Thriller Evaluation Edit !

Thriller Media Project Evaluation.

Our task was to make an opening sequence to a thriller film; we had to secure the interest of the audience in this opening 2 minutes so we made sure to include a variety of interesting and experimental shots to grab the attention of the audience. Our Group having these shots in our opening sequence meant that we could achieve a higher grade whilst creating a sequence that is interesting to watch. 

We wanted to take a different approach on what our thriller was going to be about, to do this we started off by doing a fairly large mind map of what thrillers would usually include. Once we were happy with our mind map, we took a step back and looked at the ideas we had discussed to think about what hasn’t already been done or if one idea could be developed into a new and fresh idea. We really wanted to make sure that our thriller was different from the others that were going to be made by the people in our year.  

The story line we came up with was about a girl whose mother was murdered, she then gained revenge at the murderer by killing his wife; the one person that he loved and trusted. I am happy with what I was able to achieve as I felt our finished project was to a high standard considering the equipment available, the lack of budget and the short amount of time we had to complete the project. 

To make sure that out film kept good pacing and didn’t become boring, we used fast paced cuts from the victim walking to other scenes to not only build tension but to keep the visuals interesting. I wanted to avoid keeping the shot on the victim walking for too long as there was little action in this footage; fast pace cuts help to build tension and create a thriller like atmosphere. I think that the way that I have edited our film opening was simple yet very effective because I decided we should work on sections individually instead working on the whole thing. This way we could insure that every part of the sequence had as much attention paid to it as all the other parts. This also gave us the advantage of being able to develop on interesting and abstract ideas effectively, as we were focusing on one section at a time, perfect for a thriller film.

I wanted to change the conventions a bit by having both our characters as females; the killer and victim.  Because of what is shown often in mainstream film, the expectation held by the audience are that a man will attack the woman so by changing it to an all female cast it adds to the shock value when she is attacked, as the audience is likely to expect a male attacker. This also makes it harder to predict what the story is about because it’s not what is expected. Showing this in the opening is effective because it captures the imagination of the audience without giving away too much of the plot. 

The conventional idea of male attacks female will be very recognizable and familiar with today’s audiences. So instead I wanted to change the way the audience was seeing this situation, and feel as though there was something more to this attack that is happening in front of them. The sequence then holds more importance to the audience because of this unconventional detail that I have created.   

We felt it was important however to include some of the conventions to keep our project true to the thriller genre. Some of the conventions we included were not showing the killers full identity, the only parts of the killer we did see where her eyes. By only showing her eyes it makes the audience feel intimidated. This adds to the tension that is slowly climaxing to the attack. We had point of view shots from just the attacker throughout the sequence, this was done to create the feeling that the main character was in danger and she was being watched by someone she obviously cannot see, another aspect of the thriller genre. By showing the audience that she is being followed, more tension is created as they are aware of the present danger but are powerless as they can only watch in anticipation.

These are just two of the conventional methods that we included in our sequence that helps to work the imaginations of the audience because it’s not obvious what will happen next. I think that involving these conventional methods was worth doing because it helps to create a relationship with the audience by making them understand the sequence enough but not too much, ensuring that they are paying attention. The conventions also add familiarity as they are related to the thriller genre. 

I felt that the preliminary match cutting that I had done earlier in the year was very use full when it came to making a rough draft of our whole sequence. Also it was useful in learning how to use the editing software, this benefited me a lot because later on when it came to doing this thriller opening we had no problems with trying to find tools on the program and were able to get straight into putting all the cuts together without problems. The story boarding that was involved in this match cutting exercise also benefited our group because, we knew what key shots we should be focusing on; when it came to story boarding for our thriller opening, We was also able to fill in the text boxes provided with our ideas and how the shots that we had sketched would be interesting for the audience to see. 

The filming that we had done for the match cutting, allowed us to experiment with different shot types, angles and ideas. We used different kinds of shot types for example; over the shoulder and tracking shots, which when used in variety are very interesting to watch. All the different types of shots that we tried out in the filming process made it seem worth while later on. 

