In the last few lessons we had, once we were put into groups following the teachers’ decision, we had to write up a storyboard, film the given task and edit the footage on the computers. Our preliminary task before making our actual thriller was to produce a short film based on a character reading a newspaper in a thriller genre.
Before we got into filming, we had to come up with a storyboard together with my group (Teddy, James, David). We had formed a storyboard in time for the day of the filming.
Our idea was that a man (David) that reads a newspaper article and gets really excited over this. He emphasises the excitement by jumping high up and running out the room with happiness. As he runs out another member (James) who seems confused about David running out, walks over to read the page David was reading, only to find a photograph of Angelina Jolie.
On the day of the filming we had fresh ideas into making the film better, as it turned out to be. We improved our ideas into the sorts of angles we should use in certain parts of the scene.
We had used a tracking shot with a close up of David’s feet; high angle shot for when he enters the room; a low angle shot for when he picks up the newspaper to read it; a 180 degree slow moving shot mid shot of David reading the article about Angelina Jolie; a close-up of David’s face to show his reactions; a long shot of David running out following a low angle shot while he runs over the camera; a long shot of James walking towards the newspaper, and finally a close-up of Angelina Jolie.
On the same day, we had time for some editing, which allowed us to delete the footage that was wrong and have our idea ready for the sounds to be put in.
On the lesson after, we were using a piece of software which let us pick out sounds which were already built in. This took some time, as there were quite a lot of sounds to choose from, that would fit into certain shots of the scene. After concluding the whole of the editing, including the sounds, the film had lost all of its content of being a thriller. We partly blamed our idea of the film itself, but it was actually the sounds that we used that were the biggest problem. This was because there were a lot of guitar sounds, which didn’t exactly help to make our film a thriller. The film ended up being quite funny to all of us, and we decided that we shouldn’t play around with it any longer. This also taught us a lesson that the sound/soundtrack of a film makes a huge difference into the type of genre it fits in to.