Blue Murder

We were given rough footage from the television show Blue Murder which is a police drama. Our task was to take the footage which is over fifteen minutes of footage and edit it down to a one minute clip. My group decided to present the one minute clip as “previously on Blue Murder…”. We decided it would be best to keep the context of the television the show and use this one minute clip to update the audience of what happened previously on the show in order to refresh the audience memory of last week’s episode before watching the brand new episode. All the clips we chose were high intensity showing the most crucial parts of the show. We were not allowed to use synched audio from the show, so my group wrote voice narrative script, and then recorded it to fill in the gaps of where we were missing information. We decided to get rid of the visual time code at the bottom of the screen to make the scene seem more real.

One thing we had to fix in the video was Constable Chazz was shooting in one direction and the bad guys were shooting in a different direction than the police officer. We did not want to cross the 180 rule because it did not make sense. We decided that we would flip the scene where the cop was shooting in order to keep continuity between the scenes. In Final Cut we “flopped” the whole images it made more sense since the shooters and the cop now looked like they were shooting at each other. One last thing we had to consider since we flopped the scene was that the licence plate on the van was now backwards. We decided to fix this and blur out the licence plate, just like they do in some cop television shows or on the news.

Our one minute clip had to include two or more criteria given to us. Our group chose to express/ tells a story and hints of an autobiography. The one minute clip focuses on a day in the life of Constable Chazz as a police officer. We see him walking around downtown Toronto, when he hears gun firing and he runs to the scene of the crime. The video tells a story of Chazz as a police officer saving people’s lives and preventing/ stopping crime. The clip also hints at an autobiography since it shows him doing his daily tasks at work and how he responds in this high intensity situation. A person's job can show you a lot about a person’s character and this helps to show Constable Chazz in an autobiographical state.

Finally, we were told to address one item from Robert Bresson’s notes on sound. Our group decided to address was “image and sound must not support each other, but must work each in turn through a sort of relay”. This one seemed the more reasonable to consider since we were not allowed to use synched audio. This made us really consider and have to find appropriate sound and to link it with what images. Or in some cases, the visual images were more important and could stand alone without having some kind of soundtrack added to better a scene or to emphasis it. The video and sound were not used to support each other but worked together in order to make the best piece of work.


Blue Murder from Leah Fendley on Vimeo.