Because the plot for the match cutting exercise wasn’t very exciting but the various shot types helped to make something simple look visually appealing. This fact helped us a lot later on because it was pretty much the same case with our thriller opening, the plot wasn’t that interesting or different, but using lots of different shots instantly made it more interesting. The match cutting also gave us advantage in choosing the kind of style that we wanted to shoot our thriller in later on. We also got to use the Sound Track Pro software allowing us to experiment with the different types of sounds that are on the program and create a sound track to suit our footage.

By looking at our thriller opening, we can clearly identify that both character where females and this factor I think, will definitely attract a wider range of people to come and see the thriller film because it is in some ways breaking the rules. This would attract people by interesting them with the fact that they are females and young also. I think that because we have quite a few unconventional traits our thriller film will be more suited and accepted by small independent cinemas that with releasing our film we will make it a small independent UK release.  This will be distributed around a small number of UK ‘art houses’.  By choosing to show our film like this we are taking less of a risk with how much money we could lose, although there is still a probability of losing money , it wouldn’t be as much money that could have been lost if we where to try and distribute our thriller opening to a big Hollywood blockbuster company. Another alternative is having the film released onto a TV channel and DVD at the same time, or even making it available for download on the internet. By doing this it our thriller will get a reputation on TV and even bigger exposure on social networking sites i.e. Facebook and Myspace which will then make the DVD more appealing when it’s released. 

Our main target audience was young adults (14-22), but our full thriller film will involve a lot more parts for example the themes of revenge where input from the audience will be needed for it to be understood and somehow justified. The film will be more based on thoughts rather than action making it a physiological thriller. This creates a specific audience for viewing our thriller film and understanding why certain events took place and why the main character chooses to think the way she dose. The typical type of young adult that we have tried to aim for would be; someone who is into novels about revenge and mysteries maybe English students, someone who is interested in watching a film which covers many social problems which are difficult to express, and someone who is interested in new ways of filming and new types of narrative.  Overall I am very happy with the outcome of our project and feel that the things I wanted to communicate to the audience through our film will be realized, I also learnt many lot of techniques which I can carry through to the next project I work on.

Thriller evaluation (The End)

Thriller opening: Our task was to make an Opening sequence to a thriller film, we had to insure that we had included a variety of shots and interesting (experimental shots) while making the opening. By our Group having these shots in our opening sequence, meant that we would get more marks later on and the sequence will look interesting to watch. We tried to take a different approach on what our thriller was going to be about, to do this we started off by doing a fairly large mind map of what thrillers would usually include. The idea behind us doing this mind map was that, once we thought we was done filling our mind map up, we would step back from what we was doing and look at the mind map and think about what hasn’t already been done or if one idea could be developed into a new and fresh idea. We really wanted to make sure that our thriller was different from the others that where going to be made by the people in our year.
The story line we came up with was about; a girl whose mother was killed by a man, the girl whose mother was killed tried to get her own back at the murderer by killing his wife (the one person that he loved and trusted). I think that our thriller opening looks professional, because of the way both sound and affects that where put onto the footage matched up and made sense when it was watched all together. I could imagine a proper film editor doing something like what we did with the footage that we had taken. Although many long shots showed just the two characters walking, we managed to use this and cut it up into pieces that we could later on order into an interesting fragment of the sequence. I think that the way that I have edited our film opening was simple yet very effective because we worked on fragments instead working on the whole thing. This way we could insure that every part of the sequence had as much attention paid to it as all the other parts. This also gave us an advantage of being able to have interesting and abstract material, perfect for a thriller film.
I think that we changed the conventions a bit by having both our characters as females (killer and victim). The reasons for this, as a group agreed the audience will expect to have the whole one male and one female character in a thriller film. In a normal mainstream film, the audience will be expecting to see a man attacking a woman. This way of plotting out a thriller will be very recognizable and familiar with today’s audiences. So instead we wanted to change the way the audience was seeing this situation, and feel as though there was something more to this attack that is happening in front of them. The sequence was to hold more importance to the audience because of this unconventional detail that we have created.

