Final Opening Scene

Evaluation Seven

Evaluation Six

Evaluation Five

Above is a video of people's responses to my opening scene, I will be reviewing the feedback here so that you can watch the video but also read this or watch and read one after the other, which ever is easy for you. I attracted my audience by putting my opening scene onto You-tube for anyone to watch, I also posted it onto my social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to gain a big audience and get feedback. I decided to get feedback from adults and teenagers for this video to show that my film is not just for teenagers and young adults and that some more mature older adults would also enjoy this such as the person at the end of the video as they understood my opening scene well as they watch many post apocalyptic films. I decided to put in one person at the beginning watching my draft to show different opinions of how my film has changed and to be able to get different views from my audience.

Improving Opening Scene

After getting my work graded by all of the media teachers at my sixth form I decided I wanted to improve my opening scene as I was close to getting the grade I wanted to achieve. I changed my opening scene by changing the font to something more post apocalyptic to match the genre better, I was suggested to try my film title font however I felt like this would take away the effect I wanted to create with having a bold title at the end, therefore I found another font similar to the film title on http://www.dafont.com/ , in which case I used the "28 Days Later" font where I screenshot the font and edited it on Photoshop by cropping the screenshot, moving the words to the place I wanted them and inverted the screenshot so that it would have a black background and white text to work well with my black stops for my credits. Another thing I did was edited the majority of my opening scene on Premiere Pro to create a more black and white kind of look to my opening scene, it is not fully black and white as some tones such as the red to the apple in my opening scene are shown, so it is more foggy and dusty looking to make it look very old and tiring to match the environment. So the way I did this was by taking away the majority of the contrast and by changing the brightness to be quite low to get the effect I wanted. I believe that these two specific changes have improved my opening scene majorly due to the fact that the effect of the colour in my opening scene matches the genre and reminds me of The Road as the film is very dull and gray scale. The font I am very happy that I changed as I realised after the change it made a dramatic difference in my opinion. Below are screenshots of the changes that I have made shown clearly, the left images are of my draft opening scene and the right shows the change.

On the image above you can see exactly what changes I made on Premiere Pro to create the dark gloomy look I wanted

Evaluation Four

Evaluation four from ewelina stefaniak

Evaluation Three

Evaluation Two

Evaluation One

Forsaken Draft #1

A New Idea

Throughout editing my post apocalyptic opening scene I started to ask for feedback from my teacher's, family and friends to spot anything that I could add onto my opening scene before it had to be finished. I did get many people asking me what was happening a lot of the time and they did admit they would not know that my opening scene is in the post apocalyptic environment. Therefore what I decided to do eventually was add a voiceover to explain the story and to help people understand what they were watching. I recorded the voiceover on my iPhone 5s and from watching my preliminary task recently I learned from my mistake that I should not record my voiceover too close to the person's mouth as it sounds too loud, you can hear the person breathe and you can hear them almost spit into the microphone. I asked one of my media teachers if they would be able to do my voice over for me as I knew that he would take this seriously, I asked him to try to sound very tired and as if he had not ate or drank for at least a week to get the effect I wanted, so he ended up pressing his throat a little to try to get a deep and dark voice. I gave him a short script consisting of him saying , "Day twenty-three, still can't find any food, or water, each day gets harder, but I know, we can make it through, this disaster", I asked him to take breaks throughout this so that it would make him sound like he had no energy or hope so that the audience would connect with my opening scene more and understand it better. Whilst editing after recording this I cut down the recording to where the pauses were and placed them on each cut before my credits so that it matched with my music and the edits.

Updated Sound- Forsaken

Whilst editing my filming I have changed the music for my opening scene for Forsaken, this is because I realised having the same music for 2/3 minutes made me lose concentration whilst watching it, therefore I started to think of where I needed new music and what music needed to be added and replaced.


At the start of the film I have kept my original song Vicky Chow-Morning Tale, I Nocturne, however later on I added on new suspenseful music that I found on YouTube.





I went on to read into his policies about using his music, " If you are NOT using the music in a commercial sense(monetizing, selling a product, a commercial, etc), the music is free, as long as you credit me and Subscribe to my YouTube Channel. Donation not required, but always appreciated :)", after reading this I added his name onto my film along with Vicky Chows.

I also have used this sound for my flashback moment to make it very obvious that we are going back in time. I have found the person's email address and sent them a message for permission to use the sound.

There is also another soundtrack that I have been interested in using for my post apocalyptic film which is Cold by Jorge Mendez, therefore I found his email and contacted him also to ask for permission.


