Final Film Opening

46. Whitney Razaq, Zhane St Jacques, Huy Nguyen, Danielle Chivers from 283goswell on Vimeo.

Evaluation Question 1

Conventions of film openings:
 

Mis en scene during a film opening will establish the genre, for example, a blade shown in the opening will show that there is violence portrayed in the film itself.
Below is a mis en scene used in the film “se7en” ( on the right) and on the left is my thriller in which we used the same context in portraying the blade as violence.

Establishing the location:

Variety of shots such as a wide shot will establish the location, which will give the audience sense of genre. However, there are very little shots included in my thriller that gives a sense of location, this would make sense since the killer is trying to commit murder without being seen or heard, an establishing shot would reveal the location. In Se7en, there is no establishing shots and we followed this convention also. Lots of close ups are used to portray the fact that the victim is trapped that there is only little space to wiggle in to rather than wide shots which will maybe show that there is escape routes, but in this case, there is none.

 Creating atmosphere:

 Atmosphere can be created using non diegetic sounds (music), in which it gives an insight into the mood of the rest of the film overall. During a thriller, tense music will be required in order to establish the genre to the audience (excitement or tension). In our thriller, we used the non diegetic sounds of tension which links to the genre of thriller/horror, there is a lot of upbeat sounds which include dark sounds of drums and violin to create the mood and dull atmosphere. The same convention is used in the thriller "Se7en".

Here is a prezzi that i made for the conventions of a title sequence

 

EVALUATION - Question 1

EVALUATION - Question 1

Note: due to a technical error I had to publish this Prezi on to another students account but all work in this Prezi is credited to me (Danielle Chivers).

This is a Prezi about the conventions of film openings it consists of sections labeled ; key conventions, A film opening must have a title sequence, sound and types of shots which all are linked back to the key conventions of film openings.

This is a Power Point presentation (made in Scribd) of title sequence conventions this includes idents, types of openings, list of titles in order, etc.

Conventions of Title Sequence

EVALUATION - Question 2

Evaluation Question 1

Due to a technical difficulty I had to use Whitney's prezi account which is why the Prezi says it is by Whitney although I did create it myself :)

EVALUATION - Question 2

Representation of social groups in films are defined as a group of individuals that are aimed at to inspire the creation of the characters in the film. This appeals to the stereotypes in today’s society and creating and forming the characters you see in the film express it.

Our target social group is a mix between sophisticated, middle class men and young teen girls aged 16 - 20. We decided to show these two contrasting characters to emphasise on the division in society and community. We did not choose to make the middle class male character evil and obscure to represent middle class men as bad people but to simply create a contrasting personality, status, and mind set compared to the younger female character. This expresses how differently opposing classes are perceived as.

Examples of our target social group: http://s1352.photobucket.com/user/gazzchivers/library/social%20representation

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 2

Huy played the character of a well educated, middle class man. He played a 'suited and buited' character like Brad Pitt in 'Se7en'. He's costume represented him as a powerful, authority figure giving a sense that he is in control of the situation over the young girl he is torturing. It also gives a sense of Adults vs Kids as that is a society we live in. This character will appeal to a young male audience as they may seem him as they may find him intriguing and try to unravel his actions and reasons for living a double life.
nice creator gif is here






The vitcims are usually represented as hopeless, innocent, young girls which is the representation we gave victim. We chose to dress her in white to give a sense of innocence, purity and it also gives a sense of death, as the colour white is usually associated with heaven.

Evaluation Question 3

EVALUATION - Question 3

Q 3 - production and distribution FINAL from gazzchivers

This is a SlideShare of a presentation about the production and distribution companies that we chose. it explains the reason why we chose these companies, a list of the films they produced and distributed and why they suit our film.

EVALUATION - Question 3

Question 3 -Whitney

Evaluation Question 3

Zee pp from zhane96

EVALUATION - Question 4

This vlog explains and expresses the target audience we aim for. I explain the age and gender we aim for in viewers and how they are expressed and linked to the performance and characteristics in the characters present in out thriller opening.

Evaluation Question 4

This is a facebook profile for someone that fits our target demographic..

These are the demographics that fit our sub genre in perticular..