However we did involve some of the typical conventional aspects in the film. Such as; not showing the killers full identity, the only parts of the killer we did see where her eyes. By only showing her eyes it makes the audience feel intimidated. This adds to the tension that is slowly climaxing to the attack. We had point of view shots from just the attacker throughout the sequence, this was done to create the feeling that the main character was in danger and she was being watched by someone she obviously cannot see. But the audience know she is being followed because, we are showing them that she is being followed. These are just two of the conventional methods that we included in our sequence that shows the audience instead of telling them what they should be expecting to happen next. I think that involving these some of the conventional methods was worth doing, because it helped the audience understand the sequence more and that’s what we wanted them to do, making them understand the sequence enough but not too much would insure us that they are paying attention to the details that we have included in the editing process and also the filming process.
The preliminary match cutting that I had done earlier in the year, I feel that it was very use full when it came to making a rough draft of our whole sequence. Also it was useful in learning how to use the editing software, this benefited me a lot because later on when it came to doing this thriller opening we had no problems with trying to find tools on the program and we was able to get striate into putting all the cuts together without problems. The story boarding that was involved in this match cutting exercise also benefited our group because, we knew what key shots we should be trying to focus on; when it came to story boarding for our thriller opening, We was also able to fill in the text boxes provided with our ideas and how the shots that we had sketched would be interesting for the audience to see. The filming that we done for the match cutting, allowed us to experiment with the angles and ways we shot what was going on. We used different kinds of shot types for example; over the shoulder and tracking shot. These shots where all every interesting to watch, all the different types of shots that we tried out in the filming process made it seem worth while later on. Because the plot that we had wasn’t as exciting as it could have been. This fact helped us a lot later on because it was pretty much the same case with our thriller opening (the plot wasn’t that interesting or different). The match cutting also gave us advantage in choosing the kind of style that we wanted to shoot our thriller in later on. We also got to use the sound track pro program, this program allowed us to experiment with the different types of sounds that are on the program to create a sound track to suite the footage that was taken and the idea of how you want it to sound.

By looking at our thriller opening, we can clearly identify that both character where females and this factor I think, will definitely attract a wider range of people to come and see the thriller film because it is in some ways a way of breaking the rules a bit. This would attract people by interesting them with the fact that they are females and young also. I think that because we have quite a few unconventional traits our thriller film will be more suited and accepted by small independent cinemas that with releasing our film we will make it a small independent UK release. This will be distributed around a small number of UK ‘art houses’. By choosing to show our film like this we are taking less of a risk with how much money we could lose, although there is still a probability of losing money , it wouldn’t be as much money that could have been lost if we where to try and distribute our thriller opening to a big Hollywood blockbuster company. Another alternative that we have is, having the film released onto a TV channel and DVD at the same time. By doing this it will mean that our thriller will get a reputation on TV the will be brought by viewers when the DVD is released.
Our main target audience was young adults (14-26), but our full thriller film will involve a lot more parts to it where input from the audience will be needed for it to be understood a somehow justified. The film will be more for thought so that we have a specific audience viewing our thriller film and understanding why certain events took place and why the main character chooses to think the way she dose. The typical type of young adult that we have tried to aim for would be; someone who is into novels about revenge (English students), someone who is into seeing social realism and someone who is interested in new ways of filming and new types of narratives. So I think that having a specific target audience will be a bit harder for the case with our thriller film, but I would have to say that we aimed to make it suitable for young adults to understand and to be able to watch.

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

Closed on Wednesdays

We had all finally decided on when we should start filming and where, we had everything sorted out and in order. We had planned to go to the library and film the parts that we needed for the begging of our film opening. We wanted to use the library ( south library a public library in essex road ) because we thought that the dark and old look of this library in particular would look the part in our film opening and also that it would fit the kind of theme and atmosphere that we was trying to create. But once we go there we found out that the library was CLOSED !

So we had to think of something else to do instead of what we was going to do. We hanged around for a bit trying to think about what we could do instead of what we had planned to do. We started to walk around the library after deciding that we should just do some filming out side the library while we was doing this we found a small park like path that we could use as a location for our outside scenes.

This small path/park that we had found looked appealing to us. So we decided to walk all the way down to the bottom of the path to see if there was more settings that we could use. We walked down to the bottom and found that there was a couple of flats that looked interesting. So I suggested that we had a look at them too see if the main doors would open for us to use them as a location that our main character comes out from, then later on to the path that we had just walked down on.

