Evaluation

Evaluation

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Final Cut

New idea

Unfortunately we were unable to reshoot singular shots due to the weather and our actress couldnt make it, so we've decide to start again with a new idea.

new shot list;

1. arch of trees with titles on top

2. further into the woods

3. LS of victim lying on the floor

4. tree with titles, then track 180 round the tree to find antagonist sharpening knives

5. LS of victim on the floor with antagonist in the foreground

6. ECU of gagged mouth with antagonist's feet in the background

7. pan to teddy thrown on the floor

we have come to a decision on the font for the titles;

http://www.dafont.com/font.php?file=bleeding_cowboys&page=1&nb_ppp_old=10&text=Decade+Late&nb_ppp=10&psize=m&classt=alpha

We have decided on a new name, Decade Late, and the font was found in the western category which reinforces our genre is a western thriller, due to the stand off between 2 characters.

Rough Cut

we recieved feedback about our first draft of our thriller opening and the general reaction was the it was too cliché, so we have decided we will try to add in something a bit different to it.

Tuesday 9th Feb

On tuesday 9th feb we spent the day looking at how to improve our coursework. The first thing we questioned was "is it cliché?". Our piece incompasses a lot of woods/a girl tied up/flashbacks of being dragged - this would suggest the answer is yes.
We talked over many new ideas on how to change the focus of the story to something more originally. We discussed the new edited rough-cut, and noticed that the flashbacks weren't obvious enough making the flow of the images unclear. and also the flash backs jumped from very different stages into her downfall which to an audience may be very confusing. We thought the slow continuous pace was effective, but but turns out, the 45second introduction of setting the wood scene is just a bit too long... so we decided to cut it to just two or three 5second fades.
we found that we had too many close ups of the hands and gagged mouth meant the had to get rid of a few shots. We thought about more flashbacks following the story of how she got there more, but decided they weren't effective enough and therefore removed several of these. This left us with VERY little, and were forced to come up with a better idea.
The fact that our movie was beginning to become a Psychological Thriller, which restricts the amount of styles filming we achieved. We talked about combining two genres, and decided a western thriller would work well mixing up the style of the story. Shots such as jump cuts from two characters in a duel would be converted to fast jump cuts from the antagonist to the victim from their point of views.
It started to look like we were changing our whole original idea so we then tried thinking of which shots we have already filmed to use. The ones we liked best where the disorientating trees, and a e.c.u with the camera on the floor filming the gagged lips. Because a lot of the shots were taken from a third person perspective, we changed it to the perspective of mainly the antagonists. To stay away from even more cliché, the antagonist is going to be female. Maybe a relative, or parent of one of the victims friends. In conjucntion with the 'teddybear picnic' juxtaposition of lively upbeat childhood movie while watching the thriller, we connected the reason for the attack to a repressed memory the antagonist has towards this girl from when she was younger. A tattered old toy bear is going to symbolical to the reason of her actions, how her body is going to end up after the woman attacks her with the knife.
We then created a new shot list and storyboard suggesting the new shots we need to organise to shoot. We have got a new actress, Louise Huntley, to be the antagonist, but we had a problem with the deadline and organizing a shoot. Because of the last minute change, Jordan was unavailable to act, so we changed the victim to lauren, in our group, this is also good because she knows exactly how we want the character to be.

ILP plan

We are spending and entire day to our media coursework
certain aspects we need to focus on are;
a new title, this includes: coming up with a title that is better for our thriller, and new fontto go with it and a title sequence to fit. we can use sites like http://www.dafont.com/ to find new and interesting fonts that go well with our title.
We also wanted to change the non diegetic music of our opening sequence to something with a bit more of an edge, we are considering the tune 'Teddy bears picnic' . It would be a great juxtaposition to have really sinister action happening with a happy childs song in the background, as we developed we found that we were happy with the name 'Down to the Woods'.
We then also decided that a little girl humming the tune to teddy bear picnic, with little piano joining in later would be effective. The idea of singing ' if you go down to the woods today' as the title apears is an experiment we are doing to try out once we record the sounds ourselves. We also decided to try introducing a low males voice humming under the girls to be symbolical to danger. these are some of the variations we have discussed

