Thursday 25 June 2009
Friday 1 May 2009
Thriller Evaluation
For the past five weeks we have been creating our own thriller movies. This has involved a lot or planning and research. The most helpful exercise we done in class was the ‘match cut’ which involved learning a new skill of how to edit film. We were instructed to make a short film in which we had to use the technique we had learned. A few examples of the match cut shots we used in our film was when Rudo opened the door and we filmed her hand on the door handle, pushing the handle down, Followed by a shot of her from inside the room walking through the door. We also used match cut when Rudo was walking. We first filmed this as a long shot from the front, then a close up of her face from the side as she is walking, and finally back to a long shot of the front walking and continuing to sit in a chair. This exercise helped a great deal when it came to filming our thrillers and we had had a chance to practice before.
Having the opportunity to practice filming and editing match cuts also helped as I knew how it would look on my thriller, and I had a better understanding of what angles loo more effective and how to edit it to ensure it looked right.
We also looked at different thriller opening as stimulus for ideas. I particularly liked ‘Arlington Road’ as it kept the audience guessing and began with confusion. I wanted to apply this sence of confusion to my thriller opening.
We tried to use various thriller conventions in our opening, which I feel worked well. We used the dark lighting, to create a scariness and unknown, we also made the main character a young, blonde vunerable teenage girl. We hoped people could relate to her and feel sympathy toward her as she comes across innocent. Another convention we used was point of view shots and extreme close ups, running water and a fuzzy television switching on by itself.
I feel that teenagers are represented as vunerable and helpless in our thriller. Because of having three girls in our group we decided to make Rudo the male attacker. This is also typical sterotype by society, that an intruder/attacker would be male. We decided to be ambiguous about Rudos character by filming her in the dark, avoiding too many close ups and dressing her in big dark clothing. We felt his would scare the audience more not knowing the character and keeping her identity a mystery. The only thing we knew about Rudo’s character was her race. I feel this is also a social stereotype of a young black ‘male’. We did not aim our film at one particular target audience as we feel a variety of people would be able to relate to the characters/situation/emotions of our thriller. Also anyone could experience what is happening I the clip.
I am extremely proud of my thriller and I feel the storyline would be that similar of a successful movie, therefore I think my movie would be a Hollywood blockbuster. I feel it fits the thriller genre and its conventions, it also challenges some conventions, such as having someone staring down the camera. I feel put thriller would fit in this particutar media institution. We used a lot of professional programmes t assist in editing, such as final cut pro, live type, and soundtrack pro to create our desired effect and spend a lot of time on these programmes and experimenting with new things to see what would work and what wouldn’t.
I don’t feel we would have a specific target market. However I feel teenagers who like going cinema, outgoing and like being scared would me a main audience. Gender would not be specified in a target audience for this film as I feel it would suit the needs and expectations of both a male and female audience. The age range would vary from about 15-35. The reason I don’t think it would appeal to over 35 year olds as much is because the characters are mostly of a young age, no older than 25/30 therefore they may not be able to relate to the characters, but would still enjoy the film.
For the past five weeks we have been creating our own thriller movies. This has involved a lot or planning and research. The most helpful exercise we done in class was the ‘match cut’ which involved learning a new skill of how to edit film. We were instructed to make a short film in which we had to use the technique we had learned. A few examples of the match cut shots we used in our film was when Rudo opened the door and we filmed her hand on the door handle, pushing the handle down, Followed by a shot of her from inside the room walking through the door. We also used match cut when Rudo was walking. We first filmed this as a long shot from the front, then a close up of her face from the side as she is walking, and finally back to a long shot of the front walking and continuing to sit in a chair. This exercise helped a great deal when it came to filming our thrillers and we had had a chance to practice before.
Having the opportunity to practice filming and editing match cuts also helped as I knew how it would look on my thriller, and I had a better understanding of what angles loo more effective and how to edit it to ensure it looked right.
We also looked at different thriller opening as stimulus for ideas. I particularly liked ‘Arlington Road’ as it kept the audience guessing and began with confusion. I wanted to apply this sence of confusion to my thriller opening.
