Below is our re-edited Thriller opening sequence after getting feedback from our teacher and the examiners…
The main improvement and change we made from our original Music Box video to this one is the titles. In our original Music Box the titles were very basic, the only titles we had were the production company name and at the end of the opening sequence had the title of the thriller. However in our re-edited Music Box we have included; the production company, the producer, the director, who the film is starring and finally the title itself, this makes the opening sequence look more professional. In our first edit of Music Box the titles at the beginning were done on after effects and we said that it moved like the train; however we have now changed it and made the titles look simple but realistic. We have used a standard font and plain white writing, we thought that this still linked in with the idea of a train station as the font looks like the font used in notice boards and a sign around the station and on the train, an example shown in our opening sequence is the ‘Danger’ sign. Also using a more technical font would lose the attention of the viewer watching what is happening behind the font.
The next thing we changed was the cross fades throughout. In our first edit of Music Box we had a lot of cross fades which at the time looked good, however looking back at the video we can see it starts to look a bit unrealistic and more cuts would look better as would create more tension in video, especially using cutaways. Removing the cutaways from the clip on the platform when the young boy is walking away with his dog and we see the danger sign, allowed us to create cutaways and cut the images to the beat of the song. The biggest cross fade we deleted was when the friends were talking on the train and the train passing, the cross fade was too long and instead of the cross fade showing a passing of time which it normally does, it looked very unrealistic and didn’t have a purpose. After looking at this section of the opening sequence again we learnt that us talking for that long wasn’t necessary and ended up deleting the clip.
Deleting a lot of our clips throughout meant the sound had come out of synch and we found parts in the opening sequence where the sound could have been placed and edited better for example at the beginning and end of the opening sequence. We re-did the sound for most of the opening sequence and made sure the sound was at a sufficient volume for each clip. When the flights flicker on the train we noticed that the static sound of the light disappeared for a period of time, we also added this back in and made sure it sounded reasonable.
The final thing we changed in our opening sequence to Music Box was the scene down the alley way involving the young boy. When the boy gets up from the ground and walks away we noticed firstly it was too long and secondly the boy jumps and speeds up, showing poor editing first time round. Our re-edit of Music Box shows a shortened version of the boy walking away and we cut out the jump and speed up to make the editing flow smoother.
