Final Thriller Opening

Thriller Feedback Evaluation

Our feedback shows that our product is successful with our audience as they said:
There is a wide variety of shots used in our product, which are all held steady.
The footage shown and mise-en-scene is appropriate to the genre.
The titles and effects used are also good as well.

We have met the conventions of:
Using dark themes and colours throughout our footage, by using colour catcher during editing to make everything darker.
We have used a dark atmospheric music to build up suspense, by using garage band to create the soundtrack.
We used the crime thriller convention of the film involving a murder, which is pretty obvious from the blood on the girls hands and face.


We have challenged the conventions of:
Starting the film by focusing on the protagonist, in our film we began by focusing on the antagonist, we believe that this would draw the audience in a lot more and make it more original.
Having the film set in a large city, in our film it is set in a more rural setting, however this is also good as it makes the film seem much more darker as there is only a limited number of characters which would make it much easier for the audience ot relate to them.

We don't think there would be much we would do differently next time as we feel that our product is very successful, maybe only find some more sounds to make the soundtrack more atmospheric.

Deadline lesson for thriller film

Today we completely finished our thriller film. The soundtrack fits perfectly with the clip and we are very pleased with our end result. We realise that we haven't completely stuck to the story boards as we have edited the shots and shot timings a little, but the only reason we have done this is becasue we thought that it made our thriller better.

Pictures for Evaluation

Rough Cut Feedback - 12/03/2010

Today we showed our group our thriller opening and we got given some feedback:

• The make-up looked fresh and real.
• The editing effects were good and worked well.
• When the trail was obvious, it looked effective, but for most of it the blood wasn't very clear.
• The credits were too quick and they should be slowed down a little.
• The shot with blood on the tree looked good and we should make it longer.
• The flashes were very effective but they were a little too quick as you couldn't quite make out what they were.
• There was a little too much of the blood trail.
• The camera work was good as it was steady and there were a lot of angles used.
• The blood looked realistic and not like ketchup.
  

Rough Cut

Youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOKMe6HOEVs

How we used Final Cut to edit our footage

We used the colour corrector on final cut to change the colour of our footage. Here are some examples of how our footage changed.


Before



After






Before



After






Before



After






Before


After

Targets for our group

1. Swap roles between editing and garage band so that we can gain experience at both.
2. Experiment with color corrector to get the right darkness for our film.
3. Let Holly listen to our soundtrack.

Friday 5th

Today we are going to continue editing our clip but we also needed to capture some more extreme close ups to add more of a range of shots to the piece. We think if we add these shots then it will make it more spooky and thrilling and it will also shock the audience more.

Thursday 4th

Today we edited our clip using final cut. We edited out the parts we didnt need and erased it. we then selected an order for our clips that we are not sure will stay the same now due to wanting to film mroe extreme close ups. We edited the colour of our clip by using the colour correcter on final cut. This worked better in some parts than other but overall it worked well.




We also worked on our soundtrack on garage band. We chose certain sounds to play throughout the clip, these include synths, booms and ambience sounds such as thunder rolls, which all help to build up intensity. We are happy with what we created and we are going to test the music with the footage to see how it matches up and how much we will need to edit it to make it fit.

Evaluation Questions

The following questions must be answered in your evaluation PowerPoint:
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?
7. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Lesson 2nd March

After watching our footage, we realised that because we had new ideas during our filming lesson, our footage now doesn't match up with our story boards. We think that despite this problem, our final footage will come out better because we have more of a variety of shots throughout.

Garage Band Soundtrack

For the last 10 minutes of this lesson we tried to narrow down sounds that we wanted to use in our 2 minute clip. We found three sounds that we would like to use in our clip. One of them is for our indent, one is for a climax and the last one is for a tune that would play throught the whole thing. The reason we have chosen these three sounds is because they all fit into what we wented our clip to sound like. As the clip gets futher on, the pace quickens and we want our soundtrack to reflect that. Throughtout the two minute clip there are going to be flashing images if we can get it to look right on final cut, when this happens we want to music to be obviouly different when they come up, we were thinking maybe a bit of music that would be slightly jumpy.

Unedited film footage 25/03/10

We filmed this on the 25th February, which was our first filming lesson, so we took a lot of shots that we don't know if we'll use yet. Everything that we filmed went well and looked how we wanted it to look, except for the trail. Obviously we will edit the colorings in the footage in final cut to make it look like it was filmed at night. Also we will edit the color of the blood (ketchup) to make it more obvious and apparent that it is there. The costumes weren't a problem because we planned to wear the clothes we needed to wear for the film that day. When we edit the clip the sound from it will be replaced by our soundtrack which will be made on garage band.



