Monday 29 June 2009
Tuesday 31 March 2009
Our media product which is a thriller opening uses the ideas and conventions of a real time swindling thriller. Conspiracy and conning were the main forms of our thriller, with the opening we wanted to create an understandable storyline. Not too simple as it would not be challenging for us and we feel we could be insulting the intelligence of our audience whilst also not explaining enough of where our film goes. However we could not make it too complex as it’s an opening, audiences need time to realise what is going on. We also had to be weary not to tell too much within two minutes, we wanted the audience to gather thoughts but not to be able to predict the whole movie otherwise it would not be appealing.
As the clip develops the use of our soundtrack becomes more fierce and upbeat, along with the various camera angles the action onstage becomes more meaningful and tense. As we introduce more characters the drums come in as the orchestra fades slightly, as the exchange is made and our character walks off, the orchestra and drums fuse together to make tension rise. Our idea of a briefcase exchange has been seen before as it has been used in many films, however in differing ways.
The main emphasis being the tension up until a person is finally able to see what is in the briefcase, as it’s possible anything could be in the briefcase it’s an excitement factor for our audience. In the films we took our ideas from the contents of the briefcase can vary from drugs and money to letters and body parts. We needed to be less graphic and try to be more original with our idea as predictability was going to be a problem, so we used the idea of a phone ringing as the contents for our briefcase. I believe it proposed more questions that what drugs or money would it links to more intrigue and makes the audience think. We got this thought from a French director who had the strong belief of not giving the audience what they have come to see straight away, to prolong it and then give them the climax in the best way possible achieves the best results.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The thriller represents the middle/working class social group, I believe this because we had a mix of causally and smart dressed actors. We used our location as a strong basis; The Barbican is surrounded by workplaces and offices. As we planned to film here we felt we had to have some of the actors blend in with the location otherwise the location would not be justified. The target audience was late 20’s onwards, this is because I feel the younger generation would like the action to be brought to them quicker and this opening has no real physical action just yet.
The film is mainly aimed at males, there are no women involved, the film creates the idea of two members of a gang making a deal with each other with one eventually trying to double cross the other. Women rarely have any interest in our genre of thriller. Filming at the Barbican was a good choice, at the time of filming the place was quiet, and it creates an abandoned atmosphere whilst also being a hotspot for work which would make the Barbican an unsusceptible place to not make a dodgy dealing.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
I believe we could get recognition from rising British companies who try to make something of British Talent. The thriller opening has all the elements of a British film, the location, plot and lighting. I feel our product has strong British authenticity so it would only appeal to a small dedicated audience. As most of our lighting, action and sound are limited, it would be highly unlikely we would receive any attention from the US or Hollywood. This is because Hollywood must set a standard and maintain it otherwise your product is not recognised.
Our Thriller opener was inspired by the film “Collateral.” We took the elements of the opener and made it our own, adding the themes that people would normally associate with British film. The weather (rain), the dark sky atmosphere, and the rush hour. As our characters want to make the exchange quickly and be off to their next destination. The Barbican as a filming location was good as it’s a well known place which reflects the work ethic of British culture.
Another institution that would be able to distribute our opening would be the internet, using sites such as YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe and Vimeo. These sites are well known for accessibility and being able to upload videos of any content. This makes a great place to view documentaries, music videos, TV programmes and short films like ours. If our production is good, it would receive views that lead to recommendations, popularity and then a fan base.
Who would be the audience for your media product?
The target audience for my thriller are people aged from their late 20’s and onwards I don’t feel we have to place an ending age target audience anyone interested in our product will view it. Anyone from this age onwards can represent any lifestyle. A working or unemployed person, the person who likes to socialise and others who prefer the comfort of home. Overall out thriller is accessible tp alot of people, however a description of who is most likely would be a working male in his late 20’s or early 30’s who enjoys action and thriller films.
How will you attract/address your audience?
