The titles and opening of a new thriller film, to last a maximum of two minutes.
What will I be marked on?
- Your ability to plan and construct media products using appropraite technical and creative skills.
- How you apply your knowledge and understanding in evaluating your own work showing how meanings and responses were re-created.
- Your ability to undertake, apply and present appropriate research.
Institution
For our final live filming task, we will be using Warner Bros. pictures as our instituation. This is mainly because of their great global sucess and there past headline fims that were made under their name. If our film was to then be made by then, hopefully it will follow on from other remarkable works they have produced in the past.
Warner Bros Pictures
Warner Brothers pictures is one of the major film studios to this date. It has several subsidary companies including warner brothers televison, warner home video and New line cinema. The comany is the head and forefront of every entertainment companies. Warner owns half of the CW television networks and is growing bigger everyday.DETAILS FOR OPENING- Before filming
Characters:
- Mollee Vasey- Amy-Victim
- Amy Edmonds- Grace- Victims friend
- Samuel Bysouth- Hand of Stalker
Location- school
Lighting- natural
When filming, we will keep all of these feautures in mind to create the best outcome possible for our opening thriller film.
DETAILS FOR OPENING- After filming
Characters:
Mollee Vasey (Me)- Victim
We chose me to play the part of tyhe victim because i have a lot of experience with drama a si am taking it for A-level. I have also starred in other videos in the past. We felt that with my experience, i could really capture the role of my charatcer quite quickly and still perform a good role.
Amy Edmonds-Friend of victim and mislead stalker
We chose Amy to be the victims friend as she looks reasonably different to the victim. We wnated there to be a clear difference in the characters.
Samuel Bysouth- Stalker's hand
Locations
Our first location is inside a room. We have used on wall which we have covered pictures on. This represents the stalkers room. The first 20-30 seconds of our film is all footage of this wall. We filmed this almost straight away. There was some time that we took afterwards to edit thsi part of the film before going on to filming the rest of the thriller. This was because we werent sure how it would look and if it would look obvious as to what we were trying to show to the audience.
The seconds location we chose was in a room with a big window in which over looked our school carpark. We chose this as our stalker is seen looking out of the window. We wanted to be able to have the victim standing at a place where we could actually see her through the window without having to cut the shot. This worked really well and we were able to show some really good angles within the camera shots.
The third location we had was obviosuly outside our school by the carpark. This is where the stalker stood. There are road signs printed on the floor saying 'school' which is where we chos ethe victim to stand. We thought the words could create vulnerabiltiy towards the character.
Lighting & Time
We chose to film during the day. We used the experience from our preliminary task witg lighting to help us decide that filming in darkness is too bigger challenge to take on in a short space of time. The lighting was then obviosuly natural lighting outside which allowed us to see easily when filming. It also allows you to see the final product clearly.
We edited the wall when editing to give it a slightly darker and gloomier effect to contrast with
the natural light in the second part of our film.
Sound
In our thriller, we have edited a song called '' by ''. We wanted to use the original at first but we realised this would be copywright. So instead, we edited it using a partcualr software which managed to created abtter version which creates more thrilling tension for our opening. The song has lyrics to it which we chose to be different and diverse. Most thriller openings do not have lyrics with their openings but just instrumental music. We also slowed the tempo of the song down slightly when in the footage, the hand of the stalker strokes a picture of the victim. We slowed the action down to ephasis what he is doing more for it to be noticeable to the viewer. We then therefore slowe dthe music down to create more suspense and to make it match the action.
Throughout the rest of film, we hear silence, natural noise and traffic from outside to get a sense of realism, and a sound effect which we added in in quick stages of the filming to build up even more tension.
Script for thriller film opening:
For our opening, we didnt really want any speaking but we felt that the storyline might become too confusing for the viewer as we have a lot of camera angles from different people in the film to mislead the watchers to belive that the stalker is infact the victims friend. To be able to do this, we have had to shoot from different sides of the location to represnet the eyes of certain characters. This would have been too confsuing for the viewer if we hadnt added in dialouge to explain what has been happpening.
We decided to keep it short and simple which worked out well as it leave sthe film at a good poisiton to then carry on, leaving the viewers at the edge of their seats. Here is a preview of the script that we planned out:
Mollee- 'Grace you frightened me!'
Amy- 'Sorry! But you must admit, it was pretty funny'.
Mollee-'No it wasnt, anyway can we just go, i swear i saw someone watching me'
(start walking off)
Mollee- 'what took you so long anyway'
Amy- 'Im sorry, i went to the shop'
(Sound fades as they are walking so only a mumble can be heard)
Changes made before and after editing:
We had to change the layout of our storyboard slightly to create better angles and shots that we had originally planned. When it actually came to filming, certain shots that we had hoped to achieve, actually wouldn't of told the story as clear as we hoped. Instead, we adjusted the storyboard to gain better views of characters.
We then had to change the storyboard again once we had finished editing. This was because of our time limit. We were running over two minutes which we had to edit to make the film shorter. This therefore ment that we had to cut footage that was not really needed. The wall of images in our beginning had to be cut short to allow our film to be two minutes. This was not what we had planned in the storyboard. We therefore changed the storyboard to make it final and complete.
The title of our thriller opening:
We thought about our title for our film for a while. As a group, we discussed possible titles for our film but none of us agreed on one particular name. Our first choice was, 'Two kinds of infactuation'. We decided on this as it told our story. The 'two kinds' being the victim herself and then the stalker. 'Infactuation' means want and to have an obsession over something. We thought it would tell the story well. However, when we told people our title, they were confused and didnt know what the definiton of 'infactuation' was. We then therefore decided to put together a questionnaire to help us decide on a good and we recieved title. It looked simply like this:
Audience Questionaire
We put together a screening where we got a group of people together to watch our thriller opening. This audience we had to gather together had to be within the age range of our target audience. We then created a small questionaire which we gave out to the audience to fill in. We useda range of open and closed questions to get the best possible answers to help us see what we could have improved but also what worked really well. This organisation was very helpful.
