film memo
editing
The editing phase for "CAPTUM" was arguably the longest process out of everything else. During the prost-production stage, I also took on the role of editor. With that said, almost everything after production came down to my ability to edit the film and promotional materials. Luckily, I have plenty of experience on editing, being the editor of our previous AS course work and my hobby for making YouTube videos.
adobe premiere pro
I was already knowledgeable on how to use Adobe Premiere Pro. The software was much more professional, had additional features like colour grading & sound design, thus I ended up sticking with Premiere Pro.
scene 1 (opening sequence)
scene 2 & 3 (Main Film)
I started by editing our opening title, it is a common method that editors separate the file of the opening title and the main film. Valerie was tasked with labelling and organizing each clip from production, for the benefit of my editing.
cuts
scene two editing cuts
standard cut
"CAPTUM" just like most horror flicks, uses hard cut to transition from one shot to another. This was commonly used during the opening sequence.
L & J cut
I utilised L & J cuts not only to make the dialogue seem more natural, but also to help sound effects serves as a smooth transition between on clip to another. This was especially present on shot that gave a warning before a scare, a convention of the horror genre.
Jump cut
Jump cuts are also a convention of horror genre films, thus I made use of the suddenness of the cuts to evoke an eerie atmosphere.
Invisible cut
Invisible cuts were used to transition a smooth transition from the opening sequence to the title card. Another use for was shortly after KC left the room, this was done so that just like magic, a bunch of notes would have appeared on the bed where there were previously none. Essentially that shot was two clips stitched into one seamless shot.
colour grading
Colour grading was a challenging aspect I had to tackle while editing the film. As mentioned before, the colour story had already been planned during pre-prod, It was my job to make sure that the film matched our pre decided colour scheme to match the colour grading. A notable change in colour can be seen when the room turns to red, this transition of colour is a direct homage and inspiration from "Suspiria" (1977). I started by colour grading the opening sequence first and then after editing the main film, I integrated the opening's colour grade into the whole short.
"Sinister" Inspired colour story
The atmosphere I wanted to achieve is of alike the 2012 horror film "Sinister". Its colour grading compliments the triadic colour palette that "CAPTUM" is using. With that said, I applied the present LUT of "Sinister" into our film and adjusted the colour to make red and blues pop out more.
w/o grading
w/ grading
The source footage was shot using the Osmo Pocket Default D-Cine Color. Without colour grading, the footage were warm and less saturated, lacking contrast. Thus by using the LUT pack & correcting the colour curves, I was able to attain a teal atmosphere that complements the red and yellow-orange lighting.
The most challenging aspect of my colour grading experience was trying to attain the right colours and brightness. This is because, unlike experienced or full time editors, my monitors' colour range fitted to follow the standard sRGB or DCI-P3. With that said, I had to constantly guess and check using my other devices whether the brightness and colours were right.
text
The font was an important element of setting the tone or genre of our short film. Looking at conventions of horror, majority of horror flicks consist of a Serif type font. In order to break convention We decided to use a sans serif, handwritten font. Considering that our antagonist was is entity that had been trapped for a long time, its hand writing wouldn't have been the greatest.
The font style I chose to use for "CAPTUM" is called Angst. The font has a hand written style that I personally fancied as it brought roughness & imperfection that represent the crudeness of the entity. The crooked font was agreed upon by the entire team, as the official font used for all of "CAPTUM"'s materials.
The font can be seen in the opening sequence, end credits and was later also used for promotional materials such as our poster, trailer and postcard as it created a sense of branding.
sound
Sound was another important element for "CAPTUM", despite only having dialogue in the opening sequence for majority of the short film, it was still crucial as a convention of horror is a good sound design. It is very typical amongst American horror films to have eerie visuals with loud jump scare. However, I wanted to stray away from that. Thus in order to challenge the convention, I made sure not to often use loud noises for cheap scares.
diegetic
During pre-production, we've already decided that other from dialogue, the rest of the sound would be purely non-diegetic. This was to cater to our lack of equipment in the sound department. The only pure diegetic sound recorded during production was the dialogue scene using a budget lapel. therefore, diegetic sounds were almost non-existent in post-production as most sounds were recorded or imported during editing.