Evaluation Question 4

Here is a Facebook profile of one of our audiences:

EVALUATION - Question 4

Most thriller film audiences range from 16 - late 20's this is because, these are the ages the film can be promoted most to since they mostly use social networking our of all the age groups.
It's also because if the thriller is a horror film, no one younger than 15 can watch it and if it is a physiological film or any other genre, the age group may not be able to understand it.

Our film audience is age 15 to age 25
We tried to attract them to our film via using characters that would appeal to different audience segmentation.
We used the character or the young woman to appeal to a female audience who are within her age range as and our antagonist, would appeal to the more middle class men because of his occupation and attire as well as other men because of his gender.
Through our opening, we tried to cut down our audience segmentation and appeal to a more wider age range.
Because of our target audience age, we could use social networking such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc
to promote our Thriller because we know that people between these ages are most likely to be on these sites.

We mainly wanted to appeal to men with our film, to do this we used a lot of violence, gave him a smart looking attire. We brought in class into our film, the victims being working class whilst the antagonist was middle class to try and convey his 'superiority'.
Overall though our use of props, costume and high and low angle shots (Show men as superior), we appealed to a male audience

Example of our Target Audience.
I made the Facebook profile of a male because men are our main target audience so this would show that we actually appealed to our target audience

Evaluation Question 5

After getting our rough cut feedback, our thriller opening changed dramtically. We took away the gaps in footage that we believed increased the tension but only confused the audience because they believed the thriller opening had ended, we took away excess footage such as the establishing shot at the beginning and the antagonist actually hitting the victim which ended up creating more tension because it left it up to the audiences imagination to figure out what happened between the two parts we only let them see.

This is the interview I filmed of people within 'Hidden's target age range.  interviewed both a male and female in our target age audience to see how their thoughts on the film varied.

I promoted and made our film know via  the Facebook like page and m own personal Facebook,

EVALUATION - Question 5

This is a vlog of a group of students from media responding to our screening of our thriller opening at Screen On The Green. This vlog shows that our target audience felt engaged, under stood the plot and felt the mise en scene suited the sub genre well.

EVALUATION - Question 5

Evaluation Question 5

Here is the audiences response of our thriller, after it has been played in the local cinema, they seemed to like our thriller but here are the main aspects that they enjoyed in terms of mis en scene, cinematography, sound, editing and also how it appealed to them on a personal level.

So far, we  have reached our target audience by using the power of the internet in which we uploaded our video on Vimeo and Youtube. We have also created a Facebook page in which we received comments from our audience which we found very useful as it gave us tips on how we could improve if we was to do another project. Our film was shown in the local cinema/theatre, in which our whole media group year saw our making. Our audience was 16's and over and this certainly meets our target audience success.


The video above shows the audiences reactions to my thriller but now im going to talk about my role as an actor involved in my thriller and my thoughts on how feedback from the rough cut from our teachers gave us advice on how to appeal to our target audience. After completing the rough cut, our teacher gave us ideas on how to build on with effects such as non-diegetic sounds to link the audience with more tension and suspense. Also, the clips we constructed together in the timeline, some of the clips were not necessary and needed to be cut down so it matches the 2 minute length mark so it doesn’t bore the audience too much, it is only a title sequence. The shots of each scene should be short and snappy to add tension rather than long clips which will look unprofessional. The intended target audience is of ages 16 and over due to the violence, and to appeal to this successfully we had to closely analyse how we used sound and how we edited it. My role in acting was very important as I had to make the victim look vulnerable and by doing that I had to act powerful.

Here is the venue that our film has been shown in. This is a local cinema in Islington.

EVALUATION - Question 6

This is a video made in Final Cut Pro about the technologies we used to develop our film opening. it shows;
- the technologies we used through out the making of the opening.
- how they constructed our film.
- examples of the out come.

The technologies encouraged us to be creative by containing expressive features and ways to create our work into something more creative.

Evaluation Question 6

Here is a video that I made on Final Cut Pro:

The question I will be answering in the video is "what have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?"

EVALUATION - Question 6

Throughout the whole project, overall. I found the technologies we had to use quite difficult to use because I didn't have previous knowledge in how to use some of the technologies such as Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack Pro etc.
To resolve this, I researched the different softwares and technologies in my own time, how to use it and so on so I would be able to navigate my way round them when it came to actually using them in the project.

