this could be used in a noir but without it being humorous.
 Unlike this short clip we'd plan for our film noir to be more traditional.

OTS Planning

• Frame one - Shot focuses on the corner of a table where you see a pool of blood, slowly dripping down.
• Frame two - The shot then cuts to the lower leg of the table where we can see a puddle of blood that has been formed by the droplets. In the background an arm is seen laying across the floor.
• Frame three - From a low angle, the corpse's body is shown. A woman in heels steps over it.
• Frame four - The corpse is lying in the corner of the frame while the centered woman walks towards an open door, pulling her coat off a chair in the process. The light from the doorway creates bold silhouettes.
• Frame five - A side profile of the woman is seen. The camera tracks her from that angle while she walks along a brick wall at night. Her breath can be seen against the cold weather.
• Frame six - A low angle shot of the woman walking down the street from behind. Only her shoes are visible but in the background the feet of someone can be seen standing under a street lamp.
• Frame seven - Side profile as the woman approaches the man (who has a clearly larger build than her), hugging him. 
• Frame eight - During the hug, the man slowly pulls out a knife from his sleeve and that is where it ends.

Most cenes will be set at night, we will edit the lighting to be very dark and the objects in this opening title sequence will only just be visible through the heavy contrasting. We aim to quickly build up tension in our 'OTS' which will be the only thing that is unlike usual film noirs since they tend to be more slow-paced. 

Language

In our film noir we wanted to find the best font for our OTS, at the moment the typography we have is 'Times New Roman' with the style 'Typewriter'. However it doesn't match that of what would be in a real film noir, the letters slowly get typed on the screen rather then quick and dramatic even though in our opening the scenes are quick with each scene being dramatic (eg showing the corpse and blood soaked hands) Each of our names  appear over two scenes,  however only mine, Katherine's and Kristy's names are in the OTS we've yet to add the actors that were involved. We also noticed that the recent text that we added for our names wasn't the same as the text in the middle of our OTS to show time passing.
To fix these problems we first decided to change the typography, but in doing that we came across a problem, the typography we originally picked would still appear even after applying the new typography (Apple Li Gothic medium) , even after asking the teacher we still couldn't figure out the problem. The other problem we found that instead of having the motion 'Typwriter' where the our names came on screen slowly the movement 'Wipe' was chosen. Though we still couldn't use this because the original font that wasn't wanted would still appear.

I did research in fonts and attempted to find different examples used in film noirs, and through looking found this opening from a film noir called 'Crime Wave' from 1954.

 The writing  in the OTS of this film is similar to ours at the moment, the writing is bold and plain white. The writing appears slowly while still being in sync with the background music. However the difference between our OTS and this OTS, is that in this the opening is only of a car driving along and so there isn't any tension building. Whereas ours involves quick sharp scenes with a dramatic story, and so to go with our OTS we will need titles that appear quickly to contribute to tension building.

Production meeting 16/4/12

Today we were finishing editing. Kirsty will look at whether our ots works as a title sequence well with the general conventions etc..I will be writing about the language for our ots and Katherine is looking at the sound, as it would be easier if she is creating the piano piece for our ots.
This was because we found that our OTS really didn't need that much editing or work, that we could only think of small jobs. However we did notice a few things that could be improved like clips were too long or scenes needed to be darker to fit in with the rest of the scenes, which all got fixed during the lesson.