Final piece to end the blog

Evaluation - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Evaluation - How did you attract/address your audience?

To attract our audience David and I wanted to create an opening that was full of suspense and would really set the scene for what the future of the film would bring, however we were very careful not to give too much away and spoil the rest of the film as we left it on a cliff-hanger and didn't give anything away about the characters that could tell you about them or why they were there. We also tried by using the insert shots to create a creepy aspect of the setting and location of where the characters were without giving too much away about why or where they were. By using all these aspects to try and create this classic thriller opening scene atmosphere we feel that the audience will be left on a cliff-hanger and the tense atmosphere will leave them wanting more.

Here are some of the answers people gave me about our film when I showed it to them:

Evaluation - Who would be the audience for your media product?

To decide who my target audience would have been for my media product at the start was determined by the questionnaire that I handed out to people I know or random people to find out their age and what they liked about thrillers/our thriller. The results were that we asked 8 16-21 year olds, 1 22-30 year old and 2 31-49 year olds, this clearly shows that from the people we interviewed the 16-21 year olds category was the best and our audience that we had to target our project towards. However there are a lot of young adults about 30-40 years old that like thriller films/programmes therefore we can also target our product to cater for this age group as well, this will not be hard as both age groups have a very similar interest when watching these films as all you need is good suspense and a good plot to keep them watching.
www.thedrum.com
www.bbfc.co.uk/what-classification/18   
www.bbfc.co.uk/what-classification/15   








Here is a video where I explain what certificate I believe our film would get had we carried on and published it:

Evaluation - What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

One of the ideas that some thought the two men were in the same place because the stalker in the hood was going to murder the other man in the suit, therefore I researched online the connections with males and murders I found that of 215,273 victims in murders 77% were male and that men committed 90% of murders between 1976 and 2005. This means that males can be associated stereotypically with murders and being murder victims. We also felt that males are seen throughout history as a more dominating force between the genders and we wanted to only use male actors to try and cement the fact that there is a more dominating force, if we used a female antagonist we felt that it wouldn't have the same effect. We tried to create this idea of a dominating male character by keeping him mysterious and getting an actor that is tall and broad at the shoulders to make him seem more tough and manly. We also found that we beat the stereotype of the male stalking and killing the female as we used a male victim instead, we wanted to create something a bit different so that it wasn't the same as every other story line that has a similar theme across it.

Evaluation - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

At the very start of our piece there is a skyline shot of Nottingham city centre where David gradually walks into the shot to look over Matt as he is walking across the playground, i took inspiration of this shot from a David Fincher movie where he has a skyline at the very start where 'Directed by David Fincher'. Although it is not as good as the skyline that David Fincher uses we feel that it serves the same purpose and gives off the same effect, i would have liked to have had the skyline at night however it would not have fitted in with the time of day that every other shot is set in.

 

 

Our production company titles were also inspired by another real professional production company's title: Walt Disney Studios. We decided to use the old production titles because of three reasons, one the new one is very hard to replicate as it was made by qualified computing staff whereas the old one was very simple, two the old version had a lot of features that we could use on Adobe After Effects such as the revelation of the castle and the glow of the Walt Disney and three the old one was very euphoric and is a well-known symbol of great entertainment which is what we wanted our audience to remember. Here is our and the old Walt Disney production company titles:



Our second insert shot of the hallway where the camera pans around to the right to show the full extent of the hallway and all the graffiti that are on the walls, we thought that this shot would set the scene well as, like the others, it would show a side of the place that they were in that you wouldn't have been able to see if we hadn't put them in. It also creates a creepy atmosphere for the setting as you can see how awful the state of the place is, we can link this scene to the one is paranormal activity where the camera pans to the right and reveals the boy under the sheet then he vanishes as this shows the full layout of the house and gives the house a creepy sense to it.