This is our achievement list:

- Discuss/re-write order of shots (what to keep/cut out)
- create title font desing and other titles (effect on title dissapearing - sand? )
- possibly change the name
- add zooms and flash and change colours on selection of shots
- plan to re-shoot tree's - sun - continuity
- or darken other sunny shots..
- Blog the work achieved

Filming

On january 17th we went out filming;

all of our group went to a woodland area in Jordans, and filmed all the footage we needed our actress, Jordan matthews for, from several different angles and time so that we shouldnt need to go out another time unless we had to reshoot something..

The first problem we faced was at 10:00 when we were preparing to go out filming, we checked the camera only to find out the battery was flat, so we needed to charge it as much as we could before going to film. we used this time to prepare everything fully, for example putting make up on our actress, we then shot the only shot that is inside first. the only reason it was such an issue was because we had hoped to go out in the morning to get natural morning light rather than midday.

Props/Costume/Actors

Props
rope
red lipstick
wine glass
going out high heels
dark cloth or scarf

Costume list

ripped lace tights
heels
party dress
sparkly shawl

Make up


*BEFORE & AFTER PHOTO*


Actress
Jordan Matthews - playing Catherine

Changing Winds Animatic

This is our animatic of our storyboard, it just shows what our final thriller opening will look a little bit like.
we put it together on Adobe Premiere Pro, by adding photos of our story board (some editing to be darker/lighter)
We also found the music called Eerie Angel on www.freeplaymusic.com which is a site with uncopyrighted music on. We then edited it on Audacity to make it fit with the sequence, and also the bang for the flash backs we found too. We then created our own diegetic sounds like the wind (havent decided if we will use that in the real thing)

this is our storyboard we have created for our final peice, next we will turn this into an animatic

Shotlist

• Establishing setting – edge of woodland area
• Getting deeper into the woods
• Zoom into woods
• Zoom deeper
• LA shot of tall trees
• Black screen
• Woods + whistle
• ELS dog crossing camera path (walking)
• Woods + whistle (darker)
• LS dog (away from camera)
• MS of dog sniffing
• Woods – dog comes through bushes
• Shot of dogs feet walking
• Sniffing – found body
• Black screen – titles
• Just sounds – twigs breaking, heavy breathing
• CU of hands tied up
• Very short cut of body being dragged
• Hand tied – twitch
• Pan across arm – gagged mouth
• Dragging body
• CU gagged mouth – panicky breathing
• Flash back to when attacker was putting gag on her
• Face twitching
• POV of trees – disorientating
• Fast panning of trees
• Reverse shot back to POV again
• Struggle to get up, HA
• CU fidgeting hands
• Eyes open ECU shot

Continuity task finished

My groups feedback from the rest of the class + targets:
-Full variety of shots
-effective use of camera/editing
-framing mostly ok - need to improve P.O.V shot reverse shot
-sound poor due to choice of location - need to improve diegetic sound/acoustics/dialogue

we were giving 30 marks out of 60, 50%

we know what our weak points were and what we need to focus on to make our thriller opening now we can get on with it

Continuity Task

We were given the task to create a short 1 minute film with minimum 15 shots, we were given a shotlist to follow but we made up the scene/setting/dialogue etc.


1.Person A walks up to a door
2.Handle is opened / pulled
3.Shot of person A walking through the door
4.Shot of person B sat down
5.Shot of person A sitting down next to them.
6.Shot of person A asking person B if they are ok?
7.Reverse shot (CU) of person B replying?
8.Two shot of person A and B – person B asks person A a question
9.Shot of person A’s reaction and answer
10.Shot of person B’s response.
11.This may be reapeated and varied as conversation develops – think carefully about this part. The scripting is important here!
12.Shot of person A getting up.
13.Shot of person A walking away.
14.(Possible) shot of Person B.
15.Person A exits through same door as entrance. (Do NOT break the 180 degree rule!)