This piece of filming was done on the 26th of February and we were initially planning to film on this date but because we weren't happy with all of the filming we did the previous lesson, we re-did the bit we didn't like, which was the 'blood' trail. We didn't like it the first time becasue it wasn't long enough, the filming was at a consistent height or speed and we thought that we could make it more to what we wanted if we re-did it. The filming was done in exactly the same location to keep consistency.

26th February

Today we went outside again to film the trail for the second time. This time it went much better as we had more of an idea of how we wanted it to look because we had attempted to film it before and we weren't please with the filming that we did. We realised that we wanted the camera to be very close to the 'blood' trail so that you could nocibly see that it was there and we wanted it to be a tracking shot so it felt like the viewer was following the 'blood' trail and it would make them feel excited/nervous to find out what was at the end of it. We needed it to be quite long to build up suspense so the view gets apprehensive about what is going on. The piece of filming that we did is what we wanted in all aspects so we are pleased with the clip. This means that we wont need to redo this part of the two minute clip again, this helps us out because the editing of our clip is gogin to be the hardest thing as we are not completely sure how to do it. We are a bit worried about not being able to see the blood as it isn't a bright red and some of the leaves on the floor are red as it is filmed in a forest and it is that time of year. We are going to solve this by editing the colour balance on final cut. Also, we want to make it look like it was filmed in the dark we will either edit the colour balance or make it black and white on final cut. If we cant achieve this we will get the IT technicion (Ricki) to help us with this effect. If the effect we want can not be achieved, we are not sure how we are going to portray the 'blood' in the way we want it. We may have to try another technique to create the look we want.

1st filming lesson - 25th February

These images were taken yesterday when we were doing our filming, we had to put ketchup on our faces to make it look like blood, this took a while because there we quite a lot of complications with doing this because the ketchup when everywhere and we had to get it right first time as we didn't have as much ketchup as we wanted so we couldnt be wasteful.
The ketchup trail we did in this lesson didnt go as well as we wanted as we decided as a group that it was done to think, so next time we film, we will redo the 'blood' trail.

Practice on Garage band

We went onto garage band to practice using it and we wanted to find the different sounds we needed for our 2 minute thriller clip. We tried to see if a soundtrack could be created without using traditional instruments. We found that there are many different sound that could fit into our thriller film so it was helpful for when we come to create our soundtrack, we have narrowed down what categories we want to look at. A couple of the categories we are looking to use are 'dark' and 'Intense'.

Female villains

We decided to look at female villains because the main characters in our thriller clip are female. The one we chose to look at in detail was Uma Thurman in Kill Bill as it is a well known film. We thought that it would be a good idea to look at this film because although she does bad things, she does them for a reason and in our clip, you could find out later in the film that the two girls are also doing it for a reason.




We also looked at Catwoman. Eventhough she is also nothing like our female villains, she still plays the strong role of the villain. She gets possessed by a cat which turns her into the villain whereas the villains in our clip are just sick in the head. The film revolves around what she does which is similar to our film.

Filming call Sheet

We are going to film between the dates of 25th February to 8th of march during our lesson time in the day.
Ben will pick up and bring back the camera and tripod as he is filming.
We will be filming in the forest in the outskirts of the school which is in walking distance from our classroom, and it is not a public location. We have chosen this location because it is rural and quiet enough to suit the thriller setting conventions and the lighting won't matter so much as we will make it darker in final cut.
We will be filming during the day and then making the setting darker in final cut.
Ellie and Leah need to be there for the acting as they play the two girls but as there is no dialogue they do not need to learn a script.
Ben will do all of the filming throughout the film time.
The only prop needed is tomato ketchup for the blood which we can all bring.
Our back up plan for if weather disrupts our filming is to work on soundtrack and editing from the footage we already have. During our filming time we are going to capture the first two minutes of the film. We will cover a wide range of shots and we don't need to cover any sound as the soundtrack will be playing over it the entire time.

11th February - Second filming lesson

Today we have edited our captured image so that there is text showing what kind of shots we will be using. We also wrote about why we did the test footage and how it helped us. For our next lesson we will now be ready to capture our footage for the next lesson. Hopefully we will capture all of our footage in that lesson so that we can concentrate on our editing for our final sequence.

Photos of what we want in our two minute sequence

We took pictures in our first filming lesson to show the areas that we are going to be using and what we need to capture.