Evaluation - Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Final Edit - class reviews

We got our class to sit down together and watch each others final edits and gave each other positives of our end product and some stuff that we could change to make it better if we could go back and re-edit.
+ The positives that we got were that they liked the inserts such as the window and the slanted hallway shot:












+ They also thought that our music worked well with our piece as it fit what kind of atmosphere that we are trying to create and a lot of our shots mimicked the beats of the music.
+ They also thought that we created a good enigma as they could tell what was going on but couldn't imagine what was going to happen and wanted to know more.
+ They liked the hardest part of our final edit which was the ambient sound, this was hard as we constantly had criticism about it and we tried really hard to make it work and sort out these problems.
+ The titles on the piece were positively spoke about as they told us that they were well placed so that you could read all of them clearly and they had nice font that didn't look ridiculous and very professional.
+ Our class also said that they liked the variation of our getting ready shots as they weren't the usual and boring getting ready scenes, they said that they were unique and kept the suspense of the thriller the same as it was in the shots before.

However there were some improvements that they touched upon which we took into consideration and we realised these faults that we didn't notice when editing, if we had more time to go back and edit then we would definitely change these as we think that they would make our final piece perfect. The negatives were that:

- The title where it says 'Directed by David and Guy' is very informal compared to our other titles, therefore it probably should have read as 'Directed by David Thomas and Guy Nicholson'.
- They also spotted that there was a slight wobble at the end of the shot where Matt is being watched whilst walking across the playground, we tried to combat this problem before however we didn't cut enough off to enable people not to see anything.

Thriller opening scene - Final Edit

Thriller opening scene - bird noises

For our window insert we wanted some sound that would fit with the insert so we thought of putting in some bird sounds as through the window it was an over grown garden, we thought the Blackbird sound in the first few seconds of this clip would fit just right, the bird noise finishes at 20 seconds:

Thriller opening scene - Third draft review

The overall opinion from the people that we asked is that we need to include more original ambient sound, we have looked through some of our original footage where ambient sound would fit perfectly. We found two scenes where it would fit and the audio was of great quality, these are when Matt is taking off his coat jacket and when he is walking down  the long corridor. Here is two screenshots of the scenes that we are going to include ambient sound in:

Thriller opening scene - Third draft opinions

We asked Chris and Molly what they thought of our third draft and whether we had improved on their criticisms and what they thought we could do better, they both said that it was good that we added in ambient sound however it sounded very plain in many areas and that we should get more of our original sound into the piece. As all we had used was the breaking of glass sound under feet which wasn't our original sound it was one that we found off of YouTube:

Thriller opening scene - third draft

Thriller opening scene - sound effects for the hallway

We needed some more sounds for our piece that wasn't our soundtrack and we felt that due to the poor conditions of the ground in the hallway that we shot David's character in, this was because our original ambient sound that was recorded whilst shooting this was not good as it had voices and other noises that were not good enough for our piece.

Thriller opening scene - second draft review

In our second draft opinions post we were told of a flaw that we have in our second draft which we know we need to change, both people said that we need to build our soundscape more and to do this we need to go through our shots and collect all of the ambient sound that is present and insert it into our piece where appropriate, hopefully it will be in our third draft if not then we will create a fourth to showcase it.

Thriller opening scene - first draft review

After getting feedback from our peers on our first draft of our thriller opening we decided to take some of their advice and change our thriller to combat these flaws. One of our comments was that our soundtrack was too repetitive, this was due to our soundtrack being 20 seconds long therefore we had to cut and paste it over and over again to last the full length of time. We have changed our soundtrack to a lengthier piece which lasts the full amount of time that we need it to, therefore it is not repetitive and we feel that is fits our piece well.

We were also told that we needed to add more titles throughout the film, so we went from three titles to six not including the production company name and the title of the thriller. Here are a few examples of the ones we added in: 

Thriller opening scene - second draft opinions

Thriller opening scene - first draft opinions

Thriller opening scene - opinions of our production company titles

To see if our production company opening is good enough for our project we wanted to get the opinions of some of our classmates and others around the college, this means that we can change anything that the people don't like or redesign it to make it better. These are their opinions of this production title:

Emily Brookes: 'I am very impressed with it and it looks very professional, the music also fits well with the title and makes each word and the name in general stand out more.'

Finley O'Neill: 'I like the concept of the title and thought it was done to a very professional standard, the sound effects work well and the transitions flow very nicely.'