I also decided I wanted to have a sound for my production company as many have very recognisable sounds and that is also what I wanted, therefore I found this sound which I could use for free without permission.

Use of Premiere Pro

I have used Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 throughout the whole of my year doing AS Media to edit my work such as my preliminary task, behind the scenes, video diaries and upcoming opening scene which will be up soon. I have used Premiere Pro as it is available for students such as myself at my sixth form to use for free in lesson time and study periods to edit my work as I do not have this software at home to use. What I like about Premiere Pro is how it is easy to use as it is pretty basic in my opinion, the transitions, effects and fonts it allows us to use are great for this lesson as the simple stuff will make a big difference to every bodies videos. I like how I can cut down my clips, add as many clips as I want, add text on top of my videos, add music, change the look of my videos such as being able to change the brightness of my videos and being able to change the sound by using the pen tool to add points to where I want to lower my sound or to even change the audio gain.

Fonts and Production Distribution Company

In my spare time I have been looking at different fonts I am thinking of using in my opening scene for the film title.
For our film title I have found a few different fonts on http://www.dafont.com/ that I like for Forsaken such as these which I have put on the side to show my top four favourites. I decided to use one of these for my opening scene which was Defused due to it being not too over the top and not too simple for my film and the others look very dramatic and have a strange death look to them. I screenshot the font and opened it up onto Photoshop and inverted the image as I wanted the text to be in white on a black background, which then I saved and added on to the end of my opening scene. The reason why I decided to look for more fonts is because the fonts on Premiere Pro do not have the look I am going for.

As a team me and my filming group decided to gather ideas on what we want our production distribution company to look like, therefore we researched the most well known companies to get inspiration. Our aim was to have a classic look as we noticed many companies have blue tones to them and feature clouds such as DreamWorks, Paramount and many more. Therefore we decided we wanted to combine some of the production distribution companies looks together but to add our own look to them. We used our own photographs which we have taken recently as one of us went on a skiing trip to Italy of mountains and someone else had taken a great landscape photograph of the sunset, which we then decided to edit on Photoshop. We quick selected the mountain on top of the sunset and cropped the image down, we also changed the brightness and contrast of the image to add a dark theme to it to show off the deep tones. The aim of our production distribution company is to have something related to media and photography as we all study both of the lessons and they describe our personalities very well. On top of our edited photograph we added a film strip shape and added "LEL" in between each film block as they are our initials and we have always wrote them on our work throughout the year and we made the font simple and bold. Underneath we added on "productions" with a slightly more handwritten look to it to make it look sophisticated.

Non Copyright Sound

Before knowing this I started looking myself at different soundtracks that I thought would work well with my opening scene. I listened to some of the soundtracks from the 4 post apocalyptic films we mainly studied, there was one particular sound track I really liked which was "Deer Hunting" from I Am Legend. This is because I like how tense the music is, and that it is not too tense to the point it sounds scary. There has also been another great soundtrack I have found that I would absolutely love to use in my film if it was possible and that is Vicky Chow - Morning Tale: I. Nocturne.

 I think that this is a great song for my post apocalyptic film, if anything I would love to be able to change the order of the song, as I would use the starting 20 seconds for my film in film because it is very slow and calm, then from 21 to around 55 seconds I would use for the apple part of our film when the killer has spotted his victims because it slightly reminds me of "Psycho". From the first minute to around 1 minute and 30 seconds I would love to use towards the 2 characters noticing someone is watching them and them running away because the music gets faster, also for when one of the characters gets shot. From 1 minute and 43 seconds- 1 minute and 47 seconds I was thinking would be great for the part when the female character runs over to her partner after his death because the music is very slow and has piano which I think is great because it slightly sounds aggressive on some notes. From around 2 minutes and 20 seconds- 2 minutes and 30 seconds I think would be great towards the ending perhaps when the female takes the items of significance and the items to survival and the killer starts to follow her. The ending of the song gets slower and quieter which I would also like to fit in towards the end of my film as that would make my film sound very mysterious. I am wanting tense music throughout the majority of our opening scene, I want tense music at the start, then in the film in film I want something slow and towards the end I want something calm  to leave the opening scene as a mystery.

I decided to get in touch with Vicky Chow to ask her for permission to use her piece for my opening scene



We have been given websites that do have non copyright sound tracks and sounds in lessons which we will be using when we start to edit our work. Websites such as https://www.partnersinrhyme.com/pir/PIRsfx.shtml , http://www.freesfx.co.uk/soundeffects/fire_explosions/ , http://www.grsites.com/archive/sounds/category/16/?offset=0  for foley sounds, however we have already created our own foley sounds using our props and recorded the sounds on our phones.