We took lots of different shots from different angles to see which would work best.

Thriller test footge.

This footage was filmed on Tuesday afternoon and are all practice shots for our final piece. The purpose of this test footage is to see how long it would take to shoot each shot type and what the best locations for them are. We feel that these shots were successful as we managed to keep the camera steady throughout and they showed off the thriller element well. What we should be aware of: 1. Establishing long shot: make sure the camera is steady and can clearly portray the movement of the girls. 2. Close up floor tracking shot: make sure that the blood trail is easily seen during the shot and that it is the main part of the shot. 3. Ascending tracking shot: make sure that the camera doesn't shake when ascending up the girl's bodies so that the upward transition from the ground to them is smooth. We used these shots as they are probably the most difficult to shoot and so we needed the practice to get them as steady and smooth as possible. Also they show the different range of shots that will be used during our final product and we can get some experience of shooting in the forest.

Health and Safety when filming

Health and Safety-

• Be aware of your surroundings
• Get consent
• Don't do anything that a passer by might be offended by
• Be respectful to the public
• Don't film in a dangerous place
• No swearing/children can appear in the film
• You cannot go on the roof of the college

Top Tips for filming

Top tips-

• Lots of shots
• Have a back up plan
• Make sure you film more than you need
• Make sure the tape is in the correct place
• Be clear on what you want to film
• Use your shot lists
• Keep continuity
• Keep your camera steady

9th February- First filming lesson

Editing Pictures Today we captured some footage and took some practise pictures for our final shot. We then edited it on photoshop. This is our final results. By doing this we have learnt what we need to do for our final photo.

Breakdown of our Finalised Ideas

Here is a list of what exactly will be in our two minute clip and what will be happening. We have also listed locations, props etc so that it is easier for us to film. We have split it up into sections of ten seconds and tried to guess how long we will show shots for, however when we have our footage it may not exactly follow this plan.

0-10 seconds 5 seconds of this will be our ident with its own music playing in the background. The ident will fade into darkness and the music will fade into the music we will be using for our background music throughout the clip. You will see the floor in the forest for about 3 seconds after the ident has faded out.

10-20 seconds In this section you will see the beginning of the blood trail on the floor and the eerie music has now got a little louder to build up suspense. We will be following the blood for the whole ten seconds along the forst floor. During the 14-20 seconds section, the first credit will appear which will be 'Leah Clark' which will be shown for 3 seconds, then 'Ellie Farrington' will appear afterwards for 3 seconds as well. We will have used tomato ketchup to create the blood for this and our location will be the forest. We will use a tracking shot that slowly starts to zoom in at 15 seconds.

20-30 seconds In this section we will still be using a tracking shot of the blood trail on the floor in the forest, but more credits will be appearing. These will be: 'Produced by Ellie Farrington Leah Clark Ben Whybrow' 'Directed by Ellie Farrington Leah Clark Ben Whybrow' 'Music by Ellie Farrington Leah Clark Ben Whybrow' They will all last for about 3 seconds each. The music will be increasing in volume throughout this period and reaching its full volume by the end of this period.

30-40 seconds In this section we will be using a tracking shot again, filming the blood trail but at 33 seconds you will start to see one each of the girls feet walking along. The girls will be walking through the forest with blood (tomato ketchup) on their feet. They will be wearing black leggins with no shoes. We will still be seeing credits, these will be: 'Editing by Ellie Farrington Leah Clark Ben Whybrow' 'Filming by Ellie Farrington Leah Clark Ben Whybrow' 'Lighting by Ellie Farrington Leah Clark Ben Whybrow' The music will remain at the same pace before becoming more intensive as it reaches the girl's feet.

40-50 seconds In this section we will still be in the forest but there will be no credits now. We will still be using tomato ketchup on the girls feet and on the ground where it has dripped from their hands but the shot will slowly begin to pan up and out so you can see both of the girls feet and you can see part of their legs walking along now. The music will have been playing throughout all this time, gradually becoming more intensive.

50-60 seconds The shot continues to pan up so that you can now see the girls lower backs and you can see that they are holding hands. It will be visible that there is blood (tomato ketchup) on the hands and arms and it will be dripping from them which is where the blood trail has come from. After about 5 seconds, you will begin to see the backs of the girls heads. They will still be walking along in the forest.The music will still be increasing in intensity.

