'Fixation' Opening Sequence

Here is our final product!

Creating music - Garageband

Anna and I (Lucy) had decided that we were going to make some music on the software garageband as we could not find any copyright free music good enough to use in our sequence, so we started to make our own. We knew we wanted to keep to the 80's funky theme and include tense dark music in the points that the Stalker character would be on screen. Because of this we looked at our sequence and made a timeline to plan out at what seconds needed what type of sound. We would locate the point in which needed a different type of sound and map it out and then put this into our music. We successfully created this with alot of hard work and time, time being 3 hours. 2 lessons and a lunch time as we wanted to make it perfect, and we believe it was and we were very happy with it.



                                                                WHAT WENT WRONG                                                     
 However when exporting our now finished song into iTunes, we realised it said that the song was 2minutes and 58seconds, when it should of been 1minute 30 seconds. What we had realised is that what we had though was seconds on garage band was actually 3 seconds and this had made our music to long, we were gutted however we are going to try our best to fix this the next lunch time and lesson we have to make it fit down to 1minute 30.

After having to make loads of further edits working with what we had over having to go back and reshoot some things, we have managed to make some changes to our film that we feel are very beneficial to the film as a whole. We have managed to use the shots we had to create a shot reverse shot between the Stalker and Mandy as she approaches the scene of the murder. We found this quite difficult as we had to edit perfectly to make the continuity of the film work and keep the belief of our film there. This was a major problem as it was very time consuming and we hadn't got the titles or sound onto the film yet therefore we were slightly starting to panic as we knew we were running out of time.

We had to spend an hour learning how to get the titles onto each clip by using tutorials on Youtube to help, one of which can be seen below:

We found this to be a good way to learn as it was something we had no idea about and due to the fact we didn't have it told to us exactly what it was we were meant to do, we had the freedom to play around a bit with the different texts and transitions of each. This too was time consuming but it was worth doing as it means we have learnt something new we can use in the future on Final Cut Express.

Lastly, due to copywright we had to make the music that can be heard on the opening. This took almost 3 hours which seemed forever for such a short clip and we had problems with getting it all put together in time to make the deadline however it all came together really well and we're really pleased with the end result.

Research into Film Institutes

As a group we need to consider what sort of film institute would distribute our film. Obviously as our film is not a multi-million blockbuster we understand that our film would not be distributed by a world wide famous institute such as Universal Paramount Pictures. However a small independant institute would be much more realistic. We decided to look a some of our favourite films and see what sort of institues they were distributed by.

1) 'PolyGram Filmed Entertainment'
'Trainspotting' (1996) is a crime/drama film addaptation of the novel 'Trainspotting' by Irvine Welsh and directed by Danny Boyle. The film was distributed by 'PolyGram Filmed Entertainment', a film studio founded in 1979 but eventually sold to Universal Pictures. It was based in the UK and invested in many British films such as 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' , "Dead Man Walking' and 'Notting Hill'. PolyGram became part of Universal Pictures to create a joint venture called 'Gramercy Pictures' which was the distributor of PolyGram films in the USA and Canada. 'Trainspotting' was ranked 10th by the 'British Film Institute' in its list of top 100 British Films.
The 'British Film Institute' is a charitable organisation designed to encourage the development the arts of film and television in the UK.


2)  'Lions Gate Entertainment'

Crank (2006) is an action film staring Jason Statham and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. The film was produced distributed by 'Lions Gate Entertainment'. It is a North American independent film company founded in Vancouver in 1997 and its headquarters are in Santa Monica, California. It is one of the most successful independent film/television distribution companies due to its commercial recognition and many of its pictures have been very lucrative. 'Lionsgate' also has its own record label and publishing company.


3) 'Miramax Films'

Pulp Fiction (1994) is an American crime film directed by Quentin Tarantino and distributed by 'Miramax Films', another entertainment company responsible for distributing independent and foreign films. Miramax was founded in 1979 and headquartered in New York. It was originally created to be different in that it would distribute films that Hollywood Studios did not consider plausible to distribute. Despite this original plan, in 1993 Miramax was sold to 'Walt Disney' for $60 million.


We feel that it would be totally unrealistic to expect our film to be distributed by any major Hollywood studios. However, an independent film company may be more feasible, even then, the independent film companies above are probably too 'high up the hierarchy' to consider our film. If we were to actually release a whole film I think that the best way to do this could be by previewing it at a local film festival, like that of the 'BFI London Film Festival' except perhaps a more smaller-scale festival, such as a regional or local one.