Thriller opening scene - Production company sounds 2

For our production company logo which shows up at the start of our thriller project we used this sound for when 'Legend' comes up onto the screen this makes the word 'legend' stand out more as it appears on screen, this is similar to the sound effect that we put onto the word 'entertainment'. The sound that we used is at 4:47 in this clip and is labelled Horror Loop 2. This will help it to have more of a professional feel to it and similar to how an actual production company would do it.

Thriller opening scene - Production company sounds

We used the sound effect that starts at 0:11 of this YouTube video, we put it at the start when 'Entertainment' on our production company video flashes up at the start of our thriller piece to make our production company stand out and be like the actual professional ones you see like Paramount and Dreamworks. This allows us to create a more professional feel to our piece.

Thriller opening scene - The Hunt second draft

Thriller Opening Scene - Actor update

We still have Matt as our main actor but we added in a new actor as a stalker to our main character.
The person we chose was David as he is 6"2 which can fit the description of a stereotypical pursuer and he is already an established actor inside the school/college and goes to a drama school. This is a picture of David and he is the person on the left hand side of the picture:

Thriller opening scene- reshoot date

We are going back to our location to reshoot some scenes as the originals were not what we had aspired to create, therefore the date we are going back to reshoot is the 3rd of January and we are meeting in Old market Square at 10:30

Equipment:

-camera

-tripod

-GoPro

-GoPro accessories

People present:

-Myself

-David 

-Matt

Thriller opening scene - production company title

We wanted to create a production company title that moved and looked similar to the ones you see before any movie like 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Dreamworks. Therefore we are going onto Adobe After Effects to try and create one by following a detailed tutorial off of YouTube, although we are trying to achieve this sort of creation to show our production company name we know that ours will not be as good as the proper companies employ designers to do this sort of thing but we think we can do an adequate job.

The theme that seems to occur throughout the production companies openings is that the name needs to be in bold to stand out to the audience when it comes up on screen, this is something we are going to does want the audience to remember the name when the openings sequence stops. They all also have a catchy theme tune which people know and remember and they can identify the production company just by the tune, we can try to create this effect with our but we might not be able to find a tune that fits our name and style therefore will try to put in either sound effects or a plain tune that sets the tone of the opening sequence.

Thriller opening scene - update on the review

We have switched around the sleeves scene around so it matches the actions that the protagonist has just done. We have also added on a few more titles such as ' A Thomas Nicholson film' and 'Amanda Henvey' but we still need to add a few more actors onto the casting list, the reason we haven't put any on is because they are going to go on some inserts so once we have filmed them then we can start adding the rest on.
However we haven't fixed the insert problem as we are going to go and film some more on Friday as we don't have time after school due to lighting problems and we don't have time during school as we can't get time off.

Thriller opening scene - sounds update

We needed a boom sound for the ending when the film title 'The Hunt.' comes up as it can create lots of feelings for the audience as the sound can make the scene more tense as it really makes the title stand out, it can also make the audience intrigued as they can infer that the protagonist has shot someone or has been shot as in the scene before he reaches around his body, this motion can be interpreted as grabbing for a weapon.

Thriller opening scene - first draft review

When we uploaded our first draft to YouTube and watched it many times to look for areas that we could improve on, we found that in our clip we placed the clips where the protagonist rolls up his sleeves the wrong way around so it doesn't match the actions that he has just completed. Therefore we are putting this problem as our main priority when it comes to editing the sequence further as we know this is an urgent mater that needs to be changed before we forget.

Another area we need to improve on which we found in the editing process is that we need more inserts of the location as the inserts we have apart from the window insert are either shaky or out of focus due to our poor filming, this means we are going back to the location to film some more inserts for our piece and making sure that we film it a number of times to make sure there is one that is correct.

We also need to add in more titles, the reason why there isn't any is due to us wanting to make sure the rest of the sequence was sorted and put in place and that was our last job, we are going to add in more titles next time we edit.

