FINISHED BLOGGING!!!!

 FINISHED!!!!

Q8 Looking back at your perliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

THE JOURNEY

 Animatic Prelim

 http://thriller11group11.blogspot.com/2011/01/animatic-preliminary-exercise.html
 This is a video of our first idea and we decided to do it with jelly babies. We roughly produced the ideas we had in mind and created a small story line.

  Initial Idea -Final Prelim

http://thriller11group11.blogspot.com/2011/02/final-preliminary.html

This is the final prelim where I'm acting, we manged to this effectively and I think that the animatic prelim helped us a lot as we knew what we wanted to do and how we were going to film it for example all the shots and the different angles.

 Final Prelim for our new idea
http://thriller11group11.blogspot.com/2011/03/practice-run.html 
  When beginning to plan the opening to our thriller we decided that our initial idea was not too good so we decided to change the storyline completely. This link shows our new idea.

Final Film- DEADLINE

This is our Final product which was put up on You tube. Me and my group felt very proud of our end piece as it's something that could be seen on an actual thriller  film. I don't think we fell in the trap of making it look a lot like a trailer. I am very pleased.

MISE EN SCENE

The first still shot is from our Prelim, the Mise en scene is not good as we did not really focus on how important it was. As it's seen, the actress is not dressed correctly for the storyline of the video. Also a table is used a bed, this could not be done in the final film. Alongside this, the objects in the background like a computer desk is not suitable for our storyline. The Mise en scene was not thought through properly and so made the footage look very 'cheesy' and unprofessional.

However,  the next still shot of from our final video. Immediately it's seen that the Mise en scene has improved a lot as the costume the actress is wearing has been chosen very well according to her persona such as the black dress and the scarf which plays a major role in the clip. You can't see very much of the surroundings but there is a bed and the objects go very well with the story line of the video.

EDITING

 This still shot taken from our Prelim is showing a match cut. We found it very hard to do match cuts and they looked very 'jumpy'. This was partly because we forgot to do the '5 second rule' where we left 5 seconds before filming the action. When editing this did not let us produce good match cuts so therefore the clip did not flow very well. 

After a few weeks, the still shot of our final film shows a PERFECT match cut, there are no jumps and so the clip flows smoothly. My teacher Mary said that the match cuts throughout the film were "FANTASTIC'. In order to produce better match cuts we made sure we followed the '5 second rule' and with some practice made the match cut a very good match cut!

I was pleased by the editing we were doing by then end of the unit.

LIGHTING

 Wow...the lightening looks extremely bad, it's very dark and you can hardly see what the actress is doing. This still from our prelim shows how our group did not think about the lightening needed. After seeing this clip we knew that when we done our final film the lightening had to be very good in order for our film to look good and professional.

After doing the prelim we changed the lightening, this second still is from our final video. As it's seen the lightening is much better, the audience can actually see what is in the clip. We used a small headlight camera which we placed on top of the camera so that it could bring the audience to focus on the objects. The prelim helped our group to understand that lightening is very important for a thriller film.

CAMERA

 Here is a still shot from the prelim. In our prelim we had a lot medium shots and longs shots which did not make the film very suspenseful. There was not enough drama going on in this prelim and it was due to the lack of  different camera shots. Our teacher also said that we didn't have enough angles to make our film flow nicely but still making it look suspenseful.

This second still shot from our final film, is close up the shoes the actress puts on. Close ups are the shots that the prelim lacked on. After seeing the final film we realised that a variety of shots made the film look a lot better and certainly A LOT more suspenseful, once again the prelim helped us to produce a better film

SOUND

 As it's seen on the videos from the links above, our prelim had no sound on it which made the whole video very, very boring! Without good sound a film opening is not effective. We certainly understood that sound was something important to put on our final film. We were not going to make the same mistake again.

The second still shot is from our final film, the very suspenseful and 'creepy' sound as many described was very effective for our video. It ends the film with suspense and makes the audience want to know what will happen next. From many of the feedback we got from our class mates the most common thing said was that the sound was very good as it creates a lot of suspense. I feel really happy with the sound we put on our film because we manged achieve the main goal which was to make it very suspenseful for the audience... to make them be sitting on the edge of their seats.

TITLES

In this still shot from our prelim there are no titles, we did not have time to do the titles but we realised that they were important in order to make our film look realistic. The prelim looked almost incomplete without any titles.

However, the second still shot taken from our final film has titles. Instantly the video looks a lot more professional, like a real opening to a thriller.

