Signing out

I have really enjoyed working on so many different projects to lead up to a final project that turned out really well. I have also enjoyed learning about new techniques with software, working with different people and getting to know about the film industry.

Although some parts were challenging to do, I think I have gotten so much better at using all this technology and hope I can continue to get better.

Thanks to everyone that worked with me and helped create something new :) and to everyone that followed on this journey.

THE FINAL THRILLER OPENING - CAPTIVE

Evaluation Question 1

Showing the title of the thriller over a blank screen. We used this because it would stick in the audience's head. Making it identifiable. The large font contrasts to the black background, making it easy to see and also letting the audience know it is important.

When we were planning our thriller opening we had to think what would be our USP to attract our target audience. We had to make sure that conventions of film openings were followed to maximise the chances of a succesful thriller opening.

Using famous London landmarks identifies this film opening as being a british film. The audience could relate back to it.

GIF showing and following conventions of a thriller opening. The shot is an establishing shot taken from 'Psycho'  and compared against ours.

We studied various different thriller openings to understand the conventions of title sequences as they all mostly have a very similar structure. The reason films have a followed structure is so the audience can understand better. For example, leaving the title of the film a few seconds longer than the rest.

Evaluation Question 2

Collage showing different stereotypes

In our film opening, we have challenged the stereotype of women, as our main character is a dominant female. This also changed the general target audience of thrillers, as the target audience are predominantly 18-30 year old males.

We chose to challenge the conventions because we thought it would appeal to women, it also has a twist on events as the main character is cynical, which contrasts to the the majority of thrillers that the female is usually the victim. However, the young girl is also a main character, and it shows binary oppositions between innocence and evil.

The main character is also quite young, which is why we chose our target audience to be 16-25, the audience can relate back to the character. As females and males in between these ages are more likely to go to the cinema and also are more interested in watching thriller movies.

In our thriller opening we have represented our character in a negative way, as she is mischievous, but not in the stereotypical youth aspect, we have represented her as a grown woman, that works and has a life of her own. The opening is very mysterious and we don't get a sense of her real personality until the end of the opening.

Evaluation Question 3

In our thriller we have used our own productions and distribution companies. The logo of Candi Studios (our distribution company) show the audience that a small independent company has distributed it.

Our production company is our own, we have called it CGH Entertainment, it is the members in our group's names combined to make an easy but rememberable name. These are both small independent companies as our budget is low, but with the help of free promotion such as social networking e.g. Facebook, the more audience we get will be beneficial to our production company to be known.

I believe that these companies were best suited to our film because they show that the film is of a low budget, and that we have tried to establish that the production and distribution companies are new, which is why we need to spread the word using advertising techniques.

If we had expanded we would most likely use Lionsgate as our production company because we know they make a lot of horror movies such as the Saw movies. They are a worldwide company and have a lot of connections to allow us to expand further int the film industry.

Evaluation Question 4

As a group we created a model Facebook page for what our target audience would look like. We named her 'Chelsea Brown' and she is 17 years old. We thought it would be an effective way to portray  what our target audience may be interested in and what  her personality would possibly be like.

Some artist and band preferences. We have learnt that thriller movie goers can be somewhat into more indie/rock music, as thriller are usually for 'thrill seekers'. This can potentially mean they could be into loud, rock type of music. 

We also made a Tumblr to show visually what she is interested in for example her music tastes and possible hobbies. We have done research into character profiles to ensure that we can use a realistic character based on what we have learnt. 

Our target audience has been aimed at females from the age of 16-25, we have lowered the usual age of 18 to 16 because we have a young dominant female role, which our target audience can relate back to. This is also used as a main USP, as usually thriller movies have a dominant male role and the female is usually the victim. We have challenged the conventional target audience to show that females can also enjoy a good thriller movie.

These are some movie pages Chelsea has liked, they include thriller movies of
different type of genres. This shows her interest in thrillers and films in general, which makes for a good character as we think our character should know about the genre of film we are making to make her look realistic. 