Evulation Question 6

EVALUATION - Question 7

This Prezi expresses the ways in which our prelim differs to our official thriller opening and shows how we have improved as a group within matters of learning to develop our editing, cinematography and creative skills. Overall this Prezi conveys the knowledge we have gained throughout the course of pre-production, production and post- production.

EVALUATION - Question 7

(Add screenshots+gifs)

Location

Prelim

Thriller Film

Here you can see that we didn't actually put much thought into the idea of the Pre-Lim, It didn't really follow any of the conventions of any Thriller film. We had to work with that we were given so this resulted in our mise-en-scene being of a low standard.

The prelim was filmed in the College's teachers kitchen. However, in our thriller, we made a concious decision on the plot/story of it and decided to follow the most known conventions for a Horror thriller so we filmed the thriller in the colleges Undercroft to fit in with the idea that a lot of horror films included abandoned locations.

Lighting

The lighting in our prelim was fine because of the lighting of the actually kitchen. For our thriller, after discussing it, we thought that the Undercroft would have really bad lighting so we decided to take LED lights with us so the lighting at the location would be better.

Focus

In our prelim, the focus for the majority of the opening was really soft and resulted in making it look really bad, to improve on that. For our thriller film, we manual focused the camera every time we were about to film new footage.

Cinematography

In both openings, we used close ups to try and create tension.

Our shots for both the prelim and thriller opening were really good. From experimenting with some shots in the prelim that we found to our liking, we incorporated those shots into our thriller film.

Rule of 180 degree and placement of characters.

In both the prelim and actual thriller opening, we obeyed the rule of 180 degrees. We made sure that during the post production, the movement of the actors flowed and during production we filmed on only one side so the rule of 180 would not be broken.

We incorporated our knowledge of different shots by including two shots which are normally seen in films.

Props

These are images of the two main characters from each title sequence. In the Prelim, you can see that we could only work with what we could find and had. The only prop we had was a sandwich whilst in the thriller opening we used a large amount of props (i.e. blades, a hammer, fake blood, nails etc) to give the sequence a more tense feel and establish it as a horror thriller film.

Pre-Production

Prelim

\

Thriller

In the prelim we followed the storyboard exactly and we didn't like the outcome so we decided that we would follow exactly what we had put down in our storyboard because we may think of better ideas later on which weren't included in the storyboard.

Sound

In our prelim, we only used the diegetic speech of the actresses which we didn't really favour. To improve on this, we used only a edited soundtrack that we altered which increased the tension in our opening rather than creating an anti-climax.

Titles

The Prelim titles were really fast, they were each about two seconds long and the title font was the default font given. Compared to this, we made the title three seconds long so the audience could have enough time to read it and changed the font to one that fitted the concept of a horror film in our thriller opening.

Filming

We found that after planning our prelim, it was quite anti-climatic, it wasn't at all like how we imagined it even though we stuck strictly to our plan. Our prelim made us realise that we need to create a thriller film that would actually appeal to an audience. After using the improvements from our prelim, we improvised certain parts to see how the natural acting would result in and what came out of it was very good, we ended up using some parts of it for the actual opening. (E.G. The dragging scene.)

Overall I have gained knowledge and skill in editing and handling the equipment such as camera tripod, LED light etc. This project also taught me how to use different software which were necessary to this course (i.e. Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion).

Because of this project, I know feel more comfortable filming and feel that I am confident when it comes to editing, especially with editing titles into the sequence.

Evaluation Question 7

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

At the start of our preliminary task, we began with discussing initial ideas from our group about the basic storyline plot, genre and actors involved. Since this was our first planning session, we found that our ideas were very basic and not original, we based our ideas on what we’ve already seen and experienced watching thrillers in the cinema. For example, our first idea was to create an action thriller (the first thriller we thought of is The Expendables), in which involved mis en scene such as guns but later on we found out that in order to make a action/thriller realistic, we would need a higher budget and more experience in film making. In the end, our genre was a comedy/thriller in which the setting was in the small kitchen of our college. As you can see the ideas are very basic.