FINAL EXPERIENCE

Well, there is so much to say of how much I've learned these past few weeks. From camera shots to sophisticated technology to working in a team! Even though sometimes it was very stressful and overwhelming the whole journey was very fun. Sometimes I thought we were not going to be able to our film, but I was wrong. My group have managed to produce a good final product incorporating everything that we have learned. I've had a lot of fun and will not mind doing it all over again following the feedback and suggestions given to me by teachers and students in my class. I have a lot of new knowledge which will help me in the future.

Q7 What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During the time I've spent planning, filming and researching I have learnt alot about different technologies. 

•  We were introduced to 'Blogger'-  where we were able to write  up posts, embed any videos we liked and even upload images. The most important thing that Blogger helped me on was keeping organised I was able to store all my research of thrillers in the blog. I was also able to keep track of any changes made and most important to keep in touch with my group members, making sure that we all had good blogs. 

• We were then introduced to the JVC cameras which we used to film all of our footage and eventually our final thriller opening. These cameras were very good as they were very high quality and easy to use. This was good as it made it possible for our group to film well and for our footage to look presentable. 

• As we filmed we were shown how to use more technologies, personally these technologies were completely new for me, they were: Sound Track Pro,Live type, Final Cut Pro, Quick Time, Handbreak  eventhough these were not all used at the same time they were still used all together inorder to produce a good film

Lastly, we were also introduced to camera recorder called Flip which we used to film people giving feedback. I really liked them becuase they were very practicle and easy to upload the videos as it had a USB in it. It made life sooo much easier! 


Overall, I think I've learned a lot from this course. I found out new things, things that I didn't know before. I have been amazed by the technologies needed to produce a good video. I was able to use all of these technologies and managed to use them very well. I feel very proud of what I have learned in the past few weeks and I think this experince will help in the future.

 

Q6 Audience feedback and comment

Feedback from class friends after seeing 'DEADLINE'

Charlene enjoyed our thriller opening this is what she said:

FEEDBACK ON YOU TUBE

We put our video on You Tube and we have has great feedback. At the moment we 92 hits and people seem to really enjoy the opening.

Here are some of the things they said:

 

As the days have passed, there has been more good feed back from people on Youtube. Our thriller opening now has 119 likes and very goods comments. We came to the conclusion that our thriller opening is aimed at mainly females aged 20 to 40 years old. Not a lot of our target audience was within our class, but as seen through the comments on Youtube many people like it. Through their response I can see that our group have successfully achieved our goal which is to attract young females into watching our film opening.

Q4&5 What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? How will you attract/address your audience?

Launching our video to a wider audience!

Here is an example of a student work which had a large number of hits:

This video was done by a group also going A level media, they were very successful in doing their film (they got and A for their work). They used a variety of shots, angles and the editing was done very well making the footage flow. The sound used in their film was very effective as it created lot of suspense for the their target audience. In order to launch their movie to a wider audience, they put up their video on You Tube so that a variety of people could see it.

Our group also done this, by uploading our thriller opening DEADLINE on You Tube and getting 119 hits. However as well as using the internet and social networking sites like Facebook and vimeo, we used a very traditional method to launch or movie to our audience this was done through projecting our finished product on a cinema screen in Angel Islington. The cinema was called 'The screen on Green'. After seeing our film on a big screen we felt proud of the hard work we done and for me it was rewarding. the hard work paid off!

Traditionally, 200 DVDs are being distributed to our media classes. Many people will be able to see our movie through this. However, the use of Facebook, You Tube, Twitter and even Vimeo allowed us to launch our video to more people and get a lot of different feedback from them. These traditional methods of distributing were done as we have a very low budget to distribute our videos in bigger places. Through the amazing internet we managed to show our movie to more people.

 These social networking sites were the main ones used to launch our video and many videos. These helped us get good feedback and see whether we managed to achieve our purpose which was to attract females aged between 20 to 40. I can say that my group have successfully achieved our goal! 
NOTE: These social networking sites are examples of the type of media which would promote our movie.

Evaluation Q3: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our thriller opening is particularly aimed at women aged 20 to 40 as the storyline of  our thriller is something which catches their attention. It is not necessarily the fact that they may relate to the character but it may be that they feel that they want to watch it because it gives them an insight into a story with a character like this or maybe they just enjoy crime thrillers like Laura (the girl in this video) and her friends. Laura and her friends are students, and with our research most of our audience will be students and older women.   

