Journal entry for lesson 15/01/14 - Saul Bass

In today's lesson, we looked at Saul Bass, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, best known for his design of motion picture title-sequences and film posters. He designed work for films such as 'The Man with the Golden Arm', 'Vertigo', 'Psycho' and 'West Side Story'. Bass's name grew within the industry after his work on Otto Preminger's 'The Man with the Golden Arm' in 1955. His sequences were very clever and obvious to the audience but only after they had seen the film itself. He learnt his trade when studying part-time at the Arts Student League in Manhattan. His first job involving his skill came in 1940 where he started making Film Ads. This is where he met Preminger to design a film poster in 1954 for his film 'Carmen Jones'. Due to Bass's superb work, Preminger was so impressed, he asked him to create the title sequence. Bass's work is so unique due to his hand drawn artwork within his work and title sequences.

'The Man with the Golden Arm'  was the piece of wrk that really got Bass noticed by big directors and companies. Because of this, he went on to do work for the films such as;

• 'Vertigo' in 1958.

• 'North by Northwest' in 1959.

• 'Psycho' in 1960.

For decades after, Bass's status fizzled out a little and he was not getting as many major jobs from as big directors with as high budget. However, nearer the end of his career, he was revived by both Martin Scorsese and James L. Brooks as they were so inspired by his work as they were growing up. This refreshing time in Bass's career allowed him to work on big films once again, such as;

• 'Goodfellas' in 1990.

• 'Cape Fear' in 1991.

• 'The Age of Innocence' in 1993

• 'Casino' in 1995

Editing...

After assigning ourselves to certain jobs contributing to the final draft of our sequel, Lucy was in charge of editing all the clips together. She would keep us updated of her progress over Facebook chat as we all would. After group discussion, we decided that it might look effective if we out the shots in black and white. Therefore, Lucy tried this and we all agreed that it worked and that we should keep it.

To create the effect, Lucy altered the filters 'saturation' and 'levels'. Lucy set the 'saturation' to -1 so there is no colour left. To brighten up the black and white, she altered the following levels...

• Input: 50
• Input tolerance: 100
• Gamma: 1.41
• Output: 43
• Output tolerance: 68

She also added transitions to each individual clips so the change of shot/scene was smooth and flowed. We used the transition 'cross dissolve' various times, however, we may change it in some places.  

Second draft title sequence - Captive

After the lesson were we shared our firsts drafts of our title sequences to each other, we took on board all the feedback we got and altered our title sequence trying to cover every area that was mentioned within the feedback session that we agreed with. In this draft, you will find noticeable changes, such as the removal of the voice-over which was highly advised to be changed during the feedback lesson. We also had comments saying that it wasn't clear who or what the character of the doctor was, therefore, we filmed and added scenes to the very start of the sequence of a doctor in a lab, trying to put across to the audience what the role of the character was. Hopefully, these additional scenes are clear to the audience, and they know who he is meant to be.

Sound effects

In Wednesdays lesson, two members of our group went on a school trip, so it was only Lucy and I for our double lesson. We decided to look for sounds we could use in our sequence. Our voiceover was finished and just waiting to be added into our sequence, so we focused mainly on finding a sound for the very last shot of our sequence when the camera turns and a hand covers the camera.

After finding many different sounds that were a possibility, i found a 'jump' sound from a copyright free website which we both instantly thought was right and would fit in perfectly. After downloading it, we converted it as an AIFF and added it over the final shot. After altering it, it sounded perfect and fit exactly how we would have wanted it to. It has finished off our sequence and gives it a new thriller-ish feel.

Screen credits...

Whilst everyone in our group has taken on certain roles all to contribute to our final sequence from every aspect, mine being the editing of the voiceover and sound effects, Sophie has been creating the text to overlay our title sequence.

She used photoshop to create a number of texts she thought suited the genre of our sequence. After presenting them to the rest of the group, we whittled them down to around two-three, two of them being very similar. After discussing and finalising our chosen font, Sophie began working with it on a special film and video design template. On this grid-like template, she began experimenting with the font that we found, from 'www.dafont.com'

Sophie did really well in arranging font size and colour, making sure it was the right size for the screen, and that its placement was accurate and didn't get in the way of any key features in any of f our shots. Also, due to our sequence being constantly very dark, Sophie made the font white.

After researching actors, writers, directors etc. we found a list of people that had worked on films that were similar to ours, the thriller genre, to add in our title sequence as our actors, writers and directors. For example, Leonardo Di Caprio as our mean role. We were influenced by him and his work, mainly in the film 'Shutter Island', a thriller where he plays a psychologist. Another example being John Polson as a director. Looking into films with similar story lines to ours, we found that John Polson made films that actually influenced our decision to make a thriller such as 'Hide & Seek'.

Sophie made texts for the following roles...

• Production Company
• Cast
• Title of film
• Casting by
• Music by
• Costume designer
• Production designer
• Director of photography
• Co-producers
• Co-executive producer
• Executive producer
• Written by
• Produced by
• Directed by

Screen Credits (updated)

My group and I decided that we wanted our title to be interesting and different, not just a simple text title. Therefore, we decided to create a background to go behind the text. The background we created was made to look like a set of prison bars to emphasise the name of our film, 'Captive'. Lucy and Sophie had trouble getting the background transparent on the screen. Therefore, we had to research it and found out that we were using the wrong format, we were using JPEG which flattens the image. To get the right look, we had to use PNG.

We were also unsure on what colour our text should be on-screen. Sophie took control and in her spare time, edited it and made the jail bars a faint grey colour whilst the text, that was sitting on top of the jail bars, were a plain white colour which actually worked really well. We are all gradually finding photoshop easier and becoming more comfortable when using it.

Our main focus was making the title in our title sequence really stand out and play an important and bold part in the overall look of our title sequence. With this look, we believe we have accurately met that target and think it looks great and top's off our sequence.

Start of filming...

In our Friday lesson, the last day of term, we luckily had enough planning and ideas to shoot the start of our title sequence. We went to the teacher conference room as it was the most office-looking room available. We also went to the office staff room where most of the props we needed were supplied to us by teachers, including a kettle, a diary, a stapler and a fountain pen. The shots we decided to shoot in there were the 'doctor's study' shots. These were the first frames we had planned in our storyboards.
It was good to get a head-start and to have some material to work with before we broke up for school.

We then met up during the half term to do the rest of the shooting for our sequence. Despite only meeting up twice, we got 114 different clips and I feel we did really well to get such a wide range of shots and styles.

The first day we met up in the half term, we went to Megan's house to record the indoor shots we had planned that included the girl in our sequence, played by Megan herself. The shots we managed to get, were the pan shot's of 'Maria's' room, Megan's character, and the diary shots. We also managed to get the shots of the female character leaving the house.

On the second day of shooting, we went to Lucy's house to film the remaining indoor shots involving the doctor, and the outside shots as where Lucy lives is quite quiet and secluded. This day of shooting was very successful and we got a lot done. We managed to get the shots of the doctor getting ready to leave and leaving the house done before managing to get the remaining shots from our storyboards recorded in the shot styles and angles we had planned to have featured in our sequence. We got the point-of-view shots done ,the low canted angle shot done and the worm-eye-view shot.

We were very lucky with the weather with the two days we planned to film on as both days were very similar in weather. This allowed our sequence as a whole to look even more realistic and flow without any noticeable changes within the shot. Although we had planned to have shot in the dark, we soon learned due to editing that filming in day-light and then later editing the shots to make them look darker and as if we had shot them at a more dusk time of day, was more effective.