There are two main methods I would want to use to attract, address and inform our audience of our opener. The best method would be using the internet, as well as being able to post our opening onto Vimeo and other video uploading sites; we can advertise our product on networking and socialising sites such Facebook and MySpace. It would be best the best option as it would receive comments, reactions and popularity. It would also become more interactive through aspects like fan base and groups . The second option would be billboard advertising, although it’s not the best way of advertising it has potential to reach people more as not everyone owns a computer so it can be seen at any time when travelling to work and home again.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
I have learnt a considerable amount of new shortcuts and handy ways to edit, move and change footage. Although there is much more I could and need to learn I can say I know more at present due to constructing our thriller. I was the director and main cameraman for our product and it meant having to know how to handle the equipment without making any irreversible mistakes. We managed this despite the weather conditions being testy, the rain contributed to our unique look of the opener it just meant there more caution taken with moving the camera and tripod in particular. It was through the weather we started thinking of more shots like POV, and medium close-ups it was convenient as it was also protecting the camera. In the process of filming we also had to use the editing software “Final cut pro.” Editing was harder to adjust to but we did it, there were only trivial problems like, as we would try to edit or write our names for the credits we kept encountering problems like overwriting names or the font/size being irregular. Despite that editing was good. The main aspect of editing was logging and capturing the right footage as we did make plenty of bloopers whilst filming. Learning about that was one of the highlights of this product because we saw everything and remember the mistakes we also made.
What was the audience feedback from the class?
When it was our turn for our thriller to be viewed I was nervous, for our efforts we got applause. We were praised for our plot, as it was not too vivid for an opening. Within the class we were the only conspiracy/conning thriller storyline plot which was nice. The soundtrack was very important to getting to good feedback we did get, in my opinion it was the soundtrack that set the mood and tempo along with the footage as it went well together.
Compare your thriller film to your preliminary task
We learnt our lesson and vowed to stick with the genre that we had to actually project. We put more thought into this project the fact we had more time helped, for the preliminary we got good footage and sounds the downside was it had no relation to the thriller genre. We made everyone laugh which was what we intended but it was off task as we were not doing a comedy, we learnt from this mistake and made a good opening.
A screen capture from our opening showing two of our actors (Emre and Teddy) also demonstrating that it’s on Vimeo for anyone to be able to view it and leave a comment.
The main character of our opening Emre, through seeing the opening he looks like the ringleader. If we were to use billboard advertising this capture would be one of the options.
This shot captures the action of our opening, there are 3 actors in the opening two working together against one, colour coordination was used black against grey.
This shot captures our creative sense and highlights the location and environment where we set the thriller.
The sites we would be using to advertise our thriller
film editing
In this lesson, we were continuing to edit complete our thriller. We have nearly finished editing everything with one lesson to spare. Our camera shot sequence is as follows:
An extreme long shot of Emre walking down a first flight of stairs followed by a low angle shot of the same area focusing on his knees and feet.
We have a 3 second cut with a black screen to give display our movie name we still needed to think of one and also hide a jump in our footage that was hard to get rid of.
Another long shot takes place of Emre walking down a second flight of stairs; we had the camera at the bottom of the stairs to get another angle.
As Emre looks over to another person we have David’s POV shot of him staring at Emre as he quickly walks by acknowledging each other.
Another long shot takes place of Emre travelling to Teddy, who is already sitting down waiting
there is a close-up shot of their legs and the briefcases next to them a few seconds later, Teddy picks up a suitcase and walks away. We have a low angle shot of him taking one of the briefcases away and having a building in the shot which was really effective.
We see another long shot of Teddy walking towards the camera; David is following close behind but maintaining distance so Teddy will not see him.
This triggers a mid shot of Emre realising that David is after Teddy, he looks at the briefcase and picks it up followed with a POV shot
Finally there is a close up of the briefcase and its contents, a mobile phone ringing.
Our group decided on an orchestral sound that would be supported by drums for the soundtrack of the thriller. Experimenting with the sounds we had from Soundtrack Pro. We were working on fitting in the credits.