As thrillers are usually targeted at an older audience we need to ensure that people younger that 16 should not watch it, this is because of the mental issues raised within thriller movies, as our subgenre is psychological, sometimes it is discomforting to watch something 'unordinary'. Especially as younger people (females) can memorise things better, it may be an issue for them to watch it. However there is a young main character in our film opening, but as she is the actress she understands what is happening.

Evaluation Question 5

I believe our thriller opening appealed to our target audience because it is a storyline that is not commonly used, we have included the binary oppositions of good vs evil but with a twist. Usually it is a male character that is mischievous and cunning, but we decided to have a plot twist as it would make the audience more excited to know what would happen next.

Our mise-en-scene was effective in the way that we used props and costumes that would give a suspensful atmosphere.
Props like toys around the house allowed the audience to start thinking about what may happen next without revealing to much.
The costumes were effective because it showed binary oppositions between bright and dark, which could allow the audience to see the opposition between a childs innocence and a grown womans mind frame.
The character had to be able to show little emotion in the performance, so to make it seem quite difficult to read her. We also tried to make her look quite mysterious through camera shots, as you only see her face from a low angle a minute into the opening.

The rough cut helped us a lot with feedback, we struggled because our software crashed twice and didn't allow us to save our work in time, so we started from scratch twice. But the feedback we got was very helpful, most of it was good feedback but we were told that some of the shots we did with the character walking along the river were too long and could bore the audience. We know that thrillers usually use short cuts in between scenes to add suspense so this is what we worked on.


We have reached our audience so far by cinema screening it in 'On The Green'.

Evaluation Question 6

Evaluation Question 7

Through this journey of knowing little about different editing softwares to know knowing how to use the softwares effectively I can say that I have matured in my editing skills in our final thriller opening. We used many different softwares to ensure we got the maximum and our full potential showed in the thriller opening. Getting feedback and re-working on small shots, changing small sections and being able to produce a 2-3 minute opening for a thriller allowed us to see how experience and research can create a thriller opening that creates the effect we wanted.

Pre-production was made quite difficult for us as we had different ideas as to which would be more exciting for our audience, most were based along the same lines, having a female main character was put across in all of our ideas because we only had girls in our group and also would challenge conventions and stereotypes of females, which was brought across well in our final opening.

Our preliminary task didn't have good lighting, as we only had a short time to film and plan we had to think quick on our feet so we could get good footage. However the lighting was a problem. We first filmed with natural lighting, on the camera we could just about see what was happening, which we thought would create suspense and tension, but when we put it back onto the computer the lighting had decreased and hardly anything was visible, we had to reshoot that scene in the small room again using an artifical light (DIDO light),which gave a bright spotlight on our character. Personally I didn't like using artficial light because it made it look more like a crime thriller than a psychological thriller.

However we did get all the shots we were told to do and more. We also did this in our final opening. We used as many possible shots as we could without making it look over done and I think we achieved this really well.

Storyboarding was quite quick and easy, by that time we had a full idea on what we were going to produce and the different type of shots we were going to do. The prelim was quite short and we used close up shots of a hand to create mystery before entering the room.

Both the prelim and final thriller opening were narrative openings. But we used Captive over a blank screen to ensure the audience could memorise this.

The costumes used in our prelim were casual clothing, as we didn't have to much time to prepare it was quite difficult to get a costume ready, we still created an element of surprise.

Editing shots were quite easy, we always had in mind the 180 degree rule because we know that is important and allows the audience not to get confused. We stuck to this rule and we used it effectively. Match cutting in our prelim we used a  hand opening the door. We also used something similar in our thriller opening, when the main character pulls of a poster from the wall, it is a match cute from closeup of the hand to a medium shot of her walking.

The sounds we used were also from he 'dissonant' category in Soundtrack, we feel that this is a really effective category to use when creating a tense atmosphere. We used it effectively in our Prelim and in our final opening.

FINISHED !

The final touches we had to make on our Thriller was adding in the last set of Titles and ensuring that the music matched the clips being shown. We finished editing before the deadline and we had more than enough time look over our final product. The very last thing we had to do was marked the words finished next to our group number to make it official.