We tried to use various thriller conventions in our opening, which I feel worked well. We used the dark lighting, to create a scariness and unknown, we also made the main character a young, blonde vunerable teenage girl. We hoped people could relate to her and feel sympathy toward her as she comes across innocent. Another convention we used was point of view shots and extreme close ups, running water and a fuzzy television switching on by itself.
I feel that teenagers are represented as vunerable and helpless in our thriller. Because of having three girls in our group we decided to make Rudo the male attacker. This is also typical sterotype by society, that an intruder/attacker would be male. We decided to be ambiguous about Rudos character by filming her in the dark, avoiding too many close ups and dressing her in big dark clothing. We felt his would scare the audience more not knowing the character and keeping her identity a mystery. The only thing we knew about Rudo’s character was her race. I feel this is also a social stereotype of a young black ‘male’. We did not aim our film at one particular target audience as we feel a variety of people would be able to relate to the characters/situation/emotions of our thriller. Also anyone could experience what is happening I the clip.
I am extremely proud of my thriller and I feel the storyline would be that similar of a successful movie, therefore I think my movie would be a Hollywood blockbuster. I feel it fits the thriller genre and its conventions, it also challenges some conventions, such as having someone staring down the camera. I feel put thriller would fit in this particutar media institution. We used a lot of professional programmes t assist in editing, such as final cut pro, live type, and soundtrack pro to create our desired effect and spend a lot of time on these programmes and experimenting with new things to see what would work and what wouldn’t.
I don’t feel we would have a specific target market. However I feel teenagers who like going cinema, outgoing and like being scared would me a main audience. Gender would not be specified in a target audience for this film as I feel it would suit the needs and expectations of both a male and female audience. The age range would vary from about 15-35. The reason I don’t think it would appeal to over 35 year olds as much is because the characters are mostly of a young age, no older than 25/30 therefore they may not be able to relate to the characters, but would still enjoy the film.
Tuesday 24 March 2009
Credits
The credits was the last thing we did, creating credits gave me the chance to learn how to use live type, something which i never knew how to use before the project. Live type enabled me to choose a font that worked really well with the thriller. I decided the font should be quite small and it should move or shake on the screen to create a tense atmosphre. As a group we decided to put the credits on a black screen to break up the opening of the film and keep the audience in supesnse. The colour of the font was white, this crated a contrast against the bacl screen and ensured the group that the audience would be able to read the creditas clearly. When the credits were shown we decided to add an effect which gave the whole credit a spooky feel to it. a line of lines whichmoved arounf the screen gave the credits a mysterious yet intresting effect which enhanced the audiences tense feeling
Tuesday 3 March 2009
Evaluation
Evaluation
Our opening for a thriller film, “Hostage” is finally complete. We spent about four to five weeks planning, filming and editing it. I think we worked pretty well using the conventions of real thrillers to make it. While making the thriller, we did consider going for "instant arousal", a term mentioned in the documentary, "Watching", which was about film openings. It pointed out the importance of drawing in the audience during the opening. We definitely achieved this because when we watched all of our openings with the rest of the class, some students mentioned it being scary and also, the fact that they were wondering what would happen next, like one of those films that you are scared of watching and yet you can't tear yourself away from it. The one thing we didn't need to worry about after the instant arousal was what would happen next because the project was only about making the opening of the film. Another successful thing in our thriller, according to our classmates, was out use of match cuts to show the flashbacks and the low soundtrack which made the diegetic sounds seem very sudden and it also made the video quite suspenseful. The rest of the class mentioned that it made it scary but that it was also quite cool. I think we were really successful in using the conventions of real thriller films to develop our opening and am quite proud of it.
Our opening offered a representation of a teenage girl, in her pyjamas, middle class, who lives with her mother and younger sister (the pink wallpaper in the younger sister's bedroom was very effective). She might like to go out and have fun with her friends but may also be the good daughter and protective older sister when she's at home. I think we represented her social group quite well and the fact that she’s walking around the house in the morning in her pyjamas shows a sense of vulnerability. That definitely added to the tension quite well and helped with the uneasy mood. It makes you wonder if someone’s going to jump out and attack her, which is why some audience members might find it a bit scary.
