We began by sifting through all of the raw footage and moving the takes we felt were good into a separate folder. This helped streamline the flow of work, as we would only be working with footage that we felt would be useful. Once this was done, we assembled a portion of the footage in chronological order (on the track). We looked at the first clip to decide what kind of effects we wanted to have on the whole text. We brought up the contrast to make the colours distinguished even in black and white. As well as this, we used an effect called "median" do slightly blur out the grain, that formed from filming in dark locations. A monochrome filter was added over the effects. We chose to have our film to be in black and white as we wanted it to stand out, like the films we took inspiration from "Roma" and "The lighthouse". It was also used in remanence of the period we took inspiration from, Film-Noir of the 1940s and '50s. For music, we use the artist C418 due to them being well known for making high-quality copyright-free music. We believed that their song "Stal" was the best choice, due to its Jazz genre. However, there was a part of the song that we felt ruined the atmosphere. Fixed this by cutting in between the part we dislike, and "stitched" the song back together by merging the gap with an exponential fade which made the jump between the cut unnoticeable.
We looked over the scene of Alex(Mafia Boss) lighting the cigar, we wanted to make this scene stand out and present his character as intimidating. We thought that making the flame stand out could create this effect. Tom suggested that the flame should be in colour, showing the Boss' fierce personality. After many attempts to create this effect, we sought out help from Alex himself as he was adept with Adobe software. Using his knowledge from his use of Photoshop he guided us through the process of creating the effect:
The base layer of the video was duplicated, then the HSL secondary colour tool was used to isolate the shades of the flame. Then all other colours were made grey. A grey Ultra Key was used to remove the grey background. Then a slight blur was used to make the flame look more natural.
In one scene in our film opening, the detective (played by Nathan J) is one the phone to his assistant. For this scene, we felt that it would be a good place to use a green screen. We felt this way as the detective had just come from the crime scene, and would still be outside which would mean it would be difficult to record the sound of the conversation. The process was simple in order to apply the effect. In Premiere Pro, we used an ultra-key effect on the recording to remove all shades of green (removing the background). A still image of a dark street (the photo was taken by the filming location) was placed on the layer below the clip of the detective, making it appear as the background.
