During the animation process one of our lecturers, Rachel had given Ellie and I feedback on the ending of our film and had suggested that we change it. We took this on board and Ellie has sketched an alternate sequence. Originally, the audience followed Valerie as she left her apartment and took a bus to an unknown location before cutting back to the apartment to see the Meredith shrine. The sequence Ellie drew up would show the audience Valerie packing her bag and leaving the apartment, but the audience stays as there are shots showing the sun slowly rise and then the Meredith shrine is shown. After sketching it and talking about it, Ellie and I liked this sequence more, so we edited our shot list to include these new shots and I drew up new backgrounds
During this time, we also discussed adding some extra shots to flesh out certain scenes or make them flow smoother, such as having Valerie show more hesitation before hunting down a cat, or showing her spindly monster form passing by her phone. I feel as though these changes did strengthen our film overall.
It was around this point we had settled on a new title for the film. For a long time we were using the working title The Night Valerie Went Missing, but we felt that was too wordy, so we looked at alternate titles.
- Her Blood On My Hands
- Valerie’s Muse
- Valerie’s Obsession
- Valerie’s Blood
- Blood on the Canvas
- Blood Thinner (like paint thinner)
- Imperfect Red
- The Shadow of Valerie
- Valerie
- The Art of Death / The Art in Death
- The Death in Art
- Almost Dead
- What I’ve Become / What She Has Become
- What I’ve Done
- My Broken Heart
- Wrapped in Blood
- Trap of Art
- Shadows In Paint
- Shadows In Blood
- Blood in Paint
None of these had worked for us, as we thought they were either too long, wouldn’t work well for a logo on a poster or just didn’t fit our film. Because of this we settled on the title of Valerie. It was short, simple and worked well on the poster, so it’s what we went forward with.