Editing
One of the main conventions in horror films is the fear of the unknown, which in After Hours, we wanted to convey through darkness and to play on audiences fear of the unknown and the dark. One of the key scenes in our short film involves this convention as we first are introduced to the monster character. We thought it was particularly important to build tension during this scene through the lighting and so to create the effect of the lights in the lift flickering and flashing on and off, we used the cutting tool in Adobe Premiere Pro to cut up in the clips and create the impression of darkeness where the clip no longer showed. As you can see from this screenshot, we decided to build tension even further by making the flickers more frequent and short.
One challenge we had in our short film was when creating the effect of the lift 'breaking down' and hence having the appearence of the room shaking as the lift broke down. To make this realistic we therefore used keyframes to change the 'postion' of the shot through each frame. After multiple uses of the keyframes and tweaking of wereabouts we wanted the shot to move or 'shake to', we could eventually create the quick shaking effect you see in the film.
One of the most common pieces of editing througout the film was the creation of the 'CCTV' to convey the theme of voyeurism. Of course through the location we chose we were unable to collect real CCTV footages in the buildings and also the CCTV camera's that were availabe did not always give us the exact view we wanted. So to create the appeareance of CCTV we first used the effect 'Spherize' and adjusted this until we were able to create the 'fisheye' look that many CCTV camera's hold. In addition to this we used the effect 'Circle' to emaphise the 'fisheye' CCTV camera look and feathered the edges to make it seem more like a real CCTV TV screen.
To add the final touches which helped the CCTV camera appear even more realistic we the added the effect 'noise' to make the camera appear more grainy and believable and changed the colour balance to a more green tone, as green tints are often seen in many CCTV cameras, particualrly ones used in films. One of the main giveaways to the audience that this is a CCTV camera is the use of the effect 'timecode' which we adujusted to give the real look of time and which security camera it is.Despite this process being one of the more length parts of the editing, we knew it was worth and successful in achieving the most realistic effect we could with the software we had.
Another Effect we used in our short film was the effect 'ghosting'. This was effective in helping us create a more distorted picture of our monster in the lift scene, which helped make the scene's atmosphere appear more tense and creepy distort the audiences view. Therefore, we wanted the monster to appear almost 'ghost like' and mysterious and using this effect helped us increase the mystery and also terror of the ghostly character.
Finally, to make our film appeal more to younger audiences and also to fit with the theme of CCTV, we decided to use special effects on our title so create the look of a 'glitch', which you may often see on a CCTV screen. We therefore followed the instructions of the Youtube tutorial above and used the 'glitch' template given. We thought the use of this effect was also effective in increasing the creepyness of the film as the glitch appears to be quite distorting to the audience which is the effect we wanted to create.