After we stood around for a bit, talking about how we should shoot our new and totally unplanned sequence of, our victim walking from her flat to wards the path and then through the path. Once we started to shoot our first shot I decided that, it would be best if we done at least 4 takes for each shot, this way when we come to editing we would have enough material to work with. while we was filming what we had quickly planned, we tried different camera angles and effects that we could create by playing about with the lens. We thought that by doing this we might come across more instresting ways to shoot our shots and make them look intresting as well. So you could say that we experimented a lot with our camera angles and shots.

Although our day dident go to as planned, we was still able to replan and shoot a whole proper sequence. This whole process has taught me that I can work under pressure, I can be resorcefull and good at solving problems. Also that im willing to expirement with the camera.

developing and planning

We started to develop our idea for our short film, we made the story more simple and understandable for the audience to follow. To do this we tried to make the story get to the point of what the film is going to be about with out revealing all of what is going to happen or all of what happened before. This way we will be able to keep the attention of the audience and make our film opening interesting to watch. 

The idea we had to work with was about a killer and a victim, the back story behind these two characters will make up most of the story. Which is that the killer has had a hard time growing up with out a mother to care for her, her mother was killed by a random serial killer who just decided to pick the killers mother. Ever since then the killer as a teenager growing up had always wanted to get revenge back on the killer some how who was now in prison serving a life sentence. this fact is not enough for the character who is later on going to be a killer her self, she cant feel that justice has been done the way it should be. This character was brought up to believe that the way to deal with unfair and evil situation was to go by the eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth methodology. ( the name of our film is,eye for an eye .)  I chose this because it made more sense to write the whole back story this way, it also gave a good enough reason for the killer to try and find a way to get back at the killer who killed her mother. The killer is going to get back at the original killer by killing the killers wife .

I think over all even though how i have written out the whole story plot is a bit hard to understand, once our film opening is done it will make much more sense to the audience as well as the teachers. 

Pitching our ideas

pitching our ideas, this was going to be a task for me because I'm not really good at explaining things. But when it got to our groups turn I had to do most of the talking, over all I think that our pitching session went well I got to tell our teachers my idea and explain what we was trying to aim for with different types of shots that we was going to use in our short film. I found that convincing the teachers about how my ideas would work and turn out was a bit hard, but as I carried on explain my idea properly they eventually sort of agreed with what I had in mind. They gave me a few suggestions to what I could do instead which was helpful.

 After we had finished pitching our idea the other groups where up, while they were pitching I was thinking on how our film could be better and alternative solutions to our problem areas that had just been spotted by the teachers. I also wanted to change our story a bit more to make it more interesting and make it look like there was a point to our film 

Final Idea ?

This lesson we decided to move on to actualy thinking of a final idea for our thriller, this wasent as easy as the last lesson were we had to do the random brian storm. This was because, this time we had to stick to one idea that had a proper ending and a proper start. I spent alot of time thinking about what kind of story would be good to use, at the same time i was looking at the different types of ideas that where on the brainstorm. After spending a conciderably long amount of time thinking about a idea i realised that the brainstorm that we had made wasent as usefull as i had hoped it would have been. All it looked like to me now was a load of words and locations that we could use but no definate or good ideas that we could develop on. Which was a bit dissapointing concidering that we had spent all lesson doing this brain storm and i had thought it was going to be usefull. some one my group members looked like they had given up thinking for a while untill i asked them what they had in mind or what they was thinking about our situation at the time.



Despite us not being able to think of an idea in the first half of the lesson. We was able to at least think of two basic ideas that we could use ... proper ideas that were like stories with characters in them. later on we figured out that the idea that we started to like and develop wasent any use because we dident have a proper location that we could use as a setting for the story. which was pretty annoying to find out just before the end of the lesson. So then we had to think of another idea ( third idea) to try and use for our thriller. This new idea wasent all that good but i figured that if we had got in intresting shots in and good framing in it would get a good over all mark. Also just incase we all decided to find another idea at home as a back up idea.

