Welcome back, readers! Last post, I explained my editing process for scene 1 of my brief, which I consider to be the entire crime the hypothetical plot surrounds itself in. Today, I will be going over what I did for the scene with Detective Opacus. I plan to not go over anything I explained previously, as I followed some of my techniques from scene 1 and do not want to sound redundant.
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Producing the Scene
The single shot in this scene was completed in three takes. Instead of the original plan displaying Opacus in his office, I instead opted for an alternate approach which shows him at his home. I still wanted to incorporate the transition into the title I had going with the name tag in my initial idea, so I cut out some index papers and wrote down the characters name for the camera to zoom into as the scene plays out.
The production title for the scene was produced as I was editing the scene. I will go into this process later this post.
Transitions
Of the 6 iMovie transitions, I primarily used fade and dissolve.
Much like the first scene, I used fade to show a passage of time from Guise's arrest to the moment Opacus can be seen at his home.
I used dissolve in this scene only to smoothly transition to the production title of the film.
Filters
While I decided to not go down the black and white route typical of the noir subgenre for most of my brief, I still decided to play around with whatever filters iMovie had to offer to make some sort of connection to Opacus's troubled mental state, as I do not see the connection being made well enough simply by the posture I had while reading the newspaper.
iMovie's camo filter was a light blend between the classic b&w and color, as the filter makes most of the tones muted. These muted colors represent how Opacus sees the world, and hints towards his bleak mentality.
The only point in which I did directly use black and white is was for the production title and the transition to it as a way to call back to the subgenre's roots and to show that I have not forgotten what makes it so recognizable to this day.
Production Title
Making the design for the production title was easy enough. I looked back to my early planning post covering the process, and decided to use the Francois One font I had mentioned to make up the word "Opacus".
I created the title design on Canva, as it already has Francois One built into it. it was simply a matter of my sizing it, copying, pasting, and coloring the pasted version white so that it could go over the black variant to create a shadow that could be seen with some noir films of the past.
iMovie, however, made it difficult for me to import this, even as a .png file. Whenever I would try to import the file, the resulting image would have a yellow box surrounding it, and even after zooming the image all the way down so that the entire word can be seen, the box would still shrink, resulting in only a few letters being shown at a time.
Instead of having the title as an overlay to the screen, I instead added an imported screenshot of the last frame of the recording. When an image/screenshot it put into the iMovie timeline, the software automatically turns on Ken Burns, this adds a small pan to the image by having it move from one point to the next, allowing for the image to be zoomed in/out. This can be edited and deactivated by the user at any time.
When importing the frame, I made sure that the pan started on the same frame as was left off in the recording, and had it end on a zoomed in frame of the word "Opacus". This was to line up everything so that the title could appear at the center of the screen.
Taking the last frame from the Ken Burns pan, I imported it to the Canva page where I had the design already completed, and simply realigned everything so that it could be centered. This did make me have to go back and edit the pan to the best of my ability to that it would look smooth. The final results are not the best, but getting it to dissolve into one-another was difficult.
Audio
In this scene I decided to use the original audio from the clip that was shot, and added a telephone ringing sound effect, prompting Opacus to rise from his seat. As mentioned earlier, I ended up using the same sound effect as the scene straight cuts to black following the production title to create a sense of mystery as the opening ends and the plot would properly begin.
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As much as this scene changed towards the end of production, I am proud of how it turned out. One improvement I would have made, looking back, would have been how I executed the whole transition into the production title. I feel like it would have been more interesting for Opacus to grab the top business card, and the one right under was a blank one with the title. I feel like this would have been easier to add into the film, and I would have just needed a Ken Burns pan into the title instead of having to dissolve it into a single image. Aside from that, this second scene was overall much shorter than the rest of the opening, so the changes and connections I made with different elements such as the filter were all effective calls that I am glad I came up with while I was working on it.
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That is all I have got for the production process of my brief, readers! Thank you for sticking through the tedious research process, creative planning period, and volatile production period. I will now import the final result for all to see. See you soon!
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