Production of Sound

For our soundtrack we first researched about different types of songs in romantic film. We found that as our film. As we researched we came across Radio Active by imagine Dragons and instantly though that this would be a perfect guide for our own soundtrack. Therefore, we tried to almost replicate this by following the climate part when the beat kicks in but also added our twist to it, to make it our own. 

As part of our coursework we had to make our own soundtrack that went along with our movie. Me and Fabiha found this rather challenging because we were unaware of what instrument to use as neither of us could play any! However, we had an idea of what we wanted before starting to physically make the music. As we were jumping back and forth to the boys and girl we wanted to keep the music as neutral as possible and fade in and out in different genders. we wanted the boys music to be loud and low pitch emphasising his masculinity whereas, we wanted the girls music to be more quiet and high pitch. We thought that for the boy it would be best if we use drums and bass and for the girl strings and piano.

In order to produce our soundtrack we had a music teacher come into our lesson and teach us how to make music on the programme Logic Pro. We used this programme to make our soundtrack. After the lesson we gained much more knowledge and realised that there was more to it than just using one or two instruments.

NO VOICE OVER: me and Fabiha decided that it would be better to only keep the soundtrack and not do any voice overs because the music we made was a lot more powerful.

Me and Fabiha  wanted to split it up by focusing on the sound to represent each character. Fabiha focused on the boy whereas I focused on the girl.

This is what Fabiha personally wrote about the boy and talked about the decisions we made and what sounds we chose for the male character:
For the boy i wanted the music to be loud and strong so i thought of using drums. This type of instruments was specifically chosen to symbolise his masculinity and his personality of this hegemonic character. As well as having this deep and loud music i wanted to make it more creative by adding a synthesizer effect to it, this made the music more intense which fitted with the portrayal of the boys character.

This is when the boy is first introduced and this is when the beat kicks in, as well as the synthesiser, making the music more intense, giving a hint of what his personality and character is like. Everything, including harmony is quite deep and almost intimidating which conveys a certain message to the audience. It shows toughness. 

The box on the left side is a tool which helps us change the pitch, volume and pace of the music and the keyboard is used to compose the songs. The different letters represent a different note, which is an easy way to play and test out each instrument.

What I did is I focused on the sound that rapresents the female character. Me and Fabiha both decided that it would be a really good idea if the music that rapresents the girl is faster in pace than the boy's music. Also, it should be more high pitched and contain less drums, which rapresent toughness, but more violins, which rapresent innocence and class. There were a variety of high pitched instruments such as different types of violins, or again drums but a different type, like ultrabeat drum synth.

Here we can see that violins are the main instrument that is used the most. That is because it represents class  due to how violins are usually found in classic music, therefore portray her. However there are are other instrment we added such as strings annd drums along the violins because it felt empty and incomplete without back up instruments. This created a nice harmony throughout the whole soundtrack and sounded almost professional. We can see a box with many buttons with volume levels and soeed levels. This helps us determine the speed and volume and we are in complete control of the sound.

Here is the rest of the girl's soundtrack. At the end we combined the two tracks (boy and girl together). This created the perfect soundtrack that suits our genre at the same time suits the characters. 

FEEDBACK:

We asked our teachers for feedbacl and if anything was wrong with this and she said it was perfectly fine. I think it's because we spent a lot of time researching an looking through other songs thats perfected our music making skills. 

Planning Initial sound

Me and Fabiha used Logic Pro to create the soundtrack for our film opening because we thought it was the best programme to use. We also were thinking about using Garage Band but we were not too familiar with it. We actually got our music teacher to help us with the making of the track as he is a professional. As i said, we were inspired byt the song Radioactive by Imagine Dragons because we think that the type of music used suits our film opening. 

MALE CHARACTER SOUND:

The music for our male character was more complex to make as we wanted to use synthesizers; we thought this would make our soundtrack more interesting and catchy and would almost match Radioactive. We used this as a guide for our soundtrack. The reason why we were so attracted to this song was because of the way the beat kicks in after the guitar strings, we thought that this would link with our film opening as we start quiet then go loud during the boys scenes. We actually used guitar later on to finish off the track and just to add a variety of instuments. The synthesizer helped the music sound more electric, which made that our music sound dark but interesting. The Big Beat Remix Kit, Techno Syncx B and the everlasting were played at their loudest during the boys scene and the strings were [played very quietly that you could barely hear it. The strings however, gave dimension this part and it made it easier to fade in a d out and still make it sound neutral. The boys music was also at a low pitch contrasting with the girl making it sound more masculine.