I think that our thriller would be a Hollywood blockbuster, distributed around the world because some of the editing techniques that we used isn’t something you really see in small independent UK release but in big Hollywood blockbusters. The first instance of fast track editing adds really well to the sub-genre of Horror Thriller. The other reason why it might be released internationally is because Horror Thrillers generally appeal to large audiences and most that I have seen have been released via Hollywood.
The target audience for our thriller is generally teenagers but really, anyone who enjoys Horror Thrillers. One typical member of the audience might be a 20 year old guy, any class, and works really hard at university, studying film and enjoys making them but also likes going to watch them at the cinema on the weekends with his friends, maybe for a bit of inspiration. I think that this typical audience member might fit under the demographic description of “aspirers”. I’d say that he is part of the mainstream audience.
We would attract the audience first of all by featuring our star, the lead actress on posters on billboards and on images featured on the internet adverts. We’d also possibly make a deal with a popular social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook and possibly the big fast food giants such as McDonald’s and Burger King so that anyone who buys a burger might get two for one on tickets to see our thriller. We’d also make a trailer to go on TV and have it uploaded on a YouTube channel perhaps so that users can be attracted to the film and then go on to watch it when it is released. In the trailed we might have clips from different parts of the film but not too much to give it away. We’d make a trailer that would make the audience think, “I wonder why this happens”, or “what happens to that girl” and so on.
From making our thriller, I have definitely learnt a lot. The filming was the easiest; I think because it wasn’t my first time using the professional Canon cameras and so I’d had a bit of experience which definitely helped with getting our scenes filmed quickly. On the computers, after the filming, we used Final Cut Pro to edit our opening, cutting clips down, match cuts and just putting the whole thing together, really. Once again, this was quite easy to use as I’d had experience using it at GCSE. After the film was put together, we used Livetype, which is a program for making sub-titles and the main titles for the opening sequences of films and so on. This one was a bit difficult to use because I’d never used it before and it wasn’t very easy to use. At one point me and the other members of our group gave up with it and did simple titles in Final Cut Pro but the text didn’t look very good and didn’t fit our thriller. So we went back to Livetype and gave it another try and eventually managed to get some decent titles onto our thriller. The other program we used was Soundtrack Pro; we used this one to add some music onto our thriller. It was quite easy to use. We added in an ambient, eerie synthesizer sound and a very dark and gloomy sound over that, right when our main character starts looking around the house for her mum and sister. I think it worked quite well because some of our classmates who watched our opening said that it was a big scary and I’d say that it also added to the suspense. It wasn’t our first time using it as we’d used it for our Match Cut exercise so it was quite easy to use and we had the sound done within minutes. Before, during and after filming out thriller, we’ve been recording our progress on online blogs. We each added a post every lesson and that worked a bit like a diary to show our progress throughout the project. I think that the internet offers more opportunities for us because we can embed our thriller onto our blog, or upload it to YouTube or even release it via Vimeo. That’s definitely a good thing for us and gives us more chance of growing an audience.
Looking back at the project, I’d say that I definitely learned a lot. The fact that we did lots of little exercises (match cut, storyboarding, etc) before we started filming really helped because if we’d just started filming, our thriller wouldn’t have been very good because we wouldn’t know how to edit it effectively and so on. That really helped us and I think that our thriller was quite successful, given our skills and knowledge.
Our opening for a thriller film, “Hostage” is finally complete. We spent about four to five weeks planning, filming and editing it. I think we worked pretty well using the conventions of real thrillers to make it. While making the thriller, we did consider going for "instant arousal", a term mentioned in the documentary, "Watching", which was about film openings. It pointed out the importance of drawing in the audience during the opening. We definitely achieved this because when we watched all of our openings with the rest of the class, some students mentioned it being scary and also, the fact that they were wondering what would happen next, like one of those films that you are scared of watching and yet you can't tear yourself away from it. The one thing we didn't need to worry about after the instant arousal was what would happen next because the project was only about making the opening of the film. Another successful thing in our thriller, according to our classmates, was out use of match cuts to show the flashbacks and the low soundtrack which made the diegetic sounds seem very sudden and it also made the video quite suspenseful. The rest of the class mentioned that it made it scary but that it was also quite cool. I think we were really successful in using the conventions of real thriller films to develop our opening and am quite proud of it.