Luckily importing and working with the diegetic sounds such as dialogue from the lapel were crisp clear and had not problem unlike my las experience with our AS course work "Prelude". Our audio did not need much enhancements
Due to the nature of lapel audio sounding too concentrated and unnatural, I used Adobe Premiere's tools to increase vocal presence and added a tinge of reverb. This was to make the actors voices more organic and part of the scene.
non-diegetic
For non-diegetic sounds, I used a combination of audio sourced from YouTube and a popular sound/music provider called Epidemic sounds. Epidemic sounds is originally a paid site, however I applied for a one month trial.
Believe it or not all sounds heard after the opening sequence were non-diegetic, and added post-production. As I mentioned, during production our sound equipment was limited, thus we had no other audio recording device besides a lapel. Therefore It was more convenient to add sounds like footsteps or door closing after production.
An issue I noticed while editing was the lack of human expression, such as breathing, gasps and some dialogue. In order to address this, minor human expression sounds were recorded using my voice, while major ones like additional dialogue was recorded by our actress and was sent to me via email.
poster
Prior to filming, we had a photoshoot of Althea for promotional material. The photoshoot was impromptu, thus I suggested that She hold the Super 8 camera. Furthermore In order to project our branding in our poster, I experimented with the red lighting to see if it would work, fortunately it captured the eerie and horror atmosphere I was looking for.
Furthermore, I instructed Althea to try grinning, giving a creepy essence of "somethings off" as seen from the poster.
The RAW image was then process through adobe Lightroom for colour adjustments, The original images we much darker as I lowered the exposure of my camera to be able to work better in photoshop as compared to a over exposed shot. The blacks of the image was darkened and its red highlights brightened to stand out better. The colour contrast between Red and black is a part of "CAPTUM"'s branding.
In adobe Photoshop, I made sure to follow the standard poster size of 27" by 41". I then layered Althea's image with a super 8 film frame, again to match our branding. Film bruns and scratches were also applied to make the poster look like a old or crude Super 8 film.
To ensure consistency, the text for the title adapted the same font style from the short film called "Angst". For the credits font, I decided to use the "SteelTong" font since it is a common convention for film posters used by Hollywood. The format I followed was based on other horror films such as; Alien & my prior knowledge from my preliminary exercise on horror/thrill conventions on posters.
trailer
Colour grading tool
Last but not the least, I wanted to include and incorporate a sort of theme song for "CAPTUM". Thus I went looking for one in YouTube and came across Henry Hall's "Here Comes The Boogeyman". The song was a perfect match as it talked about having to be in good behavior, if not the boogeyman would come for you. In our short, KC had not been "good" therefore, the entity haunted her. Coincidentally, this song was also played in the horror film "Sinister".
The dilemma with this is that not all the needed sound effect could be found online, there were ones that could not be provided by Epidemic Sounds. With that said, I had to adapt and get creative by recording the sound effect myself. Noises such as books hitting the ground, paper flying, vanity table items falling, were all done by my own recording. Nevertheless, it was a fun experience to create my own sound for the short film as I got to walk in the footsteps of the life of a sound designer.
The trailer is meant to be a sneak peak of what "CAPTUM" was going to be about. My first version was almost a minute long sequence of building up to a scare. I used one of the scene from the short and edited the it so that the original scene was different or altered from this one, therefore avoiding significant plot spoilers.
However after, receiving Valerie's feedback on my first version, we both concluded that it might be too long or too "slow burn". Therefore, I proceeded with making another much faster paced version of "CAPTUM"'s trailer. This version was a compilation of several scenes out of context that were altered to seem continuous. Again, I hesitated to show more clips from our product as it was only 5 minutes long & I did not want to show or spoil too much. In addition, I proceeded to use Henry Hall's "Here Comes The Boogeyman" music as to further incorporate it to our film's branding.
At the end, both film trailers were rendered and submitted to our advisor, where we unanimously decided that both edits/trailers were going to be used. However, the main trailer would be the second edit that Valeria and I collaborated on.