Final Thriller Opening Sequence

TURN OFF ANNOTATIONS

Audience Feedback

We created a focus group in our class to get feedback on what people thought of our thriller opening sequence. We were especially keen to find out what they liked and disliked about it, whether they found the narrative to be believable and what they thought of the acting.

We found that they mainly thought that the film was good and believable and were also impressed with the additional sounds we added (such as the phone ringing which became louder as it was removed from the dead body's coat) as we had to remove the audio (due to the background noise).

However, the negative reactions were that the lip syncing was a bit out of time, the acting wasn't as good as it could have been and too much information was revealed in such a short space of time too early into the film - although we justified this with the point that it is a fast-pace action film which is supposed to get straight into the action.

Overall, we felt that the feedback was fair and reflective of our film. If we could change anything, we would have used a boom microphone to record a better sound at the time of our thriller's filming to prevent any background noise so we wouldn't have had to record the lines again and wouldn't have had to try to sync the audio of the characters talking with their lip movements.

Evaluation Task 7: What have I learnt in the progression from my prelim to my thriller?

Prelim:

Camera:

Although in my prelim we included a large range of shots (wide shots, medium shots, over-the-shoulder shots, high angle shots and low angle shots), they were all fixed shots and so were overall more basic than those that we used in our thriller. In addition to all these shots (minus the over-the-shoulder shots because there was no face-to-face conversation), our thriller also included a panning shot, a circular tracking shot and a zooming shot. This all created movement which emphasises the action aspect of the film. However, my prelim did have a tiny bit of movement, but this was unintentional shakiness of the camera, even though it was on a tripod. After watching our final thriller, I can see that the camerawork has been improved since the filming of the prelim as any camera movement in the thriller was intentional and so we have become more confident in using the camera as it was the first time using it for the prelim for most of us.

Thriller

Prelim

Mise-en-scène:

For our prelim, the costumes were just the clothes that the actors were wearing on the day and didn't mean anything in accordance to what was going on. In contrast, for our thriller, our intention was for Sean and the victim to wear casual clothes to make them more realistic and show that they are just average people and for Sebastian to wear black leather gloves to hide his identity. We also had no props for the prelim, whereas our thriller required props such as the phones so Sean and Sebastian could have their conversation. The lighting for the prelim just came from the light in the room and the light coming through the windows, but for our thriller we had planned the lighting for Sebastian very carefully to connote his mystery and danger. In addition, the location of the prelim was just a classroom as it was not pre-planned. However, even though the location for Sean in our thriller changed from where it was planned to be, it was still outside and helped connote the disturbed nature of what was happening, and the location for Sebastian did not change as it allowed us to use the lighting that we wanted. All of this shows that we had thought a lot more about the mise-en-scène for our thriller as we were more prepared and so this meant that whereas the mise-en-scène for the prelim was random and had no significance, the mise-en-scène for our thriller was able to have meaning.

Prelim

Thriller

Editing:

In the prelim, the only editing I did was to cut the footage into clips and place them in order to follow the storyboard as best as I could. In comparison, for our thriller we did cut down the footage, cut it into clips and put them in the order we wanted, but we also edited the clips themselves to make the thriller look more cinematic. Lip-syncing the audio was also a way in which we edited our thriller, however I will go into this in more detail when talking about sound. In addition, the prelim doesn't seem to flow as well as the thriller does because we didn't film enough footage for the prelim and so it was very hard to edit where one shot would coherently follow on from another with the same movement. However, we found this much easier to do for the thriller as we filmed more shots of each scene.

Prelim

Thriller

Sound:

In the prelim, the only sound used is the diegetic sound of speech that was recorded at the time of filming, and as other groups were filming their prelim's in the same room, their talking is audible in the background. In contrast, our thriller is vastly different in terms of sound. We re-recorded the diegetic speech as we couldn't hear it from the original filming and lip-synced it (which I would have done for the prelim due to the background noise, but we had much longer to do so for the thriller), and, due to the audio removal we also added in more sound effects such as the phone ringing or quiet ambient noise. In addition, we also used a non-copyrighted piece of creepy music in the background to add suspense. Therefore, the editing in our thriller was much better than that of the prelim as it helped make the thriller more realistic and more mysterious, while the prelim didn't have anything added to help emphasise its genre.

Prelim

Thriller

Teamwork:

For the prelim, our group was quite big in comparison to other groups and everyone was talking over each other to suggest the shots that should be filmed and so some suggestions weren't heard and it took a while to film everything and so we didn't get as much footage as we would have hoped. Additionally, our editing was very disorganised, with three of us editing on our own to try and follow the storyboard as closely as possible and some people not editing. However, our thriller group worked very well together in comparison with everyone listening to each other's suggestions and taking them on board during the filming and the editing process to end up with a good final product where everybody played a part.

Thriller opening sequence:

TURN OFF ANNOTATIONS

Evaluation Task 6: How have I used digital technologies in my production?

As a group, we annotated our thriller on YouTube about both the process and effects of using technology for the production of our opening thriller sequence.

MAKE SURE THE ANNOTATIONS ARE ON

Evaluation Task 5: How have you attracted and addressed your target audience?