Final Opening - Spy School

This is the finished product for the opening of 'Spy School'. Within this opening the film introduces the three main characters. These include our Hero, 'Ajax Thompson' walking to his lesson at the Spy School, the nerd who shows the hero his new gadgets, and the bad guy who plans to destroy the spy school and the students within. The final copy includes everything including the music, sound effects, and titles.

Spy School logo - Main Film Title

We chose to feature an emblem typically seen on school crests. The castle represents how the Spy School started, as a medieval school. This is the logo that will appear at the end of our film opening as the main film title.



The font was chosen because it looks technical just like the gadgets featured in our film. We used Photoshop to create this logo and simply made three layers, consisting of the blue background, the castle and then the text with a red highlight. Jack and Elliot made the logo and then Brad and Alex imported the image to Final Cut and added a motion tracking effect as shown below in the example video.

The video below is the final logo that will appear in our children's film opening credits as the main film title. The music will get louder as this title appears, creating a sense of something starting. The second video shows the layers used to create the logo.

Post Production - Music Composing

While Brad and alex did the editing, we (Jack and Elliot) prepared the background music and sound effects for the Film opening. We did this by listening to the beats on garage band and started to select appropriate loops to use. When we got the footage onto garage band we decided that the constant looping of the track got boring so we added more beats to make it interesting all the way through and we changed the music for the comedy dressing scene to something that will hopefully be more entertaining. In that scene we made the music before contrast the music during the scene to really make it different to the rest of the film and this should add to the sense of silliness. We also added a completely new piece of music for the scenes with the Bad Guy. Below is our finished music track.

Post Production - Sound Effects

During the post production of our film opening, we researched and gathered a collection of sound effects that would be useful for us to use. We weren't happy with the audio recorded with the in camera microphone for most of the exterior shots. This was because a lot of wind had ruined the audio. Luckily we had not recorded any dialogue in the exterior shots, so we where able to delete all of the audio from the video files. We added in a wind sound effect and used that over all of the exterior shots. This gave the video a more professional sound. We found some sound effects for footsteps, however we decided editing the steps to sync up with the video would have taken too long, so we didn't use these sounds. There is also a typing on the keyboard sound effect, however the audio that was recorded with the in camera microphone when we filmed the typing was better than the sound effect. All of the other sounds where for the card scanning shot, the various bleeps and beeps showed that the card was being scanned. Another sound effect that was used in our opening was thunder and lightning to add to the effect of our bad guy and his evil laugh.

 

Post Production Day 1 - 01/11/2011 - Editing

 Today we started post production, we where doing the editing side. Firstly we both took a quick look through all of the footage that we had captured from our one week of production, to familiarise ourselves with what we where working with. We set a deadline for today that we would complete the first scene, which was all of the exterior shots of the Hero walking to his lesson. However it took quicker than planned, and we managed to complete scene one and two which was the conversation scene between the nerd and the hero.

We did come across a few problems whilst editing, however it was nothing we couldn't fix. Firstly was the problem of the 'unrendered' footage every time we place something into the video timeline, we had already found this problem out doing our 'typing the titles video test', so we knew how to fix it. It was as simple as clicking on the 'sequence' tap at the top of the software and clicking on render video. The only problem that this caused was waiting for the video to render, and as we recorded in 1080P High Definition video this took ages. The second problem that we came across whilst editing was trying to take a video file off a memory stick. This was because 'Brad' had made the CCTV style footage using Sony Vegas at home on his Windows PC, so the video file was '.WMV', which inst compatible on Apple Mac computers. To resolve this problem we are simply just going to re-render the CCTV footage into an Apple compatible file such as a 'Quicktime' file so we can use the video file in Final Cut.

During our next lesson, '03/11/2011', we hope to complete the basic video editing by finishing scene three, which is the 'Bad-guys' scene where he gets changed into spy clothes. Also we need to take the title credits that Jack and Elliot made in Photoshop and place them in various parts of our opening sequence, we are also going to create some titles within Final Cut to add variety to the style.

Character - Hero - Ajax Thompson

The hero of our film opening (Ajax Thompson) has set out to get revenge on ‘The bad guy’, as he killed his parents in previous years. He also wants to kill the bad guy as he plots to destroy the spy school. He decides to do this with the help of ‘The Nerd’, who gives him numerous gadgets, like tracking devices, instant link walkie talkies, Explosive phones etc. He will use these to help him save the school, and seek revenge on the bad guy.

Hero’s traditionally are characters who, in the face of danger, or in a position of weakness show courage and strength. In modern movies, the hero is often a normal person who, despite having the odds stacked against them, prevails against evil in the end. This matches with our hero as in a moment of weakness (his parents being killed), he shows strength and courage, and doesn’t just give up.

A typical hero from a modern film is Alex Rider from ‘Stormbreaker’. Alex is the youngest agent in MI6. Like traditional heroes, before being a part of MI6, Alex wanted to be a football player, and live a normal life. But after his uncle dies, Alex seeks revenge after finding out he was in MI6. Alex Rider was a great influence on our character choice, and we based the ideas of our hero around his story in Stormbreaker.

The clip above shows Alex's strength and courage even when he is in a moment of weakness as he only just leaves the funeral of his uncle, showing the true traits of a good hero.

Production Day 3 - The Bad Guy

On the third day of shooting we did all the Bad guy shots, because that required the most props so we did all of those shots in one day to be practical, these involved close ups and medium shots of the Bad guy laughing and the trying on of outfits

Problems
The trying on of clothes shots took very long to prepare for as the actor would have to keep changing his clothes before every shot. however to save time we decided to place all the clothes onto the actor and do a continuos shot of him he would then take the layers off revealing a new outfit.
We had problems trying to add a lightning effects onto the shot and this was difficult to do in the room with the equipment we had. We would have to switch the light on and on again and again and then add the sounds onto the film later on.

What went well
We did complete all the shots ahead of schedule and upload them unto the mac. part of this is down to our time saving ideas and the fact we were well prepared for the shots we needed to do that day,
Even thought one of our group was not there that day we still managed to do well without him being there and it did not affect our production.

Roles
Camera - Brad, Elliot
Lighting - Brad, Elliot
Acting - Jack