This is a quick sample of the sound that will give an idea of how the boy's music is going to sound like. It includes synthesizers to match Radioactive. I used Powtoon because i thought it would be a suitable website to use as i can insert text and images in the video. We planned to make this kind of music instead of classic music because we are trying to attract a younger audience and  this type of soundtrack will appeal to them more. We could've chosen to use violins and piano throughout the whole film opening but chose not to becase a younger audience might find that rather boring. Classic music would attract a much older audience which is not who we are targeting.


FEMALE CHARACTER SOUND:
We decided earlier on that we would have the same neutral track playing throughout the whole film opening but add certain instruents that would show the contrast between the boy and the girl. As our music was very neutral we had to show the difference in terms of sound when both characters were being shown. For the girls part of our soundtrack we wanted it to sound it to sound high pitch and more jolly than the boys. For the girl we used strings and violins as well as some other bass music. We thought violins were particulalrly effective because they show high class as classic music always has violins in it. The reason we used those two specific instruments was due to the high pitch tone it gave us. The highest note on the violin was used in our soundtrack in the girls section because it sounded enlightening and it suited with her image of being this upper class innocent girl. Moreover, the violin gave more dimension to the song, if we didn't use this, the violin would have sounded flat therefore we converged them together creating a light, soft and catchy tune. That is why we had to use strings along with it and it worked really well. However this is just our initial saple: we will be adding drums to make it even more masculin.

This is a quick sample of the sound that will give an idea of how the girl's music is going to sound like. It includes violins and strings. I used Powtoon because i thought it would be a suitable website to use as i can also insert text in the video and images.

It is clear that both sounds are similar to each other because the melody is the same. We tried to incorporate different instrument and music types all in one track to emphasise the contrast between the actress and actor.

FIRST DRAFT "IRREGULAR"

After the first draft we realised how many mistakes we made and how many things are missing. Here we still did not make titles, logo and sound. We had some missing clips such as the extablishing shots of settings. We also had some scenes missing for the boy and the number of clips of the actress did not match the number of scenes of the actor. We need to include a lot more clips for the actor to balance it out. We also need to add black fading transitions in the beginning and in the end to make it look like a real film opening.

Production of Logo

 LOGO PRODUCTION

Before actually deciding the name and logo for our film opening we did some research on the internet to get an idea of how production logos look and name look. We specifically looked at production companies that distributed a lot of romantic films such as Lionsgate or 20th Century Fox. Because our genre is romance we both thought that some sort of romantic element should be include in our logo just to give the audience a hint of our genre, evem though we do know that the logo does not necessarily have to rapresent the genre of the film.

INITIAL IDEAS

Me and Fabiha decided to sketch at least two designs for the production name and logo on paper just to get a rough idea of what name and what kind of logo would suit our film opening and genre best. Both of us thought to name our production "Bad Romance" which is suitable for the romantic genre and isn't too long. The name was inspired by the topic, which is romance and we added the word "Bad" to complete the production name. We will choose the correct font later on, on some kind of software to complete the final look of the name of the production.

Here are the sketches for our initial ideas:

on the left there are Fabiha's sketches which include a more sophisticated font,which does suit the romantic genre. Fabiha's sketches include a romantic font that says the production name and both of her sketches include hearts due to how we researched some production logos for romantic films and they had hearts in them. in Her first logo she incorporated two light blue clouds with a hear at the back almost like it is the sun peeking through both clouds. The idea of the following logo is quite romantic as it could be linked to sunsets and that is a really common part of romantic films since there usually are scenes with a sunset. Her second sketch includes a heart again but this time it is broken. It has wings on each side of the broken heart to represent Cupid, as he has wings himself.

These two are my sketcehs. They both have thename Bad Roamance at the top of the actual symbol of the logo. However in the first sketch we can see that the writing is ll capital so that it stands out more (even though that font could be changed along the process). I included a heart just like Fabiha did because we both agreed that we should put a heart somewhere in the production logo. Then we see the filming stip and machine rollers to rapresent the filming industr and those are grey to show that they are old class. The secoond sketch is pretty much the same as the old one just a few things have been changed. The fint seems to be more bold and it is underlined by a line that end wth a heart on top. That is how i still included the heart but differently. Then again we see the filming tripes and rollers everywhere to again, represent the films. 

 We decided we will develop design 3. My design (in the third picture). That is because the shape of the logo and size and the way it is laid out make it look the best.  Now we will have to make it into a real production logo using any software.