We filmed in one of the music practise rooms, we had a problem with space in that room. also we had issues with our camera and couldn't get it to focus. we were allowed to shoots some shots again on a different day and turn a blind eye to the bad continuity of clothes etc.
...As it was our first experience of filming...

Brainstorm

This is a brain storm, my group and i made to develop our ideas for our thriller opening task

Results from survey

I sent my survey link to via email to a selection of friends and family:
The responses i recieved as a reply to 'What is a Thriller?' were fairly similar:
In general my audience wish to be either scared/thrilled/action based/tension/engaging storyline/suspense

I also asked 'What makes a good thriller?', to try and provoke more detail into what the audience actually want from their thrillers:
i recieved answers such as 'jumpy scenes'/adrenaline/suspense/'build up to pinicle point'/moving/depth/realism

This will help me for when i go on to filming my own thriller extract.

Thriller Openings Conclusion

After looking at a selection of thriller film openings, i can conclude that most, not all, thrillers follow a list of semiotics that are iconic to the genre. For example the majority of the opening sequences i've studied or seen or spoke about are generally very simple; dim lighting, white on black composition/text, and very little (if any) storyline to the first 2 minutes of the film, as it is not needed. the director would use typical camera/editing/sound/mise en scene techniques to portray the genre in the opening sequence and establish the rest of the film.

BBFC: What makes a 15 and 18 certificate

The BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) is the agency which classifies the certificate rating of films in britian, they rate all films and judge what certificate they should be by whether the content is suitable.
The BBFC rates films into the following catorgories: U PG 12 12A 15 18 R18.

15:
15 rated certificate majoritively allow moderate violence, gore and sexual activity, but not too frequent and must be relevant. Drug taking is not banned but should not be promoted.

18:
18 rated certificates allow gore, violence, sexual activity and drug taking. again, not to be promoted. The difference between the two certificates is diciphered by it's explicity.

Details found from: http://www.bbfc.co.uk/

Questionnaire

Click Here to take survey
this is my survey i created as part of my research into the thriller genre

Walk On The Wild Side

The sequence begins zooming into a black cats face until the cats eyes centralised. To the viewer this connotes that cat will serve some importance in the upcoming scene or further on in the film. The use of low key lighting creates a mysterious sense about the whole sequence, what we see is very limited, just backgroud walls/pipes whilst tracking the cat walking, use of slow pace dissolves at different points of the cats journey, parts inbetween are not nessacery therefore at skipped. Iconic Thriller convention, Binary Opposition is used in the opening, with the black cat on the majoritively white background.
Non-Diegetically added brassband added is iconic of the thriller genre, coincides with the drums building up pace, indexical of something about to happen, when the tension builds the audience know that there will be some climax to come. This is reinforced by the editing, fades and dissolves are used to slow the pace of the opening down until it gets closer to the cats fighting when the editing speeds up. The other cat is a white cat, symbolic of the enemy, as the other cat is different to the one which has been in shot until that point. At this point aspects of an action thriller become apparent, and the pace is much quicker and music louder. This sequence connotes the forthcoming film in that there will be some form of confrontation between the 'goodies and baddies' and we will see the build up.

Using HD Camera's

We had one lesson in which, in our coursework groups we were given a HD camera and a tripod to spend some time practising filming, we practised shots such as LS, CU, ECU, MS as well as angles like LA, HA, Birds eye view and worms eye view. also practiced zooms, pans, and tracks.
This was good practise for when we start filming our openings and continuety tasks.
We didn't however have the chance to upload them onto the computers as they werent working at the time.

Adobe Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro is a software that we'll be using frequently throughout our media studies course in order to peice together clips to form our work.
Last week we had a few lessons focusing on how to use Adobe Premiere Pro, we were given the raw files to an a level opening sequence to a film from last year, and we had to recreate the sequence using premiere pro.
First we imported the clips on to the computer, then put them in order,
we then learnt the techiques such as editing using frames and about FPS (trim/cut)
adding transitions, adding titles (positioning/opacity/keyframes), adding effects/animations and sound effects/overplay