Visual effects

During the editing process of our film opening, we wanted to achieve a certain look, to help cement the idea that our opening is based in the past, and we needed to make our flashbacks look different too. In order to do this, we looked at what we could do within iMovie to change the overall appearance. There were a number of preset filters we could use, and at first we decided to use the 'Aged Film' filter. However, this made our opening quite grainy, and we felt that it took away some of the quality of our filming, so we opted for another filter, 'Sepia'. We decided this was a good option as not only did it give an impression of the story happening in the past, but also, the video was of a high quality. We then decided to tweak it further, by changing the exposure, contrast and saturation settings. This meant that we could find a look which we thought fitted perfectly. We made the shots with our actors Eden and Anna in, while they are in the graveyard, quite dark and this would help us with the mise en scene aspect of our opening. Since the darkness would make it quite mysterious and scary for the viewer, which is important since we are working in the horror genre. Once we had found the colours we wanted, our next step was to transfer this to all the other graveyard scenes too. We copied and pasted our created effect onto the scenes, and made a few alterations here and there, especially on close up shots of Eden, our actress, otherwise she appeared to be very pink, which was not the effect we desired.

We have a second long flash of Anna very near to the beginning of our opening, as we believed it would give a sense of what was to come, and possibly scare the viewer a little. In order to do this, we took the end scene where Anna opens her mouth, just before the face morph occurs, and used visual effects to turn the clip black and white, to make it less clear to the viewer what was flashing up on their screen, intriguing them and making them want to watch more.

On our flashback scenes, we wanted a completely different look, so decided to once again use the filters in iMovie as a starting point. We thought that the 'Dream' filter looked quite good, as there was an obvious difference to the rest of the opening. We then proceeded to change the contrast, exposure and saturation again, to get quite a harsh, highly contrasted appearance yet happier in some of the beginning flashbacks, to indicate the change in mood and situation as the story progresses.

By applying these visual effects, it has really helped us show the viewer the different scenes and in our opinion made our storyline easier to follow and understand. It also made our raw footage look much better and now we are almost finished editing completely, it helps bring the whole thing together.