12E8 - Rhianna, Grace, Ellen and Amy

Our whole group were extremely pleased with the outcome of our opening film sequence. Though there were some areas that proved particularly challenging, for instance- editing the title sequence and creating the eerie effect we wanted. Another area we found demanding was locating an interesting track of music to run parallel with the titles and make them seem more menacing and dark. Additionally getting the right doorbell sound effect, which rung as the protagonists hand entered the water, ended up proving a lot more time consuming than we had anticipated. It was difficult to get both the audio and the action to play simultaneously and create a realistic bridging affect, that didn't come across obviously edited to our audience. However we did achieve and develop our piece so much more than we ever imagined, and believe that on the whole we got a positive outcome from our efforts. Our progress developed so much from our poorly constructed, and unimaginative preliminary sequence which was lacking in variety of camera work and creativity of ideas.

Planning in Reference to... Production,Inspiration,Genre, Context & Audience in planning discussions

Who do we envisage producing our film...?

The type of company we pictured producing our film wouldn't be big budget hollywood, but something a tad more low key, a company that could explore, market, and would initially be interested in a gritty, traumatic thriller film like our own. We pictured a an independent company, who would want also want to create a serious, hard-hitting film, rather than a clear goal driven, plot predictable big revenue movie. (We pictured companies like 'Film Four Productions' 'Lions Gate Films' 'Summit Entertainment' 'Overture Films' or 'Hannover House')

What was the inspiration behind our concepts and ideas...?

Many TV dramas that had had us frightened,gripped and intrigued, quirky credit sequences, and thriller films gave us  the inspiration for our film. 

- We'd seen many serial dramas on channel four and itv, that had incorporated the conventions and concepts of the thriller genre, in a naturalistic but scary way. we were inspired by programmes such as, 'Five daughters' 'This is england' 'Prime Suspect' 'The Little house' etc, all of which touched serious issues in interesting ways.

- We looked at various credit openings to get a feel of how typical sequences worked, but these also gave us many rebounding ideas of our own, for ways in which we could make our credit sequence, much more interactive and creative! For instance, the opening credit sequence of the E4 comedy drama 'Fresh Meat' the names of those involved/ the cast appear on/around different elements of the student house they live in, this and the parallel music really help to set up the tone of the programme, and we wanted/were inspired to, create the same affect with our own opening sequence! 

Genre,Audience and Context

In order to accurately include key conventions of the thriller genre we studied and analysed many similar openings that fell under the same category, this helps us initiate what we would need to defiantly include before we could start throwing about more inventive concepts. (We watched clips from  films such as 'Sherlock','Inception','Jaws' and 'Physco' and some other media students previous work). We also debated putting our film into a different time frame/context, because we felt it had made some of the other films more affective and could attract a wider audience more effectively (if it was set say 20 years ago some dramatic elements may seem more dramatic as the audience would not be able to necessarily relate to this time frame as well making them feel disconnected and disorientated) we saw our audience as being mid-late teen/young-mid adult - a fairly wide range, but one with whom could deal with the issues we intended to explore. 

The showcase: audience feedback.

In our first and only showcase, every member of our Media class saw our unfinished film and made comments. A lot of the comments were on things that were not intentional in our piece: for example, it is mentioned several times that the last frame freezes at the end of the film for too long, but this was only because we hadn't yet cut the last sound item on the timeline. Other things discussed was the lack of credits, which we have yet to put in, and the sound. These are two areas in which we are aware we need to work, so we were very happy with our evaluation results.

finishing the editing

after a lot of planning and hard work we finished editing our sequence and managed to get it down to approximately 2 minutes. we planned how we were going to edit before we started and we took it turns to do things so we all had a go at using final cut. when two of us would be editing, the other two would be looking into music for our film opening. we looked at music on the Internet that wasn't copyrighted and we also experimented with GarageBand to see if we could find a sound that worked well. we didn't have much luck when looking into music on the Internet so we looked at sounds that worked well together and our film. we noted these sounds down so when we start making our music on garageband we already have an understanding of the program and the sorts of sounds that we would like to use.

consideration of topic

during our discussions as a group over the last few weeks we thought about the topic of our film. as it is to do with a paedophile and rape etc we realised it is quite a sensitive topic and we have to make sure what we include in our opening sequence is suitable. we have to consider that this topic could be quite upsetting for some people therefore we decided to make very clean cuts and only to hint at the themes we are trying to portray rather than being to explicit.

week 6

this week we have continued to cut our footage down and we also have started to order it. we decided to edit the footage as we put it in order rather than order it and then edit it as a lot of shots had to be fragmeted for our montages therefore this would make it easier. we have also been thinking about music for our opening sequence and what sort of music we will use and if we will make it or not.

week 5

during week 5 we focused on the credits and started to edit our film. we had to first upload all of our filming on to the computer and then we opened it on final cut express which is the program we are using to edit our footage. this week we have also spent a lot of time on our independent blogs and making sure we are all up to date. we started to choose the shots we wanted to use and cut them down as we had a lot more footage than needed as we experienced with different types of shot and angles for each scene.