Ideas

Today we had to think of ideas for our short thriller film, we got into our groups and started to brain storm what kind of ideas we could make our thriller film from. I think that this was helpful because it allowed us to look at different kinds of ideas for our thriller.
On our brain storm we had the word thriller in the middle, then we had all the basic ideas that stemed from this word. Location as one which we had written on some random locations that we could use. Theme as another and so on these kinds of words allowed us to think about more ideas that we could use as a final idea.
Later on in the lesson our teacher Andrew came around to check our progress. he said that, the way we had brainstormed our ideas all together was a good way of doing it for this stage. Overall i think that the time that we was given in this lesson to think of ideas was well spent and that the brianstorm that we had come up with was really usefull to get our heads working and thinking of actual ideas that we could use as the final idea.

preliminary match cut

the second practice film for media studies, this practice match cut film was over all good and i was pleased with the end results.
At first the filming part didn't go well because of the amount of time that we had, the amount of time we spent practising to shoot some shots took up most of our time. So when it came to logging and caputring our footage that we had taken the last lesson, we realised that we dident have as much footage as we thought we had. This was a problem but we still carried on with making a start to our editing, we knew that eventrually we would think of a good way to make up a ending with what we had already. I think the way we just got on with editing anyways was good because in the end we finished before anyone else and had our short film posted on to our blog. So we decided that to add more meaning to the short film we would need music to creat some kind of theme for the audience to try and understand what is going on.

Overall the shot film we did involved all of the shots that were required and our group was pleased with the end result of all of our hard work that had gone into to the editing and the shooting of the film.

Match cutting

Wednesday 7th January
At the start of today’s lesson we was given a quick tutorial on match cutting by Marisa this tutorial was useful. We looked at a short film created by some of the teachers from the college. This short film was about a person downloading some information on to his computer, then taking that information and looking at it then finally posting it into a post box. After we watched this example short film, we was asked by Marisa if we could see the match cuts or not and if we could tell her where they were. Then as a class we all talked about what was good with the short film and how it was showing us what was going on and not telling us as an audience about what was going on.
Then after break we got on to filming our short films, we was all given a sheet saying what kinds of shots we have to include in our short film. After having a quick glance at this sheet while waiting to get our camera, we went down stairs to get started with our filming. We spent a while waiting for our other group member but he didn’t come and we started to get a bit impatient about this. So I went upstairs to ask Andrew our media teacher where he had gone and then found out that he had left the college during brake saying he didn’t feel too well. So with this mystery solved we moved on to start filming, the idea of our short film was that two characters will meet each other, the start of the short film will look serious but then when the two characters meet they will have a thumb war. With the thumb war at the end of the short film will be kind of like a twist, because of how serious the start was and how silly the ending was. Over all we didn’t get much time to shoot our footage but we felt that we had enough to edit it all together to create a short film that made sense.

First Media Lesson Back

Monday 5th January 2009, today's lesson.

we watched a documentary about film openings, called "watching".

we was given a sheet with questions to answer while watching the documentary. the people in the documentary where talking about how build ups in a movie should be, either they are slow with little but enough information for the audience to follow up on or if the opening to a film should give a lot of information about the main character and include a lot of action and suspense. Both ways can be used to make the audience satisfied with the film, but the film maker has to make the rest of the film as interesting as the beginning. Then the documentary moved on to talking about how some films started their opening in a very different and unconventional, but yet effective ways. The films that were used as an example was seven, where the opening of the film included the credits and the footage that gave us some clues about the main charcter and the pace and theme of the whole film. this was done by using key images of what is going to be the main point of the film. we also watched the opening sequence to " The shinning". We discussed how the suspence was being held. We also mentioned that the way the camera was on a helicopter looking down on to the tiny car that the main characters where travleing in, made it look like some thing was following the car and the people in the car. The camera was not zoomed in our focused on the car, but it is hard not to notice the car becuase that is actualy what you main focus is ment to be on. aftet about two shots of senery and seeing the car more than 3 times makes us as the audience realise that the camera is actually following the car. which creates the impresstion that the car is being followed by something and it seems as if they are going the wrong way.

After we had watched this we moved on to talking about, how we would make our own thriller openings. I thought about how I would make my own thriller opening but then i quickly moved on to thinking about what else i should write into the first pharagraph of this blog.

