RDO

Titles

I wanted the titles of my film to be more dynamic than just having them stay put during the opening, similar to the Walking Dead's more fast-paced intro. For this, I used 'title roll' whilst typing out the text in a capital font with sans features. 

The font reflects the content of the film opening. The words are bold and clear, but the spindly corners add some scruffy-neatness due to the fact that the survivor and the radio host are crossing paths: two very different characters.

Editing Sound

 To makes the sound of the radio microphones more distorted, I edited Thomas' voice clips that overlay scenes in the woods with Adobe Audition.

To get some static feedback, which is reminiscent of walkie talkies, I went to:

Effects > Special > Distortion

which bought me to a pop up screen that looked like this:

I then clicked and dragged the red and green lines in order to manipulate the pitch and volume, and also accentuate feedback - it was like turning up the sharpness of a low resolution photo, which created static and noise.

Finding Ambience

Due to a poor sound quality due to the fact that there was a technical hitch with the microphones SD cards, ambience sounds were needed to make the film seem more professional.

To achieve this, I went to the website: freesound.org , made an account and looked for sounds with a public domain symbol:

This means that the intellectual property rights of the sounds clips have expired, have been forfeited or are inapplicable.

The ambience clips I used were titled:

• Outdoor forest
• Running refrigerator
• Creepy Piano
• Negative Ambience

The outdoor forest ambience was used, obviously, for the forest scenes, and the running refrigerator diegetics were used for inside the studio. The piano, however, was added at random intervals during the film, similar to how a low budget thriller may uses music to string out the tension. Near the end of the film, the negative ambience was used to create tension as the survivor stared at the phone.

Noise and Grain

Whilst editing, I noticed that the shots taken in the studio environment were grainy due to a lack of light, which caused spots to flicker about the picture like there was dust on the lens. To combat this, I went on to you tube to look for some tutorials about getting rid of the grain.

Here I found an After Effects tutorial that was very useful.

Though the effects were small, I managed to minimize the grain and make the pictures a little cleaner.