My evaluation draft

My thriller was about a woman wanting revenge but set out to hurt the nearest person to his potential victim. The beginning of the thriller that we had to film takes place from the main characters house as she leaves and as she walks through the park, where she meets her end.
My thriller challenges forms and conventions in the fact that stalkers are normally thought of as male and their victims are normally female, but we wanted to change this and make the stalker female to create a new sense of fear for the audience because society have a set idea of how stalkers work and just by making this little change the audience expects something new from the very start.
Some of the openings of thrillers gave the story away from the start and this is a common way of shooting the opening so the rest of the film can give the explanation of what happened. And some gave away very little, we watched many different examples of this is well known films and had the choice of what we wanted to take from them to make our opening.
One example that slightly influenced us was the shining. The camera slowly follows the car like a bad omen and the only thing that gives off fear in the character is the scary, dramatic music that creates suspense.

Looking back at the first short film i did, i can see that my knowledge of camera shots and techniques are of a wider range and i have managed to include them in my thriller. I’ve also been able to include these shots in a complex way by learning how to use 'match cut' and make it flow nicely so it looks professional and this made it easier to make my thriller more interesting to the audience.
I’ve also learnt that planning plays a key part in making the beginning of the thriller because in situations that we were in we could only shoot most of the film in one day and planning it made sure we didn’t waste any time because we could always refer to the storyboards we did.

My Thriller does represent woman and how powerful they can be. Because most thrillers portray a female being the victim we wanted to change this and be different. Even though we still had the victim as a female we also had the stalker as a female so women are shown in two ways strong and also weak.

I feel that our Thriller would be a small independent UK release just because we have changed many concepts of a stereotypical thriller, which might not appeal to a wider range of audience for example abroad. But i do think that this would not hold the film back and it would prove its self as a successful film in the UK due to the open mind of the British public.

The audience that i think would best suite the thriller would be 15+. By having this age restriction on the thriller it is suitable for teens and older members of the public and they will be able to understand the concept of the thriller where as younger members of the public might struggle slightly. Families with older children can see this film together which would benefit us more because of a larger amount of people going to view it. I also think more women would go and see the thriller due to the fact it challenges the typical conventions of other thrillers by including a female character more heavily than usual thrillers might. The typical person that i think fits my target audience is a female who wants to watch something different and has an open view when going to see the thriller, she most probably wont be mainstream but want to experience and different take on the way she watches films and this thriller i think, would do just that not just in the way woman are represented but also in the different way its edited and the way it was shot.

I would market my film by addressing my audience through having a star as the lead role but making sure i the thriller still had British actors being an important part in the film, this would then attract a wider audience as they would recognise the lead character and draw their fans in to watch the film.
The trailers for my film wouldn’t be to long because i would want it to reflect the film and the way its been shot, so i would give away very little and tell the basic story through fast clips. I would also make it clear that the lead role was played by a 'star' but not take away from what that person’s role in the film actually is.

In my thriller there are typical shots that show the genre of the film for example the stalker grabbing the victim, and i would show this in the trailer but only at the end to leave the audience with a strong idea of what the films about or what they 'think' the film is about.

I would advertise the thriller using a strong influence from the internet and make sure it was seen heavily through this because the audience i would be trying to reach use the internet a lot and i would be able to get the film recognised more by using this to the films advantage. I would also have some billboards around places like west end etc that way i can reach a large amount of young people.


I have learnt many new ways of using technologies in my work for example Blogging my progress as i went along was something very different, and before i started working on the thriller i had in fact never blogged before. It was a something new i experienced and it helped with planning my thriller and learning from what goes into making it.
Using the cameras to film the thriller was also very beneficial because i learnt how to get different camera shots using a tripod or hand held. In addition, i learnt along with the rest of my group so this gave us more of an option on what we could do and different shots available to us.