Target audience for thriller

Our target audience is around 15-25 aged females.
We have gone against the stereotypical male target because our leading roles are females. This challenges the conventions of a typical thriller, which could also widen our audience, as it would attract males and females. Doing research into thrillers allowed us to acknowledge the importance of a target audience. A target audience allows us to see what type of things we will use to aim it at this specific group, this includes colours, costumes and everything to do with mise-en-scene and visual aspects like posters(if we were to take it further). Having females as a target audience widens the field as males are more likely to come and see the film.

We are happy with our decision because again it challenges the stereotype, and can also be enjoyable for females to watch.

We started the age range at 15 because our film would not have any explicit content. There would be action scenes that would be appropriate at the age of 15. As our main character is quite young also we tried to widen the age range.

PRACTICE: Prelim - Preparation, planning, storyboard, animatic

To prepare for our prelim we got ideas from other thriller movies, we also watched the thriller openings that other students had made to ensure that we used a range of camera shots and angles.
Openings on the blog also helped us as they were categorised into subgenres so we could focus on what a psychological thriller looked like. We saw Arlington Road but it wasn't what we were aiming for as that was heavily stylised to give a very distorted and confusing look. We looked at more narrative openings and we found 'The Panic Room', which had establishing shots of the city, then proceeded to show more of the characters. We thought this would be effective to use as a guide, and also helped us with the positioning of the titles and the order of them.

We planned the shots by using other thriller openings as a guide, by seeing the shots we were able to suggest how we were going to shoot and where. As we had little time to film our prelim we kept the location simple, in our college. As for the shots, we decided to plan some, and then allow for others to be decided whilst filming, this would allow us to experiment with the same scene but different shots, to see which one was the most effective in its corresponding place.

Planning: Treatment for the whole film

For the whole film we would also use the same software, Final Cut, Soundtrack Pro and possible Motion. These are very handy as they allow for a lot of creativity and once we learnt how to use them efficiently we could create a successful film. However we would need more equipment such as artificial lighting where real lighting was bad or low. We would also need to think about our locations, as most of our opening is set outside in the streets on London, we would have to think carefully about where would be a good place to film.

We came up with the idea of filming abroad(adventurous) but it would show technique and skill, most thrillers and most films in general usually have some sort of scenery shift, were the characters are put into different atmospheres, it creates a whole new view of a character and how they respond in being in these different places. We thought that after the woman kidnaps the child, they would move to a different country, as the police are on the move and are close to catching her. Moving to a new country would also produce conflict in the film, making it more suspenseful.

Making a whole film would take more time, but using the right software we could make it a believable story.

Planning: Props and costume

For the main character we have chosen business/working type clothing. This will allow the audience to view her as a 'normal' character, and then be surprised to find it she isn't as normal as they thought.
The black clothing could give a mysterious sense to the character, but again, may seem to the audience as normal due to black being a popular colour to wear for work. The red lipstick however connotes danger, it is also in contrast to the clothing and therefore could show a double personality.

The child will be wearing ordinary childrens clothing, bright and colourful will contrast the black outfit and could show difference. It would also show a childs innocence.

As there are only two characters it wasn't hard to find these things. These are all things we found at home.

PRELIM: Evaluation

I think our prelim went very well. We though about the angles and shots and the variety we could have to ensure it was effective and everything ran smoothly.

We were given a brief on which we had to follow, it included some shots we had to take. The brief was quite broad, which allowed us to experiment, but as we only had a short period of time to film it we stuck to an easy place to film, giving us enough time to also re-film if we had made any mistakes, and to edit.

We chose our location to be in a small dark room in our college, which gave a mysterious look. We chose this because we thought it would run with our theme of a psychologic thriller which is what we tried to convey on camera.

We used match cuts, close ups and long shots to show our understand of how these shots worked and why they were convenient to use. For example, we used a close up on the subject opening the door handle, and a long shot to show the subject walking to the room. We used a panning shot while shooting the other main character, we panned from the bottom to the top of her body, which also added tension as the viewer would question what would happen next.

