Editing the opening

Alright. Faye did the heavy lifting by line editing the film opening. I'm adding the final touches, like coloring, titles, credits, and effects.

At first, we had said to each make our own version, but ultimately, there was no point in doing the same thing twice, so Faye made the draft and handed it over to me. Before that though, we went back and forth between the sound design, whether to use static or brown noise or anxiety inducing music, or silence.

This original draft of the opening included creepy music underneath the scene of the large painting, which we deleted from the timeline because it sounded too much like horror.

Faye and I trying to come up with something else.

In the end, we opted for silence, hoping that it would contrast with the rest of the opening because each section has sound elements (footsteps and natural sound in the intro, diegetic music from the record player, non diegetic music during the anxiety scenes, water during the fridge scene). We think the lack of sound will create an isolating feel, and feel separate to the rest.

Once I got the draft in my own timeline, Faye and I looked through fonts. Faye liked fonts with a handwriting feel to it, but wanted it to be more simple and clean. Some of the fonts we tested are pictured below:

 

In the end, we chose the font Monotype Corsiva. I then credited Faye and I as creators, Camila as our lead actress, Fesliyan studios for the music, and David Renda for the song. 

Then I worked on creating the title graphic, which we finally named our film Borderline and used a masking effect to reveal the text. I did this by keyframing an opacity mask frame by frame so that the text would reveal from behind her hair. 

First version.

After showing this part of the opening to a friend, we both thought it needed something more, like perhaps a special effect, to understand that the main character is hallucinating. I decided to add a directional blur that would blur the edges of the painting, and increased the exposure while adding rotation key frames to the directional blur, so the final effect looks psychadelic, and in this way we hope the audience understands even more clearly that it is a hallucination.

Final version with effects and the title in ALL CAPS.

The last thing I did was color correct the shots, which was fairly simple with Premiere Pro 2024, because the lumetri color panel has an option to automatically help correct shots; however, I would always have to fix the coloring anyway when the "auto-correct" would often over expose shots, leaving them looking worse off. A mix between my own eyes and the computer intelligence resulted in the final coloring job. 

One cool thing though that I learned was how to match the coloring effect from one shot to another, by usng a tool called Comparison View. I used an official Adobe Premiere Pro tutorial and was able to match the coloring from a warmer shot to a cooler shot, creating the same warm tone throughout.

The shot before comparison view and color match vs after color match.

I exported different drafts and sent them to Faye, then went back to editing, sent another draft, until finally on the 5th attempt, we had it. Our film opening was complete. We now had our final draft. It was time to go to sleep. I can't wait for everyone to see it.