60-70 seconds In this section the shot will switch to a close up of the girls hands with the blood on. It will last for about 4 seconds and then it will zoom out to a long shot of the girls standing still in the middle of the forest. The shot will shake a little to make it more spooky and you will be able to slightly see the blood trail (tomato ketchup). One of the girls will slowly turn her head to look behind her at the camera and will stay in that position until 70 seconds. Along with the soundtrack, extra sound effects will be used during the shaking of the camera to add suspense.

70-80 seconds In this section the shot will switch back to the back of the girls heads, you won't see lower than their shoulders. The forest around will be quite dark still. After 4 seconds of seeing their heads, the girls will both turn their heads, one completely to the side and one only halfway sidewards. You will see blood splattered on only one face, this shot will last for 6 seconds.

80-90 seconds In this section the shot will flash to the same as before but the other girls head will now be fully turned and she will have blood (tomato ketchup) splattered on her face and the other girls face will be clean. This will last for 6 seconds and will switch to a medium close up of the backs of the girls heads again which we will see for 4 seconds. We may make the shot shake a bit here to make it more creepy but until we have experimented with the camera we can't be sure.

90-100 seconds In this section a long shot will show the girls standing in the forest again. It will last for about 3 seconds and will switch to no one standing in the forest for 3 seconds and then it will show the girls standing there again until 100 seconds.

100-110 seconds In this section we will have a close up of the backs of the girls hair and the shot will slightly shake. this will last for about 5 seconds and the music will become quieter until it suddenly switches to an extreme close up shot of the two girls faces where the music will have a loud bang noise and then return to its previous sound. We will see the shot for about 3 seconds then the words 'The Sin' will appear in the middle of the screen which is the title of the film.

110-120 seconds In this section you will see the girls faces and the title both fade out onto a plain blank screen. It will go blank because then the rest of the film would normally continue but because we are only doing the opening sequence, we decided to leave it blank and dark After planning the timing like this, it has given us an idea of how much footage we need to capture to actually create the opening sequence.

When filming we will film more material than needed incase we need to change some of the lengths of the shots e.g turning a 5 second shot into a 3 second shot would make the sequence shorter so another part may need to be made longer to make sure that it meets the marking cryteria by being long enough. We think that the times we have set are realistic and manageable and we think we will have enough time to film all the footage we will need. During the entire sequence there will be no dialogue used at all and the only prop used will be tomato ketchup so that it can be simple but affective.

Font Choice for our main title and credits

To find our font for our credits and main title we went on to www.dafont.com.

This website has loads of different fonts that we could choose from. The fonts were in categories: such as Horror, Gothic, Fancy, Cartoon, Script, Foreign and Simple.

We looked at the appropriate catagories for our thriller, they were horror, distorted and gothic. We looked on these catagories because we thought that it would provide us with the type and styles of font that would fit well with the genre of our thriller film. The ones we chose are:

We choose this font because we thought that it met all of the conventions that we wanted it to meet. This font came from the Horror category. Although we think that this font is good, we believe that it is a little to formal for our main title and credits as the main characters in the movie are teenage girls, so we want to font to portray the girls youngness and immaturity. We also think that the writing looks to gory which is not the look that we are going for as it is a thriller film, so as a group we have decided not to use this font.

We like this font because it is scratchy and easy to read. We got it from the Distorted category. We went onto this category because we thought, our characters are distorted and a bit weird so, we might be able to find a font that would excentuate the characters personalities this would be good. Although we like this font, we have decided that the writing is slightly too normal for our liking. The scratchyness of the font is good, but its not quite weird enough for our 2 minute clip of 'The Sin'.

After we choose this font, we looked at it again and realised that none of us really liked it, so this is a definate no from the whole group. This font came from the distorted category. We don't like it because it would be quite hard to read when the credits are going though. Also we think that it i a bit busy whereas we want our font to be simple bit effective, so that it is noticiable but the main attention is on the action going on in the background. Another problem with it is that it is to all over the place and complicated which is not what we want.

This font is the last out of the four that we have chosen and we have all come to a decision that this is our favorite and the one we should use for our main title and credits. The reasons we have chosen this one is that it is simple enough to not draw to much attention from the view but yet it is not so boring that it does have character. Also, it fits into the movies genre (thriller). We got this font from the gothic category which we weren't expecting to find anything we liked in it, but we did. This font has a slightly medieval feel to it, to begin with we weren't so keen on that because we wanted the font to portray the youngness of the two young teenage girls, but after looking through them all and discussing them with in the group we decided that the older style writing could show and bring out the maturity of what they were doing (there obsession).

Our final Title of the Movie: