Thriller re-editing

For the first half of the lesson, we watched our peers' opening sequences and gave constructive comments to help them improve. We had to think individually what we thought their plot was and then two points of feedback, one positive comment and one improvement.
Our feedback points were:

•Unusual approach
•Good camera work
•Good music choices - tension built at points
•Out of focus shot at the end - good ending
•Music - at points makes it sound like Television Drama
•Refilm some shots in wide screen
•Length of shots need to be edited and cut down
•"Tom" and "Sophie" romantic section, looks too "happy" and focused around them
•Cuts more from "stalkers" point of view so that it build up tension

The second half of this lesson we spent re-editing and discussing refilming. We decided that we should not film anymore of Andrew and should only refilm the photo pan. Andrew then spent some time downloading thematic music to use in our film. From a choice of five pieces of music, I thought the most suitable was a track called 'Secrets told' as it was very eiree. I also made more cuts between the stalker camera and the over the shoulder camera. To make a further distinction between the stalker camera and the over the shoulder camera, I increased the volume level of the interference in the stalker camera shots.

Out of Focus Draft

Thriller Editing 2

Today we continued with editing together our opening sequence. Today we managed to finish the outline of our editing by cutting all our shots and music to the right length and putting it in the correct order. This meant we could get started on the time consuming effects of brightness, saturation and transitions and titles. I added in the 'dip to black' transition inbetween other footage and the photo pan and the 'cross dissolve' transition between the photo pan and other footage. We had a discussion whether our opening sequence should be a mixture of greyscale and colour, just greyscale or just colour. We finally decided that the whole opening sequence should be in greyscale. This will hopefully give the impression of a sinister detective genre format. The greyscale footage gives the opening sequence an unusual and unpredictable tone and hopefully will conform to thriller conventions. Next lesson we need to finish the editing process by adding titles and making small changes.

Thriller Editing

Today, in lesson we captured the videos which we shot earlier and then started the editing process. Firstly we looked at all of the clips which we had taken throughout filming process. Whilst watching the clips we all had a discussion about which bits of that can be used and which bits we can be cut down slightly. We had made sure during filming process that we filmed more than we needed so that in the editing process, we had enough footage, rather than having to go out and reshoot scenes. We also decided that the full opening or most of it should be shown in greyscale as the tone of film contrasted with the colours in it. If it was not in greyscale, we wanted to use faded colours. We decided that the hand held camera shots for the multiple photo pan worked better than the tripod panning shots. This was because the handheld shots were very fluid and accurate while the tripod shots appeared rigid and inconsistent. We edited the clips of Andrew walking together to make the walking appear continuous. We used a cross disolve into the sequence and a fade out of it. We then placed in between two different edits of the multiple photo pan sequence. We experimented with the saturation and brightness levels because we initially wanted this part to be in very faded colours. However, we could not find a good and consistent affect to achieve what we wanted so we decided to just have it shown in greyscale.

Thriller Filming 4

We continued to do our filming for our opening scene. Our group travelled again to Archer's field with the intention of filming Tom and Sophie as a couple. We filmed them first from two different angles walking together in front of a small collection of trees and bushes. These shots were all intended to be an audince point of view rather than from the view of the stalker.













We then did a low angle shot close up of Tom and Sophie from Sophie's side and then a reversed shot of it. We intended the audience now to connect the images they saw in the photos earlier to the ones they are seeing then.

























We took several shots from inside the tree area from a first person point of view. Andrew was
controlling the camera here and moved the camera behind the trees more everytime either sophie or Tom showed signs that someone was there. After a short while, Andrew pretended to drop the camera while I ran towards Tom and Sophie with a hood up while they ran away. Andrew then filmed panning shots of Tom and Sophie running through a small woodland nearby, although we are unsure if we will need to use this footage. When we returned to college, we captured the footage.

Thriller Filming 3

We planned this lesson to film Tom and Andrew who were intended to be potential victims in our film. Sophie could not be here because of other obligations. We started by filming Andrew walking down a street. We did two different shots from across the road, one shot of Andrew walking into the camera and one of him walking away from the camera. We also did one take of a handheld, lower resolution camera behind him, insinuating that he is being followed and filmed. Next, we filmed Tom on the swings in a playpark. One shot was from the side/front, the other was a high angle shot to highlight his vulnerability. The vulnerability is also present in the mise en scene of the playpark. We also filmed with the low resolution camera from behind some trees to show that he was being watched.

Thriller Filming 2

We arranged the photos we had on a pin board and appropriately annotated them. We then took the pinboard, camera and tripod to Sophie's house where we filmed several panning shots of the photographs. When we were ready to film and we thought the camera was correctly set up, we encountered the problem that the resolution of the image had too high levels of green in it. We later discovered that the night lens had accidentally been turned on. We then filmed one handheld pan of the photos and one tripod pan of the photos to use for the start of the film. We then went back to the college and plan to capture the footage next lesson.