Evaluation Q2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Alia talking about a movie still

What we tried to do with Dead Line is not necessarily try and represent a particular social group but to explain the story of someone who is a prostitute and a murderer. What we want to make clear is that we are not saying that all people in this profession are killers but we wanted to make a story that would capture peoples attention. With thrillers you don't necessarily have to go with the exact reality, you need a bit of exaggeration, and we wanted to make this character a cold blooded killer. This is a story of a prostitute who kills a large number of people she sleeps with and leaves a scarf as a way of giving detectives an idea of who it is but not exactly revealing her true identity, which is what we tried to do with most of the film and the characters in the first two minutes.

Q1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Se7en, Pink Panther and Deadline

Here are some Still shots of the film Se7en and some still shots from our opening Deadline:

We decided that we were going to use Sans Serif font just like the film Se7en in order to follow some conventions. This type of font also enabled the audience to focus on the footage rather than on the titles. Also the use of black screens is a convention followed by many movies and so we thought it would be good for our opening to  also have black screens. We thought that it would be good idea to also do it as it gives the clip a more sinister effect.

Here is a still shot from the film Pink Panther and a shot from our thriller opening:

 Here is a still shot of the film Pink Panther where it's seen that the criminal leaves a white glove behind as clue of who committed the crime, we decided to intergrate this in our opening, DEADLINE by making our main character leave a scarf behind also as form of a clue.

Here is a detailed still shot from the film Se7en:

  As it's seen in the still shot from the film Se7en the shot is very detailed as the shot is being focused on small but significant things, things that give a small insight of the character without completely understanding what the character is doing. We decided to intergrate this in our thriller opening by doing match cuts of the main character putting on lipstick, drinking a tablet, picking up a glass of water and wearing blusher. These small things help our audience to understand what it happening but we do not 'spoon feed' our audeince by giving too much away.    

Overall, I think that our group have follwed very well conventions thriller movies. I believe that we were very successful in creating suspense (which is the most important thing) through these conventions. We were also able to use Intertextuality through these conventions and created a sense of realism with our opening. Many of our audience will be on the edge of their seats but still have certain feeling of security as they almost know what might happen next. I feel very proud of our thriller opening and I think that we have achived our aim which is to attract women between 20 to 40 years old.

Evaluation Q6: Audience Feedback!

Today we had an audience feedback session. We played our thriller opening and got everyone to comment on it both on paper and on camera. After the clip had ended we began a small discussion on what worked and what did not in our thriller opening. Here is the recording of the discussion:

A Wordle of the audience feedback session

FINISHED!!!!

OVERALL EXPERIENCE!

Overall, I have enjoyed this unit of work, I have manged to learn new things and have a good friendsgip with many of the girls of my group. I believe that our outcome is good and I don't think we could have done any better. I think  that our story line is very simple but very effective, we have manged to get our ideas across through the opening title sequence in a very effective way. I am very happy with everything we've done and think that I've learned a lot from this unit.

FINAL CUT: (DEAD LINE- Opening title sequence)

Here is our finished opening title sequence for 'Dead Line'! 

Rough Cut for 'DEAD LINE'

This is a rough cut of the first 2 minutes of our movie 'DEAD LINE', it does not have sound or title sequences and the editing used in the rough cut does not match the editing used in the real FINAL clip as we decided to change a few things. 

The Editing Process: Print Screens

Here are some screen shots of us editing our clips, adding sound and title sequences to them.

Editing the thriller opening on Final Cut Pro

Editing the sound on Soundtrack

The finished sound for 'Dead Line'

Issues filming for thriller opening for 'DEAD LINE'...

As we had to re-film we could not afford to pay for the same room we had before for the previous film in the hotel. After watching back the clips on 'sinful wings' we decided to change quite a few things and needed more clips. The location was in the home of one of our group members. We used this person's room because she had laminated flooring which we really wanted to use as we thought it had worked well when we filmed in the hotel room. 


So as we arrived to the house we were all just taking about how to film and getting ready etc. When getting the camera and equipment ready we saw that the memory card for the camera was missing as we had left it in college. We tried to get hold of a memory card but we were unsuccessful. We asked neighbours as college was significantly far away from the location, but we could not get hold of one and were forced to go back to college. 


We made our way back to college to collect memory card then went back to the location and filmed, which took us about 2 hours. This time we made sure we had enough clips, so we filmed each part 3 or 4 times to make sure we had enough clips.

