'Killing Conscience' Editing Treatment

The editing for this piece will be clean and use continuity editing up until the flashbacks where, to create the effect of disorientation, things aren’t in order, shots are skewed etc. Editing to create flashbacks isn’t intended to look cliché so we’ll go about it differently – when zooming into the guy’s face (when he finds the body) a bright flash will be edited in to the scene to tell the audience we’re going into the character’s mind. The light will slowly fade into the scene where we see the suspects and the reason they may have committed the murder. As this is a flashback of a drunken party, the editing can feature continuity editing, jump cuts, discontinuity editing to disorientate the audience. The music we will reflect the action but also the noir characteristics of the piece. Upon zooming out of the guy’s face, the bright light will appear again and the zoom out will be sped up to invoke a sense of panic.

As the action is quite detailed, the opening titles will be placed before the starting scene. The typeface will be simple, but also reflect (along with colour) the noir feel of things.

Sound and music

The main focus of this post is to justify the sound and music we’ve chosen for our Film Noir Opening piece. To open, we’ve chosen a really soft, downbeat piece of music for the titles that sound-bridges into the first scene. This, in my opinion, creates an effective juxtaposition of sorts between the innocence of the white used in the title along with the scene of the character waking up compared to the silent shot of finding the girl in the bed bruised and bloodied.Next, we have the voice-overs. The reason we collectively decided to include a voice over is because we felt that the audience may be slightly confused and needed some insight into the character’s mind. I think the way it turned out is really effective. It compliments the scene, clarifies what’s happening, sets the audience up for the flashbacks and improves their relationship with the character. The voice-over of the girl is one of my favourites though, and the way it’s edited, in my opinion is really effective. We applied heavy reverb to her voice and added delay and a really eerie echo which is not only frighteningly ghostly, but makes the audience wonder why the male character is hearing this and makes them question his innocence.Finally, the music we used for the flashbacks, is a piece by an artist named Peaches. The music had a very grimy, seedy electro feel to it and we liked that it had very subtly appropriate lyrics. The line; “seems you got a little bit more than you asked for” also builds the sequence up and builds suspension and awe, things we definitely wanted to create in this opening body of work. Unfortunately, the music, named ‘More’, we used for the flashback sequences is not royalty-free so we will have to research how to propose to XL Recordings/Kitty-Yo, the owners of the song, for permission to use the material, organise to pay royalties, etc.

by Ben Halliday, Group Editor