Our opening offered a representation of a teenage girl, in her pyjamas, middle class, who lives with her mother and younger sister (the pink wallpaper in the younger sister's bedroom was very effective). She might like to go out and have fun with her friends but may also be the good daughter and protective older sister when she's at home. I think we represented her social group quite well and the fact that she’s walking around the house in the morning in her pyjamas shows a sense of vulnerability. That definitely added to the tension quite well and helped with the uneasy mood. It makes you wonder if someone’s going to jump out and attack her, which is why some audience members might find it a bit scary.
I think that our thriller would be a Hollywood blockbuster, distributed around the world because some of the editing techniques that we used isn’t something you really see in small independent UK release but in big Hollywood blockbusters. The first instance of fast track editing adds really well to the sub-genre of Horror Thriller. The other reason why it might be released internationally is because Horror Thrillers generally appeal to large audiences and most that I have seen have been released via Hollywood.
The target audience for our thriller is generally teenagers but really, anyone who enjoys Horror Thrillers. One typical member of the audience might be a 20 year old guy, any class, and works really hard at university, studying film and enjoys making them but also likes going to watch them at the cinema on the weekends with his friends, maybe for a bit of inspiration. I think that this typical audience member might fit under the demographic description of “aspirers”. I’d say that he is part of the mainstream audience.
We would attract the audience first of all by featuring our star, the lead actress on posters on billboards and on images featured on the internet adverts. We’d also possibly make a deal with a popular social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook and possibly the big fast food giants such as McDonald’s and Burger King so that anyone who buys a burger might get two for one on tickets to see our thriller. We’d also make a trailer to go on TV and have it uploaded on a YouTube channel perhaps so that users can be attracted to the film and then go on to watch it when it is released. In the trailed we might have clips from different parts of the film but not too much to give it away. We’d make a trailer that would make the audience think, “I wonder why this happens”, or “what happens to that girl” and so on.
From making our thriller, I have definitely learnt a lot. The filming was the easiest; I think because it wasn’t my first time using the professional Canon cameras and so I’d had a bit of experience which definitely helped with getting our scenes filmed quickly. On the computers, after the filming, we used Final Cut Pro to edit our opening, cutting clips down, match cuts and just putting the whole thing together, really. Once again, this was quite easy to use as I’d had experience using it at GCSE. After the film was put together, we used Livetype, which is a program for making sub-titles and the main titles for the opening sequences of films and so on. This one was a bit difficult to use because I’d never used it before and it wasn’t very easy to use. At one point me and the other members of our group gave up with it and did simple titles in Final Cut Pro but the text didn’t look very good and didn’t fit our thriller. So we went back to Livetype and gave it another try and eventually managed to get some decent titles onto our thriller. The other program we used was Soundtrack Pro; we used this one to add some music onto our thriller. It was quite easy to use. We added in an ambient, eerie synthesizer sound and a very dark and gloomy sound over that, right when our main character starts looking around the house for her mum and sister. I think it worked quite well because some of our classmates who watched our opening said that it was a big scary and I’d say that it also added to the suspense. It wasn’t our first time using it as we’d used it for our Match Cut exercise so it was quite easy to use and we had the sound done within minutes. Before, during and after filming out thriller, we’ve been recording our progress on online blogs. We each added a post every lesson and that worked a bit like a diary to show our progress throughout the project. I think that the internet offers more opportunities for us because we can embed our thriller onto our blog, or upload it to YouTube or even release it via Vimeo. That’s definitely a good thing for us and gives us more chance of growing an audience.
Looking back at the project, I’d say that I definitely learned a lot. The fact that we did lots of little exercises (match cut, storyboarding, etc) before we started filming really helped because if we’d just started filming, our thriller wouldn’t have been very good because we wouldn’t know how to edit it effectively and so on. That really helped us and I think that our thriller was quite successful, given our skills and knowledge.