Thriller opening scene - The Hunt first draft

Thriller opening scene - text GIF idea

In our opening sequence we have the protagonist on his phone texting his wife, however when shooting we couldn't get the camera to see what he was typing therefore I went onto the internet to try and find out how others had overcome this struggle, I came across a lot of shows such as Hollyoaks and Sherlock who use these GIFs to show the messages on the phone on the background. This kind of GIF is hard to find so I might not be able to find it to use it in my opening sequence, the only ones I can find or the ones used to make big bold glittery texts for websites and they don't have the professional look that I need for this piece. For example someone had tried to emulate what happens on Sherlock on this video:

Thriller opening scene - title background idea

For the backgrounds that I want my titles to be on I looked at a few different movies and what kinds of backgrounds they had at first. I came across a few of David Fincher's films and I really liked the types of backgrounds that he used at the start of many of his films as they really set the tone for his films. I want to use his title backgrounds as inspiration for my own opening sequence, one of the ones I liked is on the YouTube video down below where there is a city landscape in the dark. (Only watch up to 16 seconds of this clip as the rest isn't what I am trying to analyse as this is the only video where there are a lot of his openings on the same clip).

Thriller opening scene - insert editing idea

We have filmed inserts of different aspects of the building that we thought were interesting and could create a creepy depiction of the location to intensify the opening scene. I think that the film Fight Club uses inserts very well as they have them throughout the film and they flick on and off the screen, however these inserts flash up a bit too quickly so sometimes you cannot see them so I think that we will use it like they do however they will last a lot longer on the screen. I want this change what Fight Club do with theirs as I feel that the tension will be better if they last longer as the audience can properly digest what the location is like.

Thriller opening scene - filming schedule

Saturday 5th December: people present= David, Matt (actor), Andrea (guide) and me, arrive at Old Market Square at 1:15 to travel to the location.
Equipment needed - Camera, camera bag, tripod, tripod bag, rucksack, gloves, balaclava, duct tape, storyboard, mobile phones and flashlight.

Thriller opening scene - Risk assessment (equipment)

The equipment was one of the things that we made sure we had on us at all times and it too priority when moving anywhere about the building.

One of the down sides to our location which was that in some areas there was a lot of water about, this could have got onto the camera and damaged it therefore rendering it useless and causing David and I to pay a lot of money to the school for a new one. To combat this the camera was either always in its waterproof case or around our necks when we weren't filming, this way it meant that it would never touch the water or anything else that might break it.

Another risk was dropping the camera on the floor which would have broken it, to combat this David and I made sure that we always had the camera around our neck by the strap that was attached to the camera. By doing this we could make sure that we never lose the camera and be sure that the camera would never fall out of our grasp and break.

Thriller opening scene - Risk Assesment (crew)

Risk Assessment:

Risks to actors and crew:
In our location there is a lot of damaged furniture and windows, this is a danger to the actor and the crew as things could easily topple over on top of you or you could cut yourself on the glass on the floor or surfaces. To minimise the risk of this happening we have asked that every person present for the filming is to be covered with clothing apart from the face to minimise skin being exposed to cuts, we also stressed that no one is to touch anything that has lass on it with their hands and if they have to move it then they brush is away with our storyboard that we brought with us.

There are also a few holes in the floor that were about two foot deep, this is a major hazard towards the crew as if they were to fall down one then it would hurt them badly probably not enough to injure them. This also would be a hazard to the equipment as if the camera was dropped down there then it would surely break and would break also if it fell down with another person as the person would land on it breaking the camera and causing further injury to the crew member. To combat this and minimise the risk of any damage to a crew member or a piece of equipment we got a person who we know very well to guide us through the hallways as she has been before, we also lit up the whole place to make sure that we could see exactly where we were stepping and what was around us.

We took one of our shots on top of the roof, however the edges of the roof had no railings to stop people from falling off of it, this would have injured us badly and in some spots killed us. However, to combat this we sectioned off a part of the roof where there was nowhere to land if we fell off, we also went nowhere near the edge of the roof to stop the risk of us falling.

Thriller opening scene - other clip research 2

The Ring of Trees:

This piece got the lowest grade available for me to look at as it received grade E (25 marks), this is a piece that I should analyse what not to do as I wish to get a high mark for my thriller opening sequence.