Comparing the planning stage of the preliminary task to my final project, in our final project we generated more realistic, complex and original ideas even though we used some intertexuality, we added our own thoughts to it such as using the setting in the “Under croft” so we could get access with the dangerous weapons (Hammers, blades, saws and wooden bats) we needed. We got our intertexuality from doing massive research which benefitted us. In the Prelim we used intertexuality from the top of our heads as we tried to remember thrillers we have watched in the past. We did little research than we did in our final project and this is why the complexity of our final project is greater. I have learnt that doing research which is relevant to your product has a massive effect in your final idea, in that case, the more research you do, the better the ideas on planning and the final product itself. 

Planning is very important as we can see this, we made a production schedule for our final product. We did not plan a production schedule for our prelim. 

Prelim genre: Thriller/Comedy. During our making of the sub genre of comedy, we found it very difficult therefore we changed the genre. We found out that the certain genres are more difficult to create than others (E.g. a comedy needs good acting).

Final product genre: Thriller/horror. Relying on the experience of creating the prelim, we found out that our acting skills is one of our weaknesses, so we chose a genre that will rely mostly on cinematography to create tension rather than facial expressions. Therefore we chose a Thriller/Horror; also I have had experience with making a horror title sequence in secondary school in which I used some of my knowledge there also. 

Here is the comparison between our preliminary storyboard to our final product storyboard:

As you can see, the final product of our storyboard contains more detail than the preliminary storyboard. The cinematography we discussed in our planning of our final product, we used our knowledge from our prelim and we built on that, we added extra cinematography shots such as panning shots and tilt shots to show movement of an individual. It also looks more professional than a medium shot alone.

Here is the similarity shots between our Prelim and our Final Title Sequence:

During our prelim, we struggled with using the cameras as this is the first time we properly used it. We took time to auto focus the shots and to keep the camera steady in our hands. Over the course, we managed to use the cameras safely and properly using all its components (auto-focus, setting up with tripod and zoom in/out).

Here is the comparison between a non-autofocus shot from our prelim and our auto focused shot from our final product:

We did not any lighting equipment for our prelim, and we found out that some of our shots were dark and we couldn’t see it properly, it made our production look unprofessional. We took this in to notice for our final product and we used lighting equipment.

Here is the comparison between our non used light shot in our prelim and our used light equipment shot in our final product:

The 180 degree rule, we applied it both successfully in our prelim and our final product. We were shown how important this was by our teachers.The 180 degree rule claims that when filming, the camera should stay on one side of an imagery line.

Using sound is an important component in keeping the thrill moving throughout the title sequence, as in our prelim, we uploaded our title sequence to our blog (without sound), and got comments from our peers saying that it would be improved if we added non-diegetic sounds. We then added sound and got better comments. We took the comments into account and we applied it to our final title sequence. Using non-diegetic sounds is used in every single title sequence we have researched on YouTube. Soundtrack Pro made this possible for us to create our sounds. The type of sound used in our prelim is an excitement type, using fast paced drum kit, bass and electric guitar sounds to create that excitement thrill as the genre was a Comedy/thriller. However, we interpreted this as an opposite in which our genre was a thriller/horror, we had to use tension type of thrill rather than excitement so we used dark sounds such as violins and orchestra sounds. From this experience of using sound, we found out that choosing the right non diegetic sounds that suits the genre is what makes the film successful.

During our course of the project, we reminded ourselves that we were making a film opening title sequence, so the titles are very important. We didn’t follow proper conventions in our prelim, in which we made up the production ident, distribution ident and companies. However in our final product, we researched real production/distribution companies in which we researched the ones that will fit our style of making e.g. our project was low budget therefore it would be meaningful that we were distributed by an independent company (which supports real low budget films) and would be unrealistic if we were distributed by a conglomerate like Disney. We superimposed our titles for production/distribution ident but in our real title sequence we used a programme called Motion which gave our production ident a movement image in which it looks professional rather than a normal text ident. The skills I have learnt is to use different types of programmes.

My editing skills improved upon from editing the prelim to my final title sequence. From the prelim I learnt how to put basic titles on the screen, also how to superimpose it on top of a playing clip. However in my final title sequence edit, I used the same skills but also learnt how to change the font of the text, and how to make sure that each title remained in the wireframe zone so it does not look out of position.

Here are some of our title sequences in for our prelim compared to our final product title sequence:

Overall, from across the two productions, I have learnt major skills in film making which consist of using expensive media equipment safely, editing, filming, and how to improve upon skills using knowledge and experience from past work (prelim to final product).