Watching Thriller Clips

This lesson was based on looking, at bits of actual thrillers to get a general idea, on how these clips where made scary or thrilling.

we was all given a sheet, to fill out while watching the clips. each person on our table chose to fill out one grid box on the table on the sheet, this way we could get as much information into each of the grid boxes with information of how camera work, framing, sound, editing, lighting and mise en sene was used to make the clip thirilling or scary.
this took up most of the lesson and it gave us a general idea of what to do when we came to doing our own thrillers

What I’ve learnt from the practise filming session

 

We were given a sheet, which had our task on it, which was to make a short film around 2mins long. The short film had to have these four things in them a table, two chairs, two characters and a pack of playing cards. At first I thought that the task we had been set was a bit too simple and that if we had to make a film out of this for real it wouldn’t be enough to work with, to make the short film interesting at all. But I let my imagination go and decided that, the sheet didn’t exactly state how we should use the cards. So I thought our groups short film did not have to be about two characters playing a typical card game.

 

Instead we decided to make a short film about a character who is getting told about her future, the cards will be used as tarot cards and the other character will be turing the cards over.

Thrillers!

Today’s lesson I was late for the very begging of the lesson, so I came in just after our groups short film had finished. I was slightly disappointed at first, because I didn’t get to see the classes’ reactions to our short thriller film. But I was glad that I was going to get to see every one else’s short films. Whilst watching them, our teacher Andrew was pointing out what was good about people’s films and what they could have improved on. I thought it was really helpful for me that, he was explaining what he liked and what he thought people could improve on, because this advice that he was giving to us is going to be useful later on and it also made me think about how our group could have done things better.
After we had watched every ones films we went back to our class room and got told that we was going to be watching a thriller film. We watched The Shinning which was a very good thriller to watch I enjoyed watching this film and I really liked the way the film was edited. What I liked most in the film was that the music was used to make people jump even though they weren’t seeing anything scary at all. I think that this film was a very good example of a thriller film. Because in thriller films the way tension is created is very important. So here in this film we have different ways that tension is created but most of it is created by the music. I think that this is a great way of creating tension and giving the audience jumps from time to time.
In conclusion I think that the film that we had watched today was a very good film to show how music can be used to create tension.

Putting the film together

The lesson started off with a short introduction and announcement that our groups had changed from the last time we had worked as a group. I wasn’t exactly happy with this change but neither were my other class mates. But we eventually accepted it and got on to listening to what our teacher tony had to tell us about what we was going to be doing today. After this we moved striate onto the editing suite and got started with downloading our footage onto the Macs using a program called pro cut. I had already used this program in film. So again I had no problem of using this program so I volunteered to do all of the downloading and editing for the group and in return the group will give me there suggestions and opinions about how I was editing things.
Downloading the footage didn’t take me long to do, I had to capture all the footage that I had wanted to use to edit. I got this done quickly. To capture I had to use the mouse to click the capture now button in the pro cut program, and then with the escape button stop capturing. I done this process for each part of each sequence that we had shot.
Moving onto the editing: The editing part, I think was the best part; this was because I got to see all of the shots that we had shot and then gradually edit them together, which made our story start to take shape in visual form. Which was exciting for me to be able to do, I tried to make the film more interesting by not having one scene being dragged on. So instead I combined two sequences that we had shot together. This would also create some tension because the frame would be switching to one sequence to another but it will still make scene because of what is going on in the main sequence. The sequence where the card where getting flipped over one by one and the sequence where one of the characters was getting pushed down the stairs, I choose to put them into a slow motion so that it emphases the movement in each shot . It also gave a good effect, I decided that some effects where needed in the film to make it run smoother, so it would make more sense.
Once I had edited all of the sequences together, I then went onto a sound editing program to add some music to the film. By the time I had got to putting in some sound for the first 4 to 5 sequences the lesson was about to finish so I shorted the music up a bit so that it was less noticeable that there was no music in the rest of the film. I think that my group had given a lot of point about how and why the editing that I was doing could improve. And that the finished film was very good and I am happy with the end result.