Our only problem of the lesson was finalising a suitable name for our thriller, however we will think of something good enough as our final lesson is on Thursday.
filming session day 2
Today we had planned to continue filming from Thursday. Instead of slush and snow conditions, there was heavy rain and no trace of snow or ice. This meant we had to start the filming process from virtually the beginning; otherwise we would have had noticeable inconsistencies that were too obvious when we need to match-cut. So we started and finished filming at the barbican, we had a little more trouble filming with the rain and an issue of permission but we dealt with both issues effectively and finished with time to spare. It helped we had done most of the filming on Thursday.
The difference we made to today’s filming was that at the end, when the hooded man (David) follows the man who had been waiting (Teddy), the main man (Emre) looks at the situation, opens the briefcase happily to find a ringing mobile phone.
In case we did not our original thoughts on film, we thought of alternative options and filmed another ending just in case these first ideas were not good. The difference is that Emre will be looking in the Briefcase and grinning. The footage will not show the contents of the briefcase to the audience.
The Pitch
In this lesson, I, Emre, Teddy and David had to pitch our idea to the teacher and the class. As we were not completely sure of our own idea the pitch was a little complicated, because of this we thought of other possible pitches better, so we thought of another two ideas.
After further contemplation, we thought the idea of number 2 bumping into number 3 to get his bag was stupid and unnecessary. A new idea we came up with, was that number two would follow number 3. Then number 3 would stop by a kiosk and buy himself something, while he would be doing this he would leave his bag unguarded for a minute, so that number 2 could quickly steal the bag without being noticed. Although this sounded god it was way too complex and did not make sense after waiting to make the swap why would someone be stupid enough to leave the bag unguarded.
Also the limit of 2 minutes meant we had to be realistic, we had to use different camera shots, that would be challenging enough without complicating the footage on-screen. Exceeding the 2 minute mark could deduct points from us and cost us a grade. So, we kept our options open and thought we could try filming both and see which one turns out better.
match-cutting
Match-Cut
Today’s lesson we given a storyboard and had to make up shots for it, there were two groups one had to make up the series of shots whilst the other did the same and they we would have to compare the results.
The storyboard was:
A day in East London, 3pm. A man has confidential information and eagerly loads this on a CD. He then packages it to send it off.
In the group I was with Emre, we worked together in this task and David, together with Teddy worked on the same task. After we finished comparing, we found that Teddy’s and David’s sequence was in more detail as they considered more elements and was praised by Mickey for their work.
Mickey then introduced us to “match-cutting”. Match-cut is used in editing where you have a scene and two or more shots, in different angles, have been cut accordingly to fit and let the action carry on with no interferences. It’s a requirement for our thrillers
Mickey then showed us his version of the scenario he gave us. We spotted how he applied his match-cutting technique into the video.
Our Preliminary Video Planning
Our group was given another scenario, we had to actually produce the video piece with our ideas that we put on paper. The scenario was that one person walks into a room, sits opposite the other character and shares a conversation. Our group came up with ideas into creating the shots and putting them together.
plan for thriller opening
In today’s lesson our group had to plan an idea for our actual thriller opening. We had talked to each other about how our thriller opening should be also discussing likes and dislikes of certain thriller opening ideas; this was the lesson we had to have everything on paper. We were thinking of ideas like the location, whether the film was going to be in the day or evening, and if the characters were going to be alone, how many character would be on-screen if there would be any dialogue.
We combined our ideas come up with some decent scenarios. We thought of a scenario, where there would be a normal person walking at night witnessing a murder, combined with a chase scene with the witness and murderer, similar to the policeman flashback thriller we saw. We thought this was a pretty good idea because it had the “instant arousal” factor for the audience, but we were told that it was way too fast and that we could be making an attempt at a whole movie in two minutes instead of just an opening.
We then had a final idea, where there would be a conning. The opening contains a bag handling situation where two bags contain contents that each man want what the other man has. Two men work together to steal the third man's bag. This is how the scene will work. The two men working together will be called number 1 and 2. The third man is the man that gets conned. Number 1 sits in a quite area with the bag waiting. Number 3 sits next to him with a bag. Number 2 sits on the on the opposite side and impatiently waits for the swap. After the swap happens between 1 and 3, number 2 deliberately follows or bumps into Number 3 to confront him.