When it came to editing, all the programs were quite new to me for example finale cut pro and sound track pro. This helped our film develop the way we wanted others to view it, we used this new technology to add music to the film and match cut all different shots.
When we had finished the film some of my group stored it on there USB and added it to youtube this meant more people had could view the film by visiting other sites than Blogger.com and Vimeo, we were able to reach a wider audience through the internet and new technology.

My shots

We finally got to actually see the inside of the library. We found out that it wasn't the kind of library that we was hoping it to be, we was expecting the library to be more dark and old looking but it was the total opposite of what we was expecting. So after we had a quick talk about how we could do the scenes that we was going to do in the library somewhere else, we all agreed that we should go back to college because we figured that we didn't exactly need this scene after all.

Once we got back we met our teacher who suggested what we should do instead and that it would be better if we done another scene. Where we see what the killer is doing by her self, he told us that we could use the studio room that was also our class room at the time because no one was actually using it at the time. We decided to follow this idea and so we moved on to shooing some shots of me on the computer doing some research on lethal poisons and strange articles on strange people. We decided that, we should start off by shooting a high angle shot of the computer on the desk with the chair under it. Then have the camera zoom in and out of focus, then have the same kind of shot but with me sitting in the chair but this time zooming out and into focus. This way when we go to edit this part we would be able to put the two together to give it a interesting effect. For the second shot we decided that we should have the camera at a lower angle. To create the effect of the viewers being smaller and over powered by the killer who is at the computer.

Over all i think that we succesfuly shot everything that we need for our film opening. We have enough material for when we come to edit all of our clips together.

Eye for an Eye

Final changes!!!!!!:)

On Thursdays morning I found out that our film was not finished, because Tony had sent the group an email to inform the group, the changes we needed to do to our film. We started to panic because none of my group members could edit the film on that day and the last day to edit was Friday and on Friday people had appointments and lessons that day. So we decided to come in at Friday lunch time to finish it off changing the titles and names, as well as putting our soundtrack on final pro cut.First the soundtrack did not fit in with the film when we placed in on final pro cut, so we had to edit the soundtrack again to make it fit. In addition we also added more titles to our film such as camera work, cinema photography and more. After making all the changes we finished our film and we were happy with it and ticked our name off the wall as finished group. :)

Half term

We had come in on our half term and finish off out fim because at this point we we're very far behind and only had done basic editing.
We ended up changing some of the effects we used in the fim because they made the film look finished.

At one point we thought we we're finished but realised it was only 16 seconds long so we had to start all over again and plan how we could make it longer without giving to much away. We included the footage of the charcter walking from her house into the park and used other random clips that we had shot after like someone on a computer and a persons eyes. this made the film more scary and it helped with making it longer.

Still Editing!

We started use effects to make out film confuse the viewers, we did this by usin negatives and rewinding the footage so the charcater (me) walked backwards and fowards.
We wanted to use the effects we're the camera was hidden in bushes and etc.
We also slowed down the footage of the character walking normally so the viewer still knew what was goin on.

As we did this we we're learning how to use final cut pro so it took us two lessons to complete but in the end we we're happy with the end result.

We rembered some of the tecniques we had seen in other thrillers in media lessons and tired to use parts of it in the way we used the effects in our film, we didnt want to use to many of them but also had to be careful we didnt use to little.

Editing our thriller

We started editing straight away. we had to log and capture all the shots we had filmed and because we wanted to make sure we had a good shot of every part of the thriller we shot them 3 or 4 times, this make it take a long time to log and capture everything but in the end we we're left with some great footage to use.
We then watched them through all together and picked out the parts we new we wanted to use then started putting them all in order. This was not the hard part of the editing put what i found difficult was cutting and matching all the clips so it flowed nicely together.
This took a whole lesson to do but once it was done we had a strong foundation to base all the effects on because it already went well without them.
We stayed as close the plan as we could and made sure we included the shots we used from the angels that we're harder to shoot because we wanted our film to look professional and be different from the others.
We also made sure we saved all our work all the time to make sure nothing happened to it.
The first day we edited our film went well and we we're happy with what we had so far.