Thursday 26 February 2009
Sound track
I didnt have a clue how to create a soundtrack so i am now really please i have learnt. using soundtrack pro i was able to create a soundtrack that was perfect for our thriller, it did take along time as i changed it several times, i listened to almost every sound on the programme to ensure i picked the right one. I added the video to soundtrack pro and matched the sound up with the video. At times i felt no sound would be more effective for example as the thriller begins, its complete silence, also as Tara gets out of the bed its silent, i did this to create a tense atmosphere, this built on the Ssuspense and the loud sound that enters really shocks the audience. The sound track is very slow and spooky it also increases in volume and decreases at appropriate times. I used both non digetic and digetci sounds to create a realistic and effective thriller. The soundtrack fits really well with the thriller and it really enhances the frightening atmosphere.
Hostage
We have finally finished are film, Im extremly pleased with the final outcome and feel we have worked to our full potential. When we began shooting and editing i wasnt sure if the final outcome would meet the brief and actully be scary but to my surprise the thriller was thrilling and scared many members of our class. I have learnt alot from creating this thriller, i now no how to create a soundtrack, how to add titles, ho to matchcut, how to put a whole film together and how to use many new programmes. We did have some diffuclty when edidting and at times it was stressful but i feel it was all worth it as im so happy with the final piece.
Filming one
We took out a camera and tripod and set off to my house to begin filming. As we had previously cretaed a list of sots we was able to start straight away. The first shot was of tara waking up in her bedroom, we used this to shock the audience, the thriller starts off in complete darkness and silence, all of a sudden a lamp is turned on a tar sits up, this was a really effective way of introducing the thriller, we then continued shooting tara as she made her way around the house, using as many differents shots as possible to ensure when we got to edidting we had alll we needed. My favourite shots of tara included her close up, i found them extremly effective as they were shocking, frightening and strange, i knew they would shock and scare the audience. When shooting rudo, we decided to do same of the same shots as Tara, this was because we wanted to cut from person to person, to show that rudo had been there before. For example i filmed Tara opening the door and then filmed rudo doing the same. when editing this art, i matched them up and cut them really short to create a scene that showed taras hand the rudo's then again and again. We used this several times to show the audience exactly were the intruder had been, we used a mirror to re val the intruders face, we shot Tara and then rudo in the same place. When editing we flashed from face to face. This was really effective as it creates a tense and shocking atmosphere, it was also a brilliant way for us to introduce the abductor. This is one of y favourite parts in the whole thriller as its extremely intense and introduces the audience to the abductor, its terrifying. When it was my turn to be shot i got into character immediately as i knew it would show in the film. My first scene was of me in bed, begin woken up by the abductor, i used my facial expressions to show my shock of being woken up and my terror of the abductor. I was also filmed sitting in a dark room tyed to a chair with tape around my mouth, this was to show the audience were i had been taken by he abductor. we showed this part in a flashback to allow the audience to learn more about the thriller. When i was tied up the only way i could show how i was feeling was through my eyes, i got into character and felt it worked extremely well.
Filming
We were put into groups and told to create the begining of a thriller. My group included me and 2 other girls, tara and rudo, the two girls i had previosuly worked with when creating the crad game. in a group we decided the thriller should be based on an abduction, an effective name for the film was the hostage as we felt it sounded extremly frightening and exciting. the thriller was to be based on a young girl waking up to find her whole house empty and things to be in a mess. As a group we wrote out a list of effective shots we would use, we also took on differnt roles. i played the gilr who got kidnapped, tara played the girl in the house and rudo took on the role of the abductor. We cast it really well. we decided to shoot the thriller at my house as it fit the set brilliantly, I have lots of flights of stirs in my house and tara needed to use them to show herself running around franticlly looking for her sister.
Tuesday 20 January 2009
Tuesday 13 January 2009
Tuesday 6 January 2009
In a group of four we created a short scene based on a card game. as a group we decided it would be best to plan the scene first, give ourselves charcters and decided what would happen. The sene began with a member of the group walking into the college, we used a long shot to establish the secene and allow the audience to relise our location, as he walks into the college, myself and another member of the group foloow him, chases him and rob him, throughout ths we used several diferent shot such as close ups, medium close ups, low angle shots and high angel shots, these shots ensured the scene looked intresting and allowed the audience to see the situation fom all poits of view. The scen then carried on as me and the other person run away from the person we robed, to show the chase we decided it would look effective to shhot from outside of the college through the glass windows, this allows the audience to see the chase from an intresting angle. Towards the end of the chase we decided to shoot from 3 different angles firstly, the theifs from the frount being chased by the victim, then from behind showing the hreif behind the theifs chasing them and then a close up of each person allowing the audience to see facial expressions and body language. The scene ends with the card game, whihc is used to determine who keeps the stolen property. throughout the card game we used various shots such as close ups to show expression, we also used panning.
