Thriller Construction - Lesson 6 - Completing the Rough Cut

In today's lesson, we needed to complete the titling, editing and soundtrack that had commenced in the previous lesson so that we could have a rough cut finished for the deadline and could screen the rough cut tomorrow in lesson.

Screenshot of exporting the finished Soundtrack on Audacity

The whole group was present and we really pulled together to finish the last of the titles and fine tune the editing, despite a power cut halfway through the lesson. I continued my work on the Soundtrack on Audacity (which fortunately had saved a auto-recovery back-up of the project after the power cut), be matching the soundtrack to the action. I also implemented editing techniques such as changing the pitches of the two sections of the soundtrack; the first part, the piano segment, is now in a lower key to enhance the dark, mysterious atmosphere we intended to create, matching conventions, and the second section is in a slightly higher key to heighten the suspense created by the faster pace of the sequence. I also added samples of Japanese "Taiko Drummers" at the start of the clip to create anticipation in the audience, and prolonged the areas of silence where the ribbon is picked up and where the Detective exits the forest to create tension. I then exported the Soundtrack, and we placed it into Final Cut where it would play alongside our sequence. Below is a screenshot of the final timeline of the soundtrack, you can see the multiple tracks and samples that were used in the project (the longer pieces were actually mixed into one layer as originally they were several layers!)

A screenshot of the full timeline of the Rough Cut Soundtrack on Audacity

 We also highlighted which titles were important or essential to have in our opening sequence in note form and jotted down key timings to work together to produce the rough edit. At the end of the lesson we exported the project in Final Cut and uploaded the video to YouTube - it can be seen here or on a separate post on my blog; "Thriller Opening Sequence - Rough Cut - The Case of Charlotte Adams". Next lesson the rough cut will be screened in front of the class and they will fill out audience feedback questionnaires that we also created this lesson, in order for us to make any necessary improvements to our thriller.