Firstly, we decided to make the modern day and the flashback scenes more distinguishable by adding a Sepia effect to the flashbacks. Whilst creating a visible difference between the two timescales, it also serves to emphasis the elements of romanticism, accentuating the use of bright colours and the connotations of happiness and warmth we were aiming to portray. Originally, we had envisioned used the vintage film effect, giving an almost home movie style to the flashbacks, enforcing a feeling of reminiscence and nostalgia. However in practise, the iMovie effect was not in line with what we had imagined, so we decided to take a different approach instead.
The sepia effect also proved to come in useful in the earlier flashback scenes of the Scrabble playing, as it made the lighting seem more natural and overall enhanced the poor lighting. This also allowed us to slightly increase the brightness and contrast of these clips, making them more visible and defined, whilst not causing any suffering to the overall visual quality of the images.
We additionally wanted to represent the flashbacks in a more obvious way, in order to create cohesion between our product and the audience, as we found that this could often be confusing when we showed the video in various stages of completion to members of our target audience. We had hoped to do this in the conventional way of a short, clear flash effect, however, when experimenting with this effect on iMovie, we found that our clips were to sure to apply the effect to, and therefore had to find an alternative. We experimented with the overlapping effect, blending the two images together in one frame, however again as the clip was fairly short, it created a freeze frame at the end of the transition, which disrupted the smooth, flowing visuals of the video and created a really obvious jarring in the comfortable reception a sleeker style allows. Eventually, we decided on the 'White In' effect, which is basically a fade in from a whit background as opposed to black. We feel this effectively represented the 'flash' idea that we were hoping to achieve but in a more effective, and smoother style, synonymous with the pace of the song.
We showed the video to one of our media teachers, who provided us with some useful feedback. She picked up on the section toward the beginning that we had been concerned about - the scene leading in to the flashback. She felt that it would perhaps be worthwhile trying to find a substitute clip to replace the short and abrupt clips that we had been left with. We took this on board and found a discarded shot of a pan across the Scrabble box. We removed the rapid shot-reverse-shot that showed her reaction to the box, and instead replaced it with a clip of this shot, which served to act as a point of view shot. This clip slotted perfectly into the timings of the previous succession of clips, thereby not creating any dramatic effect on the timings of the rest of the video, and allowing a much smoother and more comfortable transition into the flashback scenes.
We added a long fade out effect at the end of the video to keep in line with the more conventional aspect of the image we wanted to portray, and also to heighten the stereotypical generic feature of the 'happy ending', as a fade implies much more gentle and softened connotations than perhaps an abrupt cut at the end may signify. We additionally added a short fade to the beginning of our video primarily in order to contain the titles that we were required to included on our video, but iMovie would not allow us to use these two effects simultaneously. We overcame this slightly by dragging and dropping the title effect onto the opening clip, which added the titles - we decided to keep these basic and simplistic, with the artist and track names being the only information we chose to include, in order to best represent the more simplistic style of the artist and indeed the music itself. We decided to keep the fade in at the beginning anyway, as it created a much gentler beginning to the start of the video, in line with the soft instrumental beginnings of the start of the song.
Now we have finished our video, we will next save it onto the external hard drive for backup purposes, and burn it onto a DVD for the examiners.
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