Once we had all of our shots, we began ptting it together, it took us time but eventually we managed to match up each shot, cut out irrelevent parts, add sound. In my opinion i feel the "card game" went quite well for a first go, it alowed me to develop my skills on camera work and i learnt how to put shots together that ensure the scene looks real ad flows well.
Today The class watched a documentry called " Watching" the documentry was based on the beggining of films, i found it extremly intesting and discovered that there are different types of beginings of different films. From watching the documentry i realised i dont really like credits and feel that my thriller should use as litt;e credits as possible as i feel they take the focus off of the begining. The documentry also made me realise how important the first few scenes in a film is, these scenes determine wethere the audience cntinue watching the film, they also allow the audience to learn bout the genre and discover if they will enjoy it or not.
For the rest of the lesson we watched pat thrillers made by previous media students, this was very fascinating as it allowed me to critise othere work and made me realise what i liked and didnt like. Some of the thrillers were better than others and they all vaired. There was one that stood out to me, it was called missing, The thriller was extremly
Thiller
January 6, 2009
We were put into groups (Me, Levi, Tara and Claudia) and given a pack of cards so that we could film "a very thrilling card game." In my group's practice, we had me and Claudia robbing Levi and then playing cards in order to see who would win the money in his wallet. I think that the camerawork was quite good, we were quite creative with our choices of shots. We used close ups, long shots, mid shots, a high angle shot, a low angle shot, and so on. I think that the most successful shots were the long shots and the low angle shot. The low angle shots helped to make the attackers look more overpowering. I don't think there were any shots that were particularly unsuccessful. Anything that didn't look very good, we fixed up in the editing process. The editing went quite well and we didn't mess up anything during filming so we didn't really have trouble with putting the film together. The continuity editing went pretty well except for the part where we were running through a corridor and it was filmed from the front and from behind as well. It came out a bit weird though because we tried to do a match cut but cut the "from behind" clip a bit late and the "from the front" clip a bit too early and so it looked a bit like we were running and we went past a pole but when it cut to the front view we hadn't passed the pole yet, so that was a bit of a problem. I think that despite the fact that our running scene was a little bit messed up the film did make a lot of sense. I think that the scene right at the end worked as a suspenseful one because Claudia picks up a card that she's been sitting on and I think it makes the audience get a little bit suspicious of her character. Overall, I think that our "thrilling game of cards went quite well but if we could do it again I think we could do the editing of our running scene a bit better.
January 13, 2009
In the lesson today, we watched a program called, "Watching". It was a documentary all about film openings. It was presented by a man named, Thomas Sutcliffe. He talked about the importance of drawing the audience in straight away during the opening so that they'd be willing to watch the entire film. Director, Jean Jacques Beineix pointed out that once the audience have become victims of that instant arousal, what happens next? Watching the program, I found it to be quite interesting because it made me realize how much directors think of the audience when they are making the film.
January 15, 2009
Today, we did a shot list exercise. We learnt how to make shot lists in order to help us plan shots for our thriller opening. We were given a synopsis for a short sequence and then we had to use a grid to create a shot list for it. Using no more than 20 shots, we wrote in exterior/interior, the shot type, the action and a description of what the shot would be like. My group did quite well with this exercise and we finished quite quickly. The technicians then showed us the sequence to see if it was similar to what wed come up with and from that, we learnt all about match cuts.
We were given a brief for a match cut exercise to do and it was, "A character opens a door, walks into a room, sits down opposite another character and they share a few lines of dialogue." We got to planning it and the first thing we did was create a shot list for our clip. In 20 shots, we'd decided to start with feet walking up some stairs, the hand of that person opening a door, the person walks through the door and it shuts behind them. The person (me) then walks down a long corridor and then stops at a classroom door and reaches out to open it, from the inside of the classroom, we see the door handle going down then it cuts to show that person's face through the glass. The person then walks into the room and goes right to the end and sits down at a desk, this is when we meet the other character (Tara). Both characters then exchange a few words, "you took your time" and "so did you". The first character then pulls out a mystery package and drops it on the table, the other character says, "I'll let you know". The first character then gets up to leave but stops at the door to look back at the other character. The camera cuts to the other character, who looks scared and then it cuts back to the first character who sniggers and then leaves, slamming the door behind them.
