Difficult Shots, Edits & Effects within Epidemic

Difficult Shots, Edits & Effects within Epidemic

Because of deadline dates for the film to be done by. We had to do it with what we had, and we figured that the filming inside the college was the most beneficial because it looked like a hospital in some areas. The Hair & Beauty parlour was a clear example of a hospital block. It did look a bit over-exaggerated but we had literally nothing which looked more like a hospital. This was unfortunate. We also had the interrogation room being a room which was used by Music students at the College. Again this was a problem because music rooms tend to be small and because of the Field of Vision in which the camera has, it would be difficult for us to get the right shots at the right cut.

The news scene at the start with the reporter was a difficult shot to take place because the character had to learn his lines really quickly. Therefore he was looking above the camera very slightly to see the text that he had to read. We had to create a green-screen so we used the college’s TV studio in which allowed us to to chromakey out the greens and some of the yellow. This allowed us to make the news report to look more generic as it allowed us for a ‘typical’  recorded street/city view that most news broadcasters use. We found this difficult as a group because we had no previous experience doing video editing to this degree of adding effects to make the video more plausible. This was learnt through looking at google at how other people do it. This was overcome by the help of a message board on the internet which gave 3 simple steps as to how it works, and how to refine it to make it look better. We still have a little bit of outline  where the green is but that is due to how low quality resolution the camera actually is. We also created a photoshop template of a typical ‘BBC News’ lower third for the news report. This makes it look even more generic. Darren did this through photoshop and did this by replicating a proper lower third from a screenshot. He couldn’t take away a google images version of it because the resolution was too low for what we need to export. 

We are now going to talk about the shots in the Hair & Beauty Parlour. This was a very difficult task for the group to take a decent shot because a lot of the room was infested with advertisements from Barnsley College which we had to consider and hide up for the time being. This was difficult to do because some shots required looking around the room. Our panning shot which we created was not used in the film because it showed too much of the decoration on the walls and it had unconventional effects to the project. I figured that we had to limit what the audience could see so we could make the film as effective as possible. The shots seemed to be from each corner or at the edge of the room, we did this to create a surreal effect and show how derelict and in-order the room actually is. We found this to end up being one of the major flaws in our work because we ended up not having any close-up shots because of our angst towards the room(s) that we chose. To this degree of having not as many shots as we should have inside that room and scene, we figured that  we could add some editing into it which shortened the scene and made it abstract and unique. We assumed that instead we should make this as good as possible through making the shot shortened through jump-cuts. The jump-cuts quickened the main character’s animation and the short split second white noise sound effect made it abundantly clear to the audience that everything is derelict and quiet. The white noise sticks out in the sound as to be non-diegetic, however this worked and we intend these effects to question to the audience what is happening. 

We then added some sound effects towards the end of the film when the main character gets hit in the head with a baseball bat. We got these sounds from a free sound website which doesn’t have any copyright tied to it, as it is a free-to-use sound. This made the film look a bit better because it doesn't have the heavy breathing that was originally overriding anything. We used two sound effects within the hit, it was the solid sound which had no hollow or high pitched effect and the body drop which occurs when they put the main character out of conscious. 

We didn’t use many editing techniques after that apart from cutting and cropping to make the film short yet efficient.

The final effect that we put into the scene was the slow motion when the David wakes up from being knocked out for the second time for not complying with the two other character. We didn’t find this difficult however we found it to be one of the more difficult shots out of them all. Darren slowed down the FPS by 50% in which when David woke up from being asleep after being punched over the head by Steve. This added an effect of disorientation to the audience and this was well represented through the blood dripping from David’s ear. 

Overall the tricky shots, edits and effects wasn’t too difficult in the way that they were well implemented and we made do with the shots that we got in the end. This allowed us to mess around with the footage and I feel like through not having enough shots it inspired us to have more creativity.