This will be presented as a directors commentary with clips of the opening sequence and also clips of the preliminary peice.
- Forms and Conventions;
- It take the form of a Thriller opening, it includes the following conventions of a Thriller, titles/credits, production companies, actors, edited by, music by, produced by, directed by ect, and also the title.
- Challenges conventions --> like a trailer for some of it - very fast pace of shots (with diff bits of the storyline in the same sequence) - mysterious - makes audience want to see the rest of it. At the end of opening the "5 days earlier" shows that it is about to carry on into a full film.
- Representation;
--> Teenagers and the supernatural.
- We thought that it would be better if the main character and supernatural character should have long hair because it is a good representation of teenaged girls and long hair on makes a ghostly figure more mysterious because they can hide their face behind it.
- We also thought it would be good for the girl to have blonde hair and the ghostly girl to have dark brown hair because they contrast. Blonde would represent light, purity and goodness, and brown would represent darkness, evil and a dirty slate.
- The main character is wearing bright/light/bold colours to reflect bubbly personality - in 1st opening clips she is wearing white (getting ready for a party clip). In some of the shots she is wearing a darker/bold blue jumper this is showing through her clothes that as the film progresses her personality is getting darker as her mind is being driven insane by the ghostly girl. Also the white jeans on her bottom half are contrasting this and show that she is slowly being taken over and hasn't turned completely insane yet.
- The ghostly girl wears dull and pastel colours, representing her ghostly state, also she can't wear brightly coloured clothes because dull clothes make it easier for her to blend in with the shadows and her scenery, making her a more mysterious and a tense character.
- Girl on round-a-bout represents ghostly girl going round in victims heads and along with the music it represents how the victim will become insane because of her.
- Hannah and I decided that one of us should act out the part of one of the main characters because we knew how we wanted it to look and we would also be more reliable, therefore making it easier to get the finished product we wanted. We also chose Lucy Gent to act out the part of a main character in our production because she is a drama student and would be able to portray mine and Hannah's idea of how her character would act.
- All of these are essential for the creation of a character because if not a lot of thought go into it then the character may be unclear to the audience or have a different affect on them other than what affect you wanted to have on them.
- Media institutions;
- distributed the thriller opening on blogger and youtube. If we had longer on this we would have tried to upload it to more sites like myspace, facebook and bebo to get a wider range of an audience. Usually low budget English films by directors who havent yet been recognised of their talents are distributed on the internet to get hopefully an audience which will watch other films they may put on there. Youtube would be the best place to distribute an opening to a film because youtube has a lot of viewers, and broadcasting videos is the main feature of the website unlike the other sites which are more social.
- Target Audience;
15-24 year olds.
We set out to capture the audience by making it mysterious, making it tense, slightly scary, leaving them asking questions and wanting to know more.
There is a mixture of diff shots taken from what would be the film and they are put into the beginning as like a flashback that our main character is having. This would make the audience want to know what happened for these flashbacks to occur because the images in the flashbacks pose a lot of questions because they are quite mysterious. I collected quite abit of audience feedback, not all of them were media students which makes their opinions more applicable to what an actual audience would look for in a movie not a media student.
- The overall comment of mine and hannah;s thriller opening was that it was really good, there were good comments about the random shots - knife clock round-a-bout ect being scary, good comments on the music adding tension, quite a few people wanted to watch the whole film if we made one, so it fulfilled what we wanted by wanting our audience to want to find out more, making them want to watch the rest of the film. However there was 2 comments on blogger and they thought it was a trailer. This was taken into consideration after we finished storyboarding at first and we extended the original piece to make it seem like it carried on into a film after the title.
- Technologies;
- Internet - the websites used were a source of a large range of free sounds/music - time consuming - often came up with results which were nothing like what we were looking for.
- iMacs/iMovie - learnt how to use different on screen effects to help give an eery feel to the thriller opening, there were some limitations; trouble with the macs; on some clips they kept freezing at the end of them, when creating and removing the titles for the film it duplicated some of the clips, it wouldn't let us do some of the transitions we wanted however that was probably due to the length of the clips and other effects/titles may have affected it.
- Vid cameras - They are pretty easy to work with once gotten to grips with, limitations - some of the shots had to be filmed on the tripod (still) instead of using a tracking shot because the camera would have been too shaky because we didn't have a camera trolly/dolly to get that effect.
- Progress;
- more experimentive with camera movement
- took panning (in preliminary) - moved across then up instead of just across.
- tracking shot
- steadicam
- wider range of shot types and angles.
- put a lot more thought into angles of camera shots, pays off because it makes the opening sequence more interesting to watch if there are a variety of different shots.
- sound quality better - in preliminary voices weren't that clear however in final production the scream (only diegetic voice) was clear, which made it more effective on the audience - if the scream had been quieter because of the distance of the camera or the music was louder then it wouldn't have the same effect on the audience.
This is the final piece of the evaluation, it would have been included in the filming, however there were some problems with the camera i filmed it with and it missed the last bit, and as I haven't had time to re-do the progress section of my evaluation I have written it up with clips aswell.
Hannah and I made quite a lot of progress from the preliminary exercise to our opening to the thriller.
We were more experimentative with camera movement and we took panning, which was in the preliminary exercise, and we moved the camera across then up instead of just across. This is shown in the clip below;
We also used tracking shots and steadicam. We have used a wider range of shot types and angles within the thriller opening. A lot more thought was put into angles of camera shots, this pays off because it makes the opening sequence more interesting to watch if there are a variety of different shots.
The sound quality is better in the thriller opening because in the preliminary piece, the voices weren't that clear however in the final production the scream (which was the only diegetic voice in the pice) was clear, which made it more effective on the audience. If the scream had been quieter because of the distance of the camera or the music was louder then it wouldn't have the same effect on the audience. It is shown in the clip below;
