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






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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.