Shooting the short film

First thing that I had to do in the morning was, to learn how to use the cameras. I had done this before in my film studies class, so I was just going through it again, but I was making sure I hadn’t forgot about anything and saw this as a recap to what I had been told before. After Mickey (media technician) had done all of the explaining about everything; I watched my group put the camera battery in and out of the camera. Next part of the lesson; the class was getting showed how to use the tri pod and how to put the camera onto the tri pod. Because I had already learnt how to do this in my film studies class, instead of just sitting down I got up to help my other class mates.
After all of the explaining about the cameras and tri pods where over and done with we were all told to get back to our groups. Once we was in our groups we all got handed out our storyboards to get started with planning how we was going to shoot the short film. I did all of the story boarding. I kept all of the drawings simple but put in arrows and camera movements in the correct boxes to give me basic guide lines to direct the short film and each sequence in it.
When we got to our setting for our short film, the first thing I did as the director was made sure that all of the mise en scene was done. I put the cards out on to the table, I tried to make it look like there was actually going to be a tarot reading here. While I was doing this the rest of the group was setting up the tri pod and turning on the camera. Once I had laid out the cards I went to look at the story board I had done and got my group members to their positions that they was supposed to be in to start.
When we finally got into filming and acting the storyboarded scenes out, I started to make the group take more than one shot of one sequence. As a director I thought that by doing this it will give us more material to work with when we got to edit the film together. And also we would have more choice to pick from. I think that whilst we were filming as a group we worked well, but I think that I was a bit of hard work for me because I had to tell everyone what to do and how to do it. At one time when we were doing the over the shoulder scene and a point of view scene I had to do the camera work for it. Because I thought that these two parts of camera work would be the most important parts in the short film. So I decided to shoot these parts myself. I kept the camera rolling until I got the exact focus that I had wanted to get. Although I had chosen to do this role I felt a bit uncomfortable doing this, this was mainly because I am not used to telling people what to do and how to do things. But I feel that if I hadn’t pushed my group to do as much as they did whilst shooting the sequences, there wouldn’t be much to work with when we was editing and the end result wouldn’t be as good as it could be.
I was happy with the overall footage that we had shot and even though it was a hard task for me to direct everything, I can say that I had a fun time filming with my group over all. I also got a taste of what it is like to direct and do some camera work also which I both enjoyed doing.

Planning for our first thriller film

First thing that we got to do in the morning was to; learn how the pro cut program on the Macs worked. We were given a practice to do, which involved us using a short sequence clip from a film. The short sequence was about a boy who looked like he was waiting for someone at a café but then when he tried to leave him nearly bumps into a scary looking homeless man who has come into the café looking for food. The little boy is holding a lunch box with him, and the homeless man recognizes this and decides to get the little boy to give it to him. There is not much dialogue in this sequence but it was fairly easy for me to work with. Plus I had worked with this same clip in film studies and I had a general idea of how the clips should go together. After we had put the clips together, we were then told about the different types of effects that we could put into the film sequence. There were a lot of effects, which varied from a number of different dissolves and fades (in and out).
After we had general idea of how to use pro cut (program), we had time to mess around with the program and experiment with everything that was on there. to see what would be good to use and what would look a bit too obvious to use for our actual short film that we was going to be shooting next lesson. When this tutorial was over we went back to our class room to find out what groups we had been put into. I was grouped with Shaince and Dominique.
Now that we had been put into our groups; we was given a basic narrative to follow which was that it had to be a thriller but it had to include two characters, a table, two chairs and a pack of playing cards. At first I wasn’t to happy with what we was given to work with but I started to let my imagination flow. Eventually after a short discussion with our group we came up with the idea, of having a pack of cards but they would be in the form of tarot cards instead of playing cards. We figured that this would still be following the “rules” because it was still cards but a different type of cards. The story that we came up with was that there would be a young lady (played by shaince) who would come to a fortune teller (played by Dominique) to get her fortune told. But to make it seem more thrilling, we decided that we didn’t need to have any sort of dialogue involved in our short film. This was because we figured that if this was done, there would be more for the audience to think about. Also because there would be more room for the audiences imagination to decide on what was actually going on.