Editing the Thriller - The Car Sequence

The final scene in my Thriller takes place in a car and initially the footage showed that of a bright and clear day. For the purpose of my thriller this was far too bright and it had no sense of danger lurking behind it. It simply looked like a sunny day in a car. This was fixed by changing the brightness and contrast settings. The brightness was decreased to -0.25 and the contrast centre was increased to 1.00. This added a different edge to the sequence as it suddenly become a lot more threatening and a lot more stylised. This works brilliantly for the purposes of my Thriller as the lower brightness sets an unnerving tension for the audience in a highly subtle manner.

In the initial plan for this section of my opening sequence I was going to have the data for the first murder appear on screen in white text against a black background a couple of seconds after the gun shot. While this seemed like a feasable idea in the beginning, I eventually realised that there was not enough time to include it and it just looked out of place and pointless. This has lead to me removing that piece from the sequence and just lengthening the shot of the papers a little bit more. In the end, this has made the sequence flow so much better and I am glad that I removed it.

In the scene there was one particularly troubling sequence, in which the character flips the sheet of paper and starts drawing a mind map of the situation. The shot in which the diagram is drawn was far too long and I could not afford to take so long on one shot but I could not cut from an empty sheet of paper to a full diagram. Ergo, I decided to use one of the shots that were not intially in the storyboard to fill in the gap to act as a segway between the empty sheet and the full diagram. This worked until I realised how shaky the shot actually was. As re-shooting this scene is not an option, I simply had to try and use a bit of editing trickery to fix the problem. This was done by stabilising the media and then cropping it to remove the ridiculously obvious signs of the stabilising taking place. While that particular shot still has a slight edited look to it, it is far superior to what I had initially and it works as a perfect segway.

The ending of the scene was incredibly simple to edit together as I simply cut from the close up of the characters eyes to the text showing the title. The font for the title is Leander which was also found on DaFont and was chosen for similar reasons as the credits font. However, it is bolder and larger therefore cutting a more imposing figure against the black background whilst still be easy to read.