The first thing that I found I should not do is that the title sequences were on blank backgrounds, this is poor as the thrillers that I have analysed have all had theirs appear somewhere in the background while continuing their opening sequence on. The font for it was poor as it looked like a very childish font and didn't match the theme of the opening sequence at all, this amateurish look to the film carried on throughout the piece.

At the start they had people running past the camera screaming "oh my god" this was a poor opening to their work as again it was very amateurish and one some occasions you couldn't see everyone's faces when running past as the lighting was so poor. This scene would have probably been better placed at the end of the opening sequence if they had to include it as it contradicted the narrative as at this point they hadn't entered the wood yet therefore should not have been running out of there screaming at the start.

In conclusion what I should learn not to do for this piece of work is not to contradict and mix up the narrative and I must keep it fluent throughout, making the lighting of my piece a big priority so people can see what is happening, the font should not be childish like I have copied and pasted it off of the internet and the titles should be on a background of the thriller not on top of a blank screen.

Thriller opening scene - Actual location reece shots

These are a few shots from the location where we are going to shoot our opening scene as in the earlier post we used pictures from someone else's blog who went there two years prior to us. In the time between then and now location has changed quite a bit as people have obviously come in and vandalised it even more as there is more graffiti and a lot of the furniture has been destroyed. We looked around the building to familiarize ourselves and search for the perfect shots and rooms to film in, I took a few shots like picture one where in the room at the back of the picture where we filmed lot of our piece. We will also film on the roof like in the second picture where we could capture the Nottingham city centre and drag it down to reveal the protagonist. Picture four was one of our insert shots, however it will be took from a different angle as it was a better shot through the window, these inserts can show the audience different aspects of the building that you wouldn't have been able to see if we didn't include them.

Thriller opening scene - Sounds

On YouTube before you upload a picture to its site you can choose to have a piece of music in the background, all of these pieces of music are copyright free as you are not allowed to have copyrighted music on your YouTube videos, this means that we searched for types of music that we would want to put into our piece for our protagonist to use. We are considering Beethoven's Ode To Joy as this could be a fitting tune for our protagonist to play to make it more of a psycho-type villain, this then makes the protagonist seem creepier as it is a stereotypical aspect of a thriller villain as they then seem more psychologically unstable.

Thriller Opening Scene - narrative changes

Our narrative idea scored very well so we are sticking with this idea and we had one helpful piece of criticism as they said to get rid of the captive idea as it would make the protagonist more mysterious which fits well with the feeling that our audience wants to experience.

Thriller Opening scene - Titles

These are the types of titles that we might want to include in our opening we put them on a storyboard so we could show them like our storyboard shows the other scenes that will be in our opening scene. There is also a number at the top left to show which scene it was so you can match it up to the scenes on our storyboard to conclude where they are going to go and in which order.

Titles: (in order of appearance)
Rogue Legend Entertainment presents....
A Thomas Nicholson production
A film by David Thomas & Guy Nicholson
Starring.....
Matt Fisher
Amanda Henvey
Fecky O'Lewin
Lloyd Kobaiashi
THE HUNT.

Thriller opening scene - actor

Actor: Matt Fisher

We feel that Matt Fisher would be the best candidate for the protagonist in our opening scene as he may look young but we are not going to show the protagonists face so how he looks does not matter. However, we need someone who could act like a powerful figure so to do this he needs to be tall and have broad shoulders, Matt is 6"3 which is the kind of height that we wanted and his shoulders are quite broad to pass for someone who is much older than him. Another reason why we chose him is because he is our friend and lives close to both of us which means he can get into town easily for our shoot, this means that he is available and ready for filming whenever we need him which is an important aspect of our actor.

Thriller opening scene - storyboard

Thriller opening scene - Audience research

Question 1:
We asked the age ranges of our audience as we wanted to know the opinions of thrillers amongst a different range of ages therefore getting a more reliable opinion on our story and what we want to base our story around. The answers were that we asked 8 16-21 year olds, 1 22-30 year old and 2 31-49 year olds. We thought this was a good range but we could have extended it towards the 0-15 and 50+ year olds, however if we extended it too far towards the 0-15 year olds some of the people might not be old enough to watch certain thrillers and won't have a good view of all genres of thriller.

