Planning the OTS

For the storyline of our film, we have chosen the concept storyline of Jekyll and Hyde.We have used this as it is not only an intriguing story but allows quite a lot of adaptation to make it film noir and stray completely from the original novel to produce an original take on a classic story.

We have only cast one actor so far, we have chosen Joseph Keeley for the part of Jekyll as he is a great voice actor and the sequence relies heavily on the monolugue.

Our Opening Title Sequence has gone through several series of changes mainly because of the problems with time and continuity.

So Far, the storyboard has been changed several times. First of all, we have changed Jekyll's location from a confessions room from a church to a desk in his study. This was due to the fact we would have had quite a hard time to obtain time to film in a confessions room. This would also have meant having to cast an older man to play a Priest which we wouldn't have bee able to cast properly.

We have changed the profession of Jekyll's character from Detective to a Journalism student to compensate for him looking as young as he is. This also means we have less issues with the costume.

The main adaptation was the monologue scene. This is the majority of Jekyll's camera time. We originally had him leaving a message on an answer phone to his lover. We later realized that there was no answer phone system in the 40's and we had to adapt it. He cannot reach her so writes a telegram instead. This was a huge faux pas on our part but we have made the adaptations in time

Focus Group

On the 8th of February, we presented our Opening title sequence to the rest of our media class. We also showed them an alternative style to produce the credits. We then left them with prompt questions and filmed them answering them as well as them leaving feedback and expressing concerns that they had. The video is found here:

   Feedback from Sam SheepDawg-OEight on Vimeo.

I am extremely happy with the way it was received by everyone and they didn't bring up any issues we weren't expecting. They were obviously interested and they said they would watch the whole film. We are in the process of distinguishing Hyde as we are putting his scenes in black and white and adding some distortion. There are other issues that we noticed but they didn't (e.g. synchronization of sound) and we are resolving them.

Music Piece

It has come to a point in our editing where we are considering adding the music to it, as the music has been a side note and not a concern so far, we had not written anything for it. We had always had the ideas for what we wanted it to sound like. We wanted a very jazzy, atmospheric piece with piano and jazz guitar.

The video shown below shows a piece of piano which is along the sorts of the desired music. However, it is too quick and flashy for what we want so we would produce the final piece as a more simple version of this with drums, guitar and bass guitar.



The music will have to be at least a minute and a half long to give something to work with for the majority of the sequence.

Our musical experience has been our advantage here, me and James play and own guitars, I can play bass and he plays piano. James also has experience with music software such as GarageBand so we can simulate the instruments we cannot play.

Editing

Amongst all the time in lessons we have had to edit, I have been coming to the mac suite in my lunchtimes with Matt and James. I have now spent an hour editing in my free periods and will be spending the next two hours editing as well. This will ensure we will have the rough edit ready for friday in which we present it to the rest of the media group. The main editing issue we have had has been audio. We have had issues with synchronizing the sound with the video. The main worry was the lighter scene which has three sound effects per cycle and it was out of time. Now the issue is sorted out and the video is in sync with the audio. We have also had trouble with the footsteps as Audacity's noise removal feature removes the footsteps as well as the wind so we may need to recreate the sound ourselves.

The lighter scene is where the actors names are shown

Another issue we have had is that currently, our title sequence extends our limit of two minutes. We have been deleting and shortening the clips to necessity which had made the scenes more interesting (the Phone and writing scenes for example).

Our full timeline lasts 2:05:11 in total

I have been editing the sound and adding titles and to my surprise, it has been relatively easy and I believe that with the others' help this lunchtime, I believe we could have a near finished piece by the end of today.

UPDATE 7th February:
We have shown Ms Moore (one of our media teachers) the OTS as far as we have got it. She had a few positive things to say about the video but also had some constructive criticism. She said it was not obvious enough who was who in the scenes and we needed to contrast it more. She also said that the lighting in the Jekyll scenes varied too much and it looked strange. There were also parts of silence in the voiceover that she picked up on and said that she thought they were there either on purpose or there was nothing to say. We realized that we could make the silence a lot shorter and we are now in the process of doing so. Another thing she said was the titles were an anticlimax and said it was a let down after the title 'Hide' and the lighter scene itself just to have plain titles in the corner but we explained they were only temporary, we showed her the idea Matthew recorded and she said that it looked a lot more creative. The credits Matthew filmed are found here:

http://asmediastudiesmatthewevans.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/creating-credits.html

She was concerned that although we have edited the sound a lot, the video editing and camera work was a bit simple. We showed her a scene we were going to put in featuring jump cuts and she liked it.

All in all, I am happy with the feedback we received as they are all small things that were either temporary or small things we could easily resolve.