DESIGNING LOGO ON SOFTWARE
In order to make the logo for our production company I used a specific software, Microsoft Word. Firstly, I could not decide whether to use Adobe Fireworks or Words because i have experience with both softwares. However, i finally chose to use Word due to how it is a simpler way to create logos and names of productions. It had simple tools that could make shapes, lines and fonts to start with but i had to edit and put effects to make it look professional. For example i added the fade, glowy and 3D effect to actually create a decent logo. Here are each of the steps explained really through out the making of the logo.

This is how i started making of the logo. 



This is the first step and i just clicked on 'insert' and 'shape' and selected the heart shape as i wanted the heart to be the focus point of the logo.  I wanted the heart to be red as the colour represents love and heart are usually red anyways.

Here I double clicked the heart and a little window appeared that showed different settings that included effects. Here i could change colour, add effects and different textures which is quite cool because it almost seems like i am using Photoshop.

I decided that i should make the edge if the heart glowy due to how it give a better effect and it looks better. I changed the shade of red just to make it more pleasant and less bright as it was too bright for my liking. I added a 3D effect to make it look more complex. 

Here i am trying to make the recording rolls by selecting the circle as shape and changing the colour from black to grey. 

Here are the rolls once done. I added another circle which is smaller and white. I then added grey lines to complete it.

Here i selected the pen tool because i can draw lines with curves. I drew the curves myself and made it to a shape of an S to to make it look like a filming strip and it is again, grey because the rolls are grey and they should match.

Here i added lines throughout the filming strip because then or will make it look like a realistic one almost. I then added the final touches with special effects by double clicking such 3d effects or glowy effects like the heart so it would match. 

This is the final logo but we still have to choose the official font of the title 'Bad Romance' therefore it is not totally complete yet. The writing that will go on the logo will be made on PowerPoint.

Here is the final production logo with writing on it. The writing says the name of the production company (Bad Romance) and 'productions'. The font chose is called Chalk-duster and I chose it because I think the dusty chalky effect looks good with the logo overall. The colour of the writing is also red which matches the red heart in the logo and the theme of romance in general. I left the white background because i think it looks better than any other colour background.

Refilming scenes

As Fabiha filmed all scenes for the girl and I filmed all the scenes for the boy we eavh had o refilm some bits to make the scenes as accurate as possible in terms of angles, framing, types of shots and mise en scene. Here are the adjustments we made.

After Fabiha's first attempt at of filming the girls scene she was really unhappy with the work due the tripod and also timing therefore, She decided to re shoot the whole section again. as she got the opportunity to do this she wanted to change a few things around to polish tings up a bit.
In order to improve from her first shoot, she wanted to really focus on the props. she wanted her actress to look more feminine because she realized that she cannot really show her class status in the very beginning of the film as that would give away the whole film. she wanted to emphasize their social class through the setting rather than their character.
As you can see she has changed the bedsheets. In the first image the bedsheets were more red and had more print on them; when she first shot this she thought that it would be good the red could symbolize her passion and ferocious character. However, she then thought that this would give too much away as i am only filming the first two minutes and i didn't  want to give everything away. So in order to tackle this problem she changed the bedsheets she wanted pink to emphasize her girliness also used something much more simple and elegant. she thought it would be more safe for her to conform to the stereotype. Moreover, to really emphasis her femininity she thought a high angle shot would be vital to use instead of a long angle mid shot. In addition, when she looked back at my filming she realized that there wasn't much light  in the footage this reduced her from looking all naturally angelic. As she wanted her to be as natural as possible she knew that she could not use artificial lighting therefore she tried to use as much lighting as she could gather, she filmed this later on in the day when there was more light coming in the room giving us the illusion that she is much more sweet and innocent and the environment is more welcoming in her room.

Before putting my project on Final Cut Pro I was looking through the boys scenes and was not happy with my work therefore decided to film the boys scene again.  After getting feedback from my teacher she told us that we need to focus on the boy by using more extreme close ups and really emphasising his mis en scene. We then re-filmed and made sure that we focused on extreme close ups also the mis en scene making sure that his gender and class were explicitly being portrayed in a negative light. Moreover, we filmed the establishing shots of the boys area and the girls area and planned on moving back and forth in both areas emphasising the contrast. We can clearly see how the faming in the first picture down below is not straight. It is slightly titled and it is well noticible. It is not accuurate neither it is a good shot that is why we decided to delete this scene and film a ifferent scenes. We tried refilming this specific scene but because we was ssitng on the stairs i cold not use the tripod to record a steady shot due to how low he was. The tripod was not low enough. The second picture shows the new clip. The framing is really accurate as the tripod was straight and on the level. It is not tilted like the one before and the lighting is also much clearer and better.