In the next lesson, we filmed, edited and published our clip from the match cut exercise. There were only of us so on the upside, we got it done quickly and finished before the end of the lesson.
Overall, I was quite pleased with the camera work. I think that most successful shots were the very first one, with the feet walking up the stairs (from the side and from behind) and the one where I'm in the classroom, walking to the desk too sit down (extreme close up from the side). To be honest, I don't think there were any shots that we used that didn't work. The editing went quite well and we got it done pretty quickly. The continuity editing was almost perfect except for the fact that we had some problems doing a match cut between the very first shot and the second one. We had difficulty getting the feet right an making sure they were stepping on the right steps and with the right feet and so on. We didn't do much to make it look better but it did look alright. I think we successfully created suspense during that film, especially the scene with the mysterious package and Tara saying, "I'll let you know".
Although the whole film went well and the editing process, we did forget to film an extra 5 seconds before and after each shot but that didn't cause any problems during editing so it was OK.
January 13, 2009
In the lesson today, we watched a program called, "Watching". It was a documentary all about film openings. It was presented by a man named, Thomas Sutcliffe. He talked about the importance of drawing the audience in straight away during the opening so that they'd be willing to watch the entire film. Director, Jean Jacques Beineix pointed out that once the audience have become victims of that instant arousal, what happens next? Watching the program, I found it to be quite interesting because it made me realize how much directors think of the audience when they are making the film.
January 15, 2009
Today, we did a shot list exercise. We learnt how to make shot lists in order to help us plan shots for our thriller opening. We were given a synopsis for a short sequence and then we had to use a grid to create a shot list for it. Using no more than 20 shots, we wrote in exterior/interior, the shot type, the action and a description of what the shot would be like. My group did quite well with this exercise and we finished quite quickly. The technicians then showed us the sequence to see if it was similar to what wed come up with and from that, we learnt all about match cuts.
We were given a brief for a match cut exercise to do and it was, "A character opens a door, walks into a room, sits down opposite another character and they share a few lines of dialogue." We got to planning it and the first thing we did was create a shot list for our clip. In 20 shots, we'd decided to start with feet walking up some stairs, the hand of that person opening a door, the person walks through the door and it shuts behind them. The person (me) then walks down a long corridor and then stops at a classroom door and reaches out to open it, from the inside of the classroom, we see the door handle going down then it cuts to show that person's face through the glass. The person then walks into the room and goes right to the end and sits down at a desk, this is when we meet the other character (Tara). Both characters then exchange a few words, "you took your time" and "so did you". The first character then pulls out a mystery package and drops it on the table, the other character says, "I'll let you know". The first character then gets up to leave but stops at the door to look back at the other character. The camera cuts to the other character, who looks scared and then it cuts back to the first character who sniggers and then leaves, slamming the door behind them.
In the next lesson, we filmed, edited and published our clip from the match cut exercise. There were only of us so on the upside, we got it done quickly and finished before the end of the lesson.
Overall, I was quite pleased with the camera work. I think that most successful shots were the very first one, with the feet walking up the stairs (from the side and from behind) and the one where I'm in the classroom, walking to the desk too sit down (extreme close up from the side). To be honest, I don't think there were any shots that we used that didn't work. The editing went quite well and we got it done pretty quickly. The continuity editing was almost perfect except for the fact that we had some problems doing a match cut between the very first shot and the second one. We had difficulty getting the feet right an making sure they were stepping on the right steps and with the right feet and so on. We didn't do much to make it look better but it did look alright. I think we successfully created suspense during that film, especially the scene with the mysterious package and Tara saying, "I'll let you know".
Although the whole film went well and the editing process, we did forget to film an extra 5 seconds before and after each shot but that didn't cause any problems during editing so it was OK.
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