Final Cut :)

Here is our Final Cut!

Today we watched through each groups rough cuts, then gave feedback in what we thought about each of the clips. On our rough cut we explained about what happened to our titles and why we haven't got them on there and just said that we are going to edit the music and just edit it in general to clean it up.

The general feedback that we got back from the class, was that it was an original, fast paced, mysterious opening sequence. They also said that we did a wide range of shots, showing the red strip lights, and the underwater affect we did. People also commented on how we had the voice mail at the start of the opening sequence, represented mystery and "what is going to happen next?". Feedback about the editing was good, they liked the fast transaction shots, how objects and people just appeared, how everything flows together.
Other things that the students suggested we looked at and edited again are about the blood on the face, dosen't look real
The music was not such a success, people said that we should make it a darker sound to represent the images we had put together, to give it more suspense. But they did say that some of the child music worked well on top of the soundtrack, the jewerlly box clip worked well.

Rough Cut

Rough cut:



This is our rough cut, unfortunatly we didnt manage to put our titles onto it due to file difficulties. we are planning to edit the music and sound levels to make it flow better with the piece aswell as adding effective titles :)

Editing

Today we began and nearly finished our editing for out thriller, with our piece we chose to make it very abstract and wierd. This means that we relied on our edting more than anything, as lydia mentioned before we had trouble with filming some of our bits as the lighting was not right. With this we then had to concentrate hard on editing it so that could get the effect we wanted. one of the problems we ran into was making the transitions clearer and understanderble enough without taking the edge of our more bizzare opening. another was getting the timeing right, we hope that we will be able to merge the titles, soundtrack and footage togther to make it flow well.
We want the editing to have these points in them:

Fast transitions
fade in an outs
Flashing images
Snappy titles
merging of images

We are a little worried that we might not get all of this doen in time, but we hope that if we work hard we can get it done.

comments on a student project

http://thrillerproject.blogspot.com/search/label/Student%20Thriller%20Opening

click above for the student thriller

camera Work : a range of intresting shots showing only hands or feet doing something, this is effective as it doesnt give too much away of whats happening in the scene. sharp clean footage showing exactly what needs to be seen, with a good lihgt balance, we can learn from this as our in our editing time we are having to change the contrast on our images. the low angle shot from the floor looking up at the main character works well as it among other shots keep the footage varied and intresting.

Editing: quick and clean transitions, to the point and not too long clips. the use of the titles is used really well as they have come up with the idea of having the usual london underground map

But have changed the station names for the names of the actors, director etc.....

Mise-en-scene : this is worked very well as they have chosen to film in london itself, which gives you the perfect setting, costume and extras you need. The bomber himself is very plain, all in black and this gives a feel of curiosity for who this guy might be.

soundtrack:good consistent music , no lyrics , because there was no lyrics it contributed to the creepy feel to the clip . the crecendo of the music at the end of the opening builds the tension of what the audience already know is about to happen .

overall a very well and clean opeing theiller :)

music soundtrack

The music was something that we started to do right at the beginning of this task but we found that once we had made our music some of it needed to be timed in with the clips, so gradually as we added and edited more of the footage we needed to change the music, we started to add in just simple sound effects and had to add in some voice overs on certain parts like when the voice mail on the mobile phone can be heard. We had planned to change our music from our annamatic as we fwelt it did not go with what we were planning to shoot. but after we finished our filming adn got onto editing we started to realise that the music from our annamatice would go well with our footage. although the small amount of music we have is not enough to fit our opening we plan to work on it to make it better and long enough to fit our piece.

Shooting Footage

On the second day of filming we ran in to several problems whilst shooting our thriller because we found that certain shots proved to be a lot harder than we first thought.
We wanted to do a shot which captured the affect of water going in to a glass but we found that when we tried to shoot this you could see the persons hand and body that was holding the glass, we tried several different positions but still found that we had the same problem. We then put the cup on top of the camera which meant that the water effect was less obvious but it prevented the person being show and all that you could now see was the persons hands, but this was very faint. We found that by shooting the shot like this the effect was not as good as we had hoped because the water movement was much less.

When we were shooting the scenes that involved the fake blood we found that it was very hard to make the blood look effective. The blood ended up being a think line and we could not put the blood close enough to the eye to make it look like that is where it was coming from, we decided to keep this shot but add a lot of effects to it to make it look better.

When filming the shot of the girl in the cupboard we ran in to problems with lighting, we found that our first attempt of filming this when uploaded on the computer was too dark to actually see clearly what was happening in the shot, so when we re-filmed this we decided to use a different place that allowed more light to enter in to the shot, we did this because we then thought of the idea of editing the shot on the computer to make it darker rather than trying to lighten the footage because this was not successful at all.

When we were filming the footage on the pond we found that it was hard to get a creepy and eery effect so this is something we would have to do on the computers. We also found that from certain angels you could see to much of the girl in the shot and it showed too much of her face when we wanted to keep this something that was not too clear but from other angels you couldn't see enough of her so that shot was confusing and you could not tell what we were trying to show in the clip.

Scenes

We first went around the college looking for ideas of where we could shoot our thriller.
We found several different locations that looked appealing and took photographs of these which appear on the blog. Once we had looked through the photographs we decided which locations looked more suitable for filming.
On our first day of filming we went to the drama studio where we used a dark cuboard to film our first shot, and also for the shot of the television, we later filmed the shot of the bleeding eye also in the drama studio.
For the red light effect we went to the dark room, where we did still shots and also panning shots of the lights, this created a blured and flickery effect.
We used the drip trays to film the effect of water being dropped and to capture the ripples that were created.

Names For The Thriller.

1.Captured
2.Isolation
3.darkness
4.betrayal
5.spotlight
6.The haunting
7.Tortured

After coming up with these names we narrowed it down to to a choice of three, these being Tortured, Captured and Isolation. We decided Isolation was the better choice out of the three because it gave away the least. The reason we decided against Captured was down to the fact that it had been used previously and it was a very common choice. We then thought through the ideas of tortured and Isolation and decided that tortured gave away to much of what would be happening in the storyline.

The name for our thriller is ISOLATION.

Analysis of Real Thriller- Panic Room

Panic room begins with opening sequence of birds eye view of New York, then the shot slowly moves into a panning shot, then moving onto close ups of the buliding, which show the credits. The first shot shown starts after the soundtrack has started. The sounds of the orchestral instruments begins with a deep and low pitched instrument, this is when the first credits appear. The sound is both non-diegetic and diegetic. By having typical street noises such as Traffic, Sirens and general background noise, these sound gives us a sense of the atmosphere in the busy city.
After the title of the film appears the music speeds up. This builds tension throughout the opening sequence. The soundtrack appears to be quieter and slower whilst two characters appear speaking over the soundtrack. This brings the opening sequence to and end, to lead you into an action packed film.