Music Choices...

The music in a film plays a very big part. The music emphasis an action. This also suggests the genre and sets the mood for the film before it is fully watched. Automatically when we hear a scary sound in a film we quickly think that it is going to be scary. A unique opening of a thriller movie that really inspired me of the music and sound is in 'The Stepfather'. At the beginning we hear the children singing 'Silent night' and we hear the music behind it, then it switches into a dark slow creepy odd sound when we see the people layed on the floor. Which at first we think the man is all innocent until we hear the bad music. I Think this is a clever way because it does not give much away and puts the audience in been confused in a way in what to believe if the guy is innocent or not.

As this really inspired our group we thought of putting a childish song at first to match with the character and then slowly change it to something very dark, slow and creepy.

Music Choice

Watching other thriller films I've seen that many of then have a peice of music throught the film with sound effects to really emphasise an action.

In the opening of The Stepfather (2009) The character switches on children singing 'Silent Night'  howver, the sweet angelic song is embedded with odd creepy music which portray the characters sick twisted mind.
As it is asthough he targets something innocent and makes it mortifying.

PLACE THE OPENING OF THE STEPFATHER HERE


In the movie 'HIDE AND SEEK' I saw that there was a creepy piano instrumental throughout and maybe the use of string instruments. As the film goes on , the music gets louder and faint voices of the characters re heard but you can still hear the music.

(HIDE AND SEEK 2004)

Music plays a big part in not only thrillers but all movie openings as it suggest the genre and sets the mood for the film before it is fully watched .

TITLE IDEAS

Because we have changed some of the concept of our initial idea - Sinful wings
we decided that the title does not go very well with the concept of our film as we did not use wings in our final film. And also we thought it sounds less appealing when said aloud.
the creative minds of my group  enabled us to find many ideas to choose from such as:
ROOM 3
DEADLINE
RED LIPS                                                                                                  
                                                  

                                                       And so may more.

Our final decision for our title is....
DEAD LINE as the characters door number is '33' and it will made clear at the end of the film.

It is important to not give away the film with the title as the storyline of the film will be predictable and therefore, less enjoyable.

SALT IS AN EXAMPLE OF A THRILLER TITLE THAT DOES NOT GIVE AWAY THE FILM FROM JUST HEARING THE TITLE.

 BY JUST HEARING THE TITLE SALT, MANY PEOPLE WILL BE CONFUSED AS TO WHAT THE FILM IS ABOUT AND WHY THE WORD 'SALT' HAS ANY RELEVANCE.
'SALT' IS THE SURNAME OF THE MAIN CHARACTER IN THE FILM. AND IT IS ABOUT A CIA AGENT... NOT ABOUT CHIPS!

ESTABLISHING SHOTS

An establishing shot in film establishes the context for a scene by showing the relationship between its important figures and objects.It is usually  a long shot at the beginning of a scene indicating where, and sometimes when, the scene takes place. Estalishing shots usually use famous landmarks such as; NEW YORK CITY and the EIFFEL TOWER.




We've an establishing shot in our film in order to show the audience where exactly the character is. In this case, she is in a house in a 'posh' area. We then zoom in to a window implying that the character is in the room. There is then a match cut of the character inside the building.

(PUT ESTABLISHING SHOT OF OUR FILM HERE)

An establishing shot is usually short at about  three seconds - however long enough for viewers to acknowledge the scene.

In the film :Wake in Fright  it pans over the vast desert landscape of Australia, with unsettling music to convey that the desert is a dangerous place. it lasts for about half a minute. An establishing shot of this length would be wearisome if it is placed after the film had started, because by then the film should have been established.

(Wake in Fright     Establishing  shot)

Examples of Match-Cuts!

This year in As Media Studies we looked at various edits, but one of the main ones used in and throughout our thriller opening is a 'match-cut'. We have them at the beginning when the character picks up the pills, picks up the glass of water and puts it down, picks up the lipstick and puts it back on the table, picks up the brush and throws it on the table again.
Also when the girl turns around and drops the scarf, we cut straight to the scarf landing on the ground. We have taken this from 'The Stepfather' and ' Se7en' movies, because we believe that match cuts are more common in thrillers, and it helps keep the audience alert. 

Music Choices!

In terms of music and sound we are undecided when looking at music to play throughout the clip, however for small things such as when main character throws the make-up brush on the table or when she walks across the floor of the room in high-heels we are clear that we need to find sounds to represent the sounds these actions actually make.