Question 2:
We then asked what sub-genre of thriller that they liked the options were: horror, mystery, crime, comedy and supernatural. The horror sub-genre got 4 votes, mystery got 6 and crime got 1, this means that we can do our original idea as it mainly has a mystery theme throughout.

Question 3:
Our next question was about how thrillers make them feel, we chose this as when we are designing our storyboard and filming our shots we can try to change camera shots, angles and ideas to suit what they like to feel. Our data showed that two person liked nervous, six liked being intrigued and three people liked to be tense, this means that we are going to have to make sure that we make our shots to be as intriguing as possible by not giving too much information about the protagonist and showing inserts of the location that would be considered to be interesting yet scary.

Question 4:
Our next question was about peoples opinions on our narrative for our opening scene, this question is crucial as we can get their opinions to see if our idea is any good and if they want to they can tell us some helpful suggestions as to how we can change our narrative to make it better. Overall they seemed to like the story as there was no votes under 3 out of five (1= terrible and 5= very good), we got two votes for 3 out of 5, six votes for 4 out of 5 and three votes for 5 out of 5.

Question 5:
Question 5 which was our final question was to do with font, we included three types of font which we quite liked for our thriller, however these are not definite choices as we are still looking for fonts. Font 1 got five votes, font 2 got two votes and font 3 got four votes, if we do not find another font that we want to use then font 1/3 will be what we will use, in addition if we find a new font then we will compare the new font to the winner of the questionnaire font to see what people like best.

Thriller opening scene - Costumes

Thriller opening scene - Locations

Location one - abandoned school
^^ link to the website these pictures are off, we had to get these pictures off of this blog as we havent been there yet but once we have I will post another blog post of the recce shots.

 Location one is an abandoned school on the outskirts of the town centre, it would fit the theme of our thriller as it is meant to be quite mysterious and is meant to make people feel uneasy as they the atmosphere is creepy. However, the place is very far away as we would have to take a 30 minute tram journey and 10 minutes of walking to get to the location so reshooting would be more of a hassle than somewhere nearby.

Location two - fields by George Spencer

Location two is a 2 minute walk from our college or a 20 minute walk from our houses, this location is very close and easy to get to if we need to reshoot some scenes or if we want to add more scenes into our thriller opening. However, it isn't as good as the school as the atmosphere isn't as creepy or mysterious but would be an okay area to 'hold/kill' a captive if this shoot was to be logical.

Thriller opening scene - Narrative

Storyline: A man in scary place and walking down a corridor and whilst texting his woman saying something like, ‘be home soon honey bringing dinner’ then walk towards captive and draws knife out then the camera cuts.

Lines:

H=killer 

W=wife

W - (Texting)Hey honey will you be home soon?

H - (Texting) Sure babe I've just left work

W - (Texting) okay please be quick, I'm starving

H - (Texting) Of course Hun, let me just grab dinner x…..

Thriller opening scene - Other clip research

To get good ideas about what I should and shouldn't do when filming and designing my storyboard I believe that some research on some other A level clips that have been done in the past that range from the highest to one of the lowest grades you can get for your piece.

Torn.

This thriller piece received 56 marks which is an A so this means this is one of the pieces I really need to take notes from on what to do in my piece as the person who made this did it very well. One of the things I really liked in this piece that made it tenser and like thriller film such as fight club where they have inserts that flash up using quick cuts of creepy images that fitted well with the narrative of the opening sequence.

The costume that the main character was in was really good in my opinion because it gave the character a sense of normality as he's a man in his dressing gown going into his shed to start working or read his paper, however this juxtaposes his actual intentions as they would be considered to be not normal and creates the sense of insanity about the man. This creates tension as we do not know anything about this man or why he is doing this therefore creating mystery about what the future of this narrative holds which keeps us watching it.

The narrative in this opening sequence is perfect for a thriller piece as it creates tension without telling any story or giving away the plot of the rest of the film therefore creating mystery and suspicion about the character.

