The Brief

My brief is to create a title and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.

Conventions of a Thriller

A thriller uses suspense, tension and excitement to draw in the audience and commonly hide key information from the audience to create the tension between characters and also to create suspense within the audience. The opening to a Thriller is generally slow to calm to get the audience settled and entice them into the film. Another aspect of a thriller is that hints are given towards the outcome of the film throughout, this allows the audience to geuss what will happen during the film creating an air of mystery and suspense within the film.

Preliminary Film

Peer Feedback - Preliminary Task

The feedback I received from my peers was that at the beginning the walk didn't flow as our match on action was not very accurate. It was commented that our CCTV style shot was very innovative and an original idea. We had very good continuity editing according to the group, such as our 180 degree rule and our eye line match was very good but could of been used more frequently. It was also suggested that we added in a master shot to show the audience where the characters are positioned. The general consensus was that our film was very fluent and our continuity editing helped us to make a very innovative piece of film.

How will this feedback be used?

In my next piece of film, I shall try to add in a master before dialogue to ensure that the audience know where the characters are. I will also try to ensure that the film flows and we have used as much continuity editing to keep the audience entertained and believing in the situation I want to create.

Preliminary Task

In our last lesson, we had to film a sequence of a character walking down a hallway, opening a door to a room and then starting dialogue with another character. We planned out our sequence in a story board which we made as accurate as possible to ensure we knew what we were doing as we were filming our shots. We used a lot of continuity editing to ensure that our film ran smoothly but also used specialised editing techniques to make our storyline interesting. As a group we decided to ensure that we used a varied range of camera shot types and other media techniques.
we used the 180 degree rule which is where, as you are filming dialogue, you keep the characters to their side of the frame to ensure that the sequence ensures continuity. the only time you can change this is if you actively show the camera changing sides of the character during the dialogue. My group used a lot of match on action shots to ensure that we kept continuity to keep the audience captivated and believing in our interesting yet short storyline.
WWW - Due to the fact that we kept to our 180 degree rule and matched on action our film was able to flow smoothly as we used and stuck to the continuity editing techniques. Also, our editing made the film very interesting as we edited shots to make it look as though we had filmed through CCTV.
EBI - Firstly, our film could be even better if we had more of a storyline as we didn't have much time to complete our storyboard and then add in a very detailed plot. Secondly, in our dialogue section we had to use the same shot during the first section of the dialogue as our main character was in a different position to the previous over-the-shoulder shot.

Induction - EBI

The task that i thought was not very effective was the 'Donnie Darko' scene we had to recreate. I think this was due to our continuity editing which was very hard to do as you had to think of many things at once as you are filming. There are several rules you have to think of whilst filming a continuous linear narrative such as the Master Shot, 180 degree rule, eye-line match and shot reverse shot to name a few. You also have to make sure the actors are in the same positions that they were in in the last frame to keep continuity. Putting all this together is very hard as you can always tell when you went wrong as shots do not match or objects/settings are different. I can see that this is going to take a lot of work and thought to get it right in the future.

Induction - WWW

The induction task I enjoyed the most was the 'Push A Little Button' task. I enjoyed creating a montage and learning a new range of media skills that I didn't know before, for example, I learnt a range of shot types and how to position a camera to get a nice looking shot by conforming to the rule of thirds, golden mean and actually thinking about what was put in the frame. I also learnt how to edit my montage on iMovie with transitions to make it more interesting and how to use effects to make my groups work stand out. Our work was very effective as it recreated the original advert accurately and we also had the soundtrack and what sounded like a professional voice over by asking a media teacher (who is an ex-announcer on the radio) to do it for us so we had some variation to other groups.

Media blog practice

Firstly click the 'add image' button then select 'browse'. Select the image you want to add and press 'open' then 'upload' to add the image to your blog.