How to make our film look more professional

When creating a film, you want it to look professional and of good quality, which is why I decided to do some research into how we can achieve this in order to reflect what I have learnt and found out and apply it to our film.

1) Trim it

The first thing I found out is that unnecessary shots make the audience less interested and makes the film seem slightly tedious, so the best thing to do is trim the shot down to only what is needed. Any basic editing software has a trim tool and as we are using Final Cut Express to edit our film, we are all perfectly aware of where the 'cut' tool is. We became familiar with this software as we used it last year when creating a 2 minute introduction to a film therefore we feel a lot more confident using it this year.

The cut button is located in the tool pallet which has been highlighted in a black oval shape.

2) Attach a logo

The second tip I found to making your film look more professional was to add a stamp/logo. As a group, we created a Logo for our film, however, in our rough draft of our film, we did not attach the logo to it. Therefore, as a result of this research in our final copy of our film, we will include our logo amongst the title sequence which will help the audience to identify with our film.

Here I have included our logo which will be featured in our film. This was created on Photoshop and we used a drawing pad free-handed to transfer it onto the computer.

3) Colour correction

Colour correction is a very important when ensuring your film looks of a professional quality.While many see colour correction as a simple way to fix problems with the original footage, there’s a lot more to it than that. Colour correction can perform real magic on any project, no matter what the final output is. From broadcast shows and independent movies, to DVDs and streaming videos, colour correction is the perfect technique to not only make the final video look outstanding but also to give new meaning to certain scenes. Adopting colour correction as one of the necessary steps in your postproduction sessions can make such a difference in the final results that you may soon find your productions rising to a whole new level, taking you several steps ahead of the competition. Already, we have used this technique in our rough copy of our film. In one of the shots, the lighting outside was slightly darker which created a blue filter on the frame which we did not want. Using the colour corrector, we was able to match it to the next frame which allowed us to edit continuously thus enabling us to achieve e a more professional looking scene.

Here we can see what a difference colour correction can actually make and how many different effects it can achieve.

4) Depth of focus

The final thing I concluded as part of my research is the importance of the depth of field. At first, I didn't quite understand what this was, however, after looking more into it I found that it is

the amount of distance between the nearest and farthest objects that appear in acceptably sharp focus in a photograph. A preferred selection Depth of field in a focused subject in an image can be quite subjective. So, why is this so important? Using this method you can direct the focus of your audience toward whatever element you desire to showcase. Thus subconsciously telling them “this is important.” It is also important to ensure the DOF does not create a 'muddy' effect in which someone shoots wide open and part of the subject is out of focus.

 

Here I have attached a good example of a muddy shot which was taken from the them 'abortion'.

 

When you really think about it, DOF is just another framing edge. Just like left, right, top, and bottom of the frame can be used to isolate the scene; DOF can be used to control how deep a scene is. This gives the cinematographer the option to limit space. Take for example a car park. In reality it may be a large space, using shallow depth of field one can create a very small, intimate scene with a character.

 

Here I have attached an Image which displays a good depth of focus which we will try to re-create in our film in order to achieve a more professional feel.

 

 5) Youtube links on how to use editing software

 

I have also attached some links to some Youtube videos which show how to create a more professional look when editing with popular editing software which has also proven useful when editing our short film 'Lola'.