We also used artificial lighting in the dark room as the room was very enclosed and didn't let enough light in. We used a DIDO light to create a yellow spotlight, then we dimmed it so it wasn't so bright. This proved effective as we could create a sense of mystery.

We muted the sound as it wasn't very well recorded and added non diegetic sound from Soundtrack Pro to add tension to the scene. We used music from the category 'dissonant' and 'dark' as they fit well with what was happening in the scene. We also noticed that the prelim worked well without diegetic sound.

Overall I think the brief given is what we made sure of following. We used the types of shots they asked us to use and also used more to show evidence of understanding. As we also had time to film and edit and some spare time left over we ensured everything was exactly the way we wanted it to be.

From making this prelim we familiarised ourselves properly with the equipment we would be using to film our actual thriller opening, and also experimenting with Soundtrack Pro, Final Cut and the shots and angles we used allowed us to plan ahead and look into depth of each shot we would be using for our thriller opening. We also know that sometimes a shot can be planned but can be changed if we see something more suitable for the scene. Next time we film will be for our thriller, so we have to ensure that we can get as many different shots into the opening as possible without making it look over done.

Filming: Photos

These are some pictures of us on set at Tower Bridge. We used this to film establishing shots as well as shots of me walking. This also gave the audience insight of where the film is set. As it is a British film we decided to include famous landmarks to make the viewers aware. We had to sign a form so we could film as we weren't allowed to film the buildings.

Carina setting up the camera and giving directions. We had a bit of trouble with the rain but we put an umbrella over it so it wouldn't get damaged.

Pictures of me getting ready to film our shots walking.

Our poster for the 'missing child' . My group member Hermenia went online to look for ideas to make the poster look as effective and real as it could. The red letters also contrast well. 

Scenery of where we were.

Our second location, we filmed just 10 minutes down from Tower Bridge, the old and narrow pathways around there gave a mysterious feel to the opening.

Filming.

Carina filming the scenery.

A look at the type of shot we were filming.

Vlog About Our Idea

This is a vlog we made shortly after we were put into a group and given the task. In the vlog we discuss our Initial Ideas for our Thriller.
This vlog will help you see how our idea evolved as time went by and other ideas we had for thrillers.

PITCH Feedback

We showed our Final thriller pitch to our classmates and teachers. From that we gathered some information that would allow us to explore and develop possibly a better thriller. Overall the feedback we got was very good, we had a strong pitch a a well though out idea that showed understanding of all our research. We also got some possible ideas to add or create a better effect on the audience. We had originally planned to do a narrative opening with a chronological view, but then from the feedback we were given an idea from a member of staff that we should intertwine the two seperate characters. So instead of following the main characters path, we would show small clips that would allow the audience to question what was happening. We will take this into account while filming our scenes and then see what scenes work best where while editing.

Research into Film Titles: Evidence of research

As a group we decided that the most effective way of adding in titles was through Final Cut, it was easier than using other software. But we had trouble finding a font that looked professional but was still minimal. We also wanted it to stand out, which is why we kept it white. We also kept it this way because we looked at other film openings like 'Arlington Road' and 'Mezrine' and they both have white fonts to contrast the background. I feel like it has worked and proved effective because it allows the audience to focus on the scenes behind the opening titles. We also followed the conventions of a typical thriller movie, this is to ensure that we can show our understanding of conventions and therefore make an effective opening.

Adding titles.

These are some screen prints of the titles we were adding. As seen, we tried to make the titles contrast to the background. We also followed the conventions of a typical thriller opening as we have put all of our titles in the correct order. This shows our understanding of how and why titles are placed in certain places, for example, the main actors/actresses always are put one after the other, with about 4 seconds showing each. Then actors that have smaller roles, are shown for less time, and often put together.

We can also see that we have put the first names and first words larger and in bold. This catches the audience attentions. We added fades to smooth out the look of the titles. And it also created a more professional look.