In conclusion this piece is a good reference point for when we come to design and make our thriller piece as it was an almost perfect piece as it was close to full marks, tips I need to take away from this piece is that: quick cuts create tension and can give the audience another view of the setting or what the character is doing that he might not be able to see, the costume is a key part in a mystery thriller so try and make the costume look as normal as possible and not to include anything unrealistic or ridiculous and finally the narrative is another key part and cannot reveal the story in any way.

Preliminary Task - Evaluation

The strengths of our preliminary task is that it covers everything that we needed to have on our task such as the four lines of dialogue, a character opening a door, crossing a room, sitting down in a chair opposite another character, a match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule. I think that our strongest area was definitely editing as we managed to make the clip look very professional and the continuity was very good on the finished product, however that was due to the amount of the clips that we cut if we were to do it again then we would have strived to get the continuity more accurate. I also feel like we used the equipment well when filming to make our shots look smoother and look less shaky, examples of these pieces of equipment like a spider mount, tripod with a weighted anchor and a normal tripod.

The weaknesses of our preliminary task were that some of our shots that we recorded were out of focus, shaky or had some of the lens in the shots, therefore we had to reshoot some shots and wasted time trying to get each shot perfect for the editing stage if we could go back then we would try to make sure that everything is perfect to reduce the time wasted. If I could reshoot one scene again then I would reshoot the shot where it shows the feet of the insane man walking into the room, I would have also had a shot of Kai walking in through the other side of the door to make the continuity better when he comes into the room.

Unlike this task, in the proper piece of work that I am going to film for my thriller opening scene I am going to think more carefully about costume, background and diegetic sound as they were lacking in my preliminary task due to having to film my piece as soon as I got told about it so didn't have much time to get all of the things that we wanted prepared.

Preliminary Task - Finish Product

Preliminary Task - Filming

When filming the preliminary task we learnt a lot of skills that we could use when it comes to filming our final piece on our thriller opening scene, we had a lot of continuity errors when we filmed and we had to go back and reshoot some scenes to make sure that they flowed nicely and didn't look out of place. A couple of the shots that we filmed when holding the camera using our hands were a very shaky and we had to go back and re-film these scenes, the only difference was that we used the spider mount to rest the camera on when walking towards the table as a POV shot this made the shot stable and looked more professional. To film our over the shoulder shots to get our shot reverse shot scene we had to use a tripod with a weighted axel to film our shots as there were only two of us in the group, we had to place the tripod carefully around the room so we didn't break the 180 degree rule.

Preliminary Task - Editing

Kai and I edited our preliminary task on Adobe Premiere Pro, it was an easy program to use once you got used to it after some teaching of the controls from the teacher it was simple and we got our editing of the scenes done in no time at all. In our editing we added in effects in-between scenes to create a smoother flowing interchange so it wasn't all amateurish quick cuts, however we did include some quick cuts as this can add more tension to a scene as it makes the pace of the scene increases. To make the shots flow nicely to create a good scene we made cuts to the shots we had filmed, this was to make our continuity better and to make sure our scenes didn't have any things in it that looked bad or that we didn't want such as us standing still or talking out of shot. We also included back ground music in the end credits where 'Insanity.' comes up to create tension as the music is quite quiet and relaxing which when in contrast with the scenes themselves creates and eerie and mysterious feel about as to what is going to happen next.

Preliminary Task - Dialogue

Walking guy - Kai Gilchrist

Sitting man - Guy Nicholson
Camera man - Kai Gilchrist, Guy Nicholson

-Hello, how are after your little ermmm….episode

-I’m fine I don’t know what really happened that night

-It’s okay that is why we're here, to help you to help yourself

-To help myself?!? What do you think I am insane!!!!!

-Actually you are (hands sheet)

Preliminary task - Storyboard

This was the storyboard that we designed to illustrate what we wanted the outcome to be for our preliminary task, we included camera angles, details on how we wanted the camera shots to be and if there was anything that was going to move in the shot then we put what direction it was going to move. Even though the storyboard was not well drawn when considering the character costumes and aspects of their look, we included every prop that we wanted in the task in the story board from the insert of the you are insane sheet to the tables and chairs we have used.