PLANNING - Target Audience

Our thriller audience will be aimed at ages 15 and over. The reason for this is because our thriller contains elements of extreme violence, these include blood and weapons(props) such as hammers, blades and a wooden bat. These mise en scene will the one that provides us the chance to From my own experience, I came across many friends that like the tension and suspense of violence. Males are the gender that we will be targetting due to men prefering violence in movies more than females. Violence is more masculine and females like genres such as romance and are not drawn into violence type thrillers. Males are more likely to relate to the theme of weapons which would make them appeal to the thriller more. Our group decided to use fake blood either brought from the shop or made at home to increase the violence level, therefore creating extra thrill.

PLANNING - Costumes and Gender

The killer will be wearing a suit, but in this case, the suit will represent his personality, that he is both a business man and a serial killer.The tie on his suit will be the tie that will wrap the hands of the victim, disallowing any hand movement from the victim so that the victim cannot escape, attack or protect herself. The killer is a male in which a male is more likely to be a serial killer than a female. A male has strength in which has more ability than females to kidnap someone. On wikipedia, it is stated that female serial killers are rare and uncommon therefore portraying the killer as male in our thriller is more convincing to the audience. The victim will be wearing normal casual clothes in which the setting is being taken place in an undercroft, under a school. It would be appropriate to wear casual clothes to school therefore it relates to the setting also. The victim is a woman, in which women are classed as innocent and caring. They are not as strong as males physically therefore cannot protect themselves properly.

We thought that the character wearing a suit would represent how he holds a 'normal' life but underneath the facade, he's actually a killer. Ir could represent how what you see isn'r always what it seems.

RESEARCH - Foley sounds

Foley sounds is an alternative word for sound effects. It is used in many amateur and low budget films, which may come useful as we create our thriller opening as our creation is a low budget one also. Foley sounds are useful as it adds aural depth to a piece of clip. Some of the sounds include footsteps, smashing sounds, punches, kicks, sounds of broken glass and many others. It saves extra time as we would have to create the sounds ourselves if there wasn't any foley sounds, and it would be dangerous in some cases of creating sounds of e.g broken glass.

Foley sounds can be accessed in Soundtrack Pro, in which I will be taking this in to consideration when editing the sound part of my thriller.

It would be difficult to create sounds such as footsteps with our camera, as other sounds such as wind will interrupt the quality of the sound. Here is the video below that I have looked in to.

RESEARCH - Soundtrack Pro/ Garage Band

In this research, I will be finding out how to use Soundtrack pro/Garageband. This is important because sound in a film opening is what creates atmosphere, excitement and tension. All these components are required in a thriller genre. Things I have learnt from my research are how to add different kind of instruments on to a timeline, also how to make specific sounds lower in volume than others so they blend in together creating the best sound/music possible.

After watching a few videos about Soundtrack Pro, i will now move my research on now to Garage Band. After watching tutorials on Youtube about Garage Band, I came to a conclusion that Garage Band is the software that is more simplistic than Soundtrack pro, but however Soundtrack Pro is more advanced in having more sounds and more other things that Garage Band cannot do. Soundtrack Pro requires higher intelligence but i think that i will stick to Soundtrack Pro during the editing side to my thriller that i will be making. This is because Soundtrack Pro has more useful sound effects that will be relevent to my thriller.

Here are the videos for my research on Garage Band:

RESEARCH - intertextuality

Intertextuality is a media term for the similarities and inspirations from one film to another. good examples of this are mainly made into funny comedy films such as Meet The Spartans and Scary Movie. The film Scary Movie has taken inspiration from the horror film Scream. you can tell that intertextuality is used due to the same scary ghost mask used in both films.

intertextuality isn't just focused on props or story lines it also can be expressed through themes and settings as seen in the film "Psycho" and "Fatal Attraction". These two films share similar theme through intertextuality for example the scene when the woman is brutally murdered in the bathroom can relate to the adjacent murdering scene in "Psycho" the reason for this is to make the audience aware of the similarities between both film scenes. normally only very famous and popular films use intertextuality with other films this is so that the target audience notices the similarity and gains more respect for that legendary scene.

RESEARCH - Final Cut Pro Extended

Following on my Final Cut Pro research, today i will be looking at how to add text on to clips. This will be useful as later on our group, we will be adding title sequences to our thriller opening. We have done some practice on adding text on to pieces of clips in class but i haven't got the hang of it fully therefore i am doing this research to boost my knowledge.

Here are some of the videos i have searched on youtube, after watching various of clips i now know how to create narrative title sequences, in which you have to superimpose the text, also how to enlarge the font size, change the font style, and how to make it fade in fade out (effects).

FILMING - Props

After our group unsuccessfully not finding any fake blood around stores in Angel Islington, I went around multiple shops to find the realistic fake blood that was in my price range.
I successfully found fake blood in a toy store in Wood Green from £1.50 and bought two containers because I felt that the amount wasn't enough.

FILMING - Bloopers Part 2

FILMING - Shoot 2

After we all went out to go and find fake blood to buy and being unsuccesful, we went round various shops to try and find like-like looking blood that was in my price range and successfully found fake blood for £1.50p but the amount in the container did not seem enough to us so we bought two packets of fake blood just to be cautious.


When we went back to the college's undercroft for our second filming, we found that some of the props we used were no longer there that seemed vital since they were nearly in every shot I.E. The white table and that some new possible props had been moved to the place where we filmed previously
After a short discussion, we decided to mostly use close ups so the props in the scene could not be seen as much as the footage we obtained from the previous filming, we think this worked to our advantage because the amount of close ups we filmed would add to the tension we want to create.
The new props that we believe another media group left behind worked in our advantage as we used the props to make our opening seem more proffesional I.E. nails, hammer, real blade, small harden shears etc.
We decided that we would mainly use close ups and film short clips of the barrels which held the props for our superimposed titles, we sed various array of the props for this and spread some fake blood in the area to make it seem like our location was the actual place where the antagonst commited his killings.


We mainly improvised this filming because it was very vague in our storyboard but we think we pulled it off quite will with our ideas we made on the spot.
Learning from our mistakes from our previous filming, we made sure that no bags or anything that didn't belong in the scene of the tripod was in the location of the filming whilst we were filming.

Overall, we think that we successfully made the drastic change in the props and setting of our location work well to our advantage and it will make our opening titles look even better.

FILMING - Bloopers Part One

Question 5

PLANNING - Initial Ideas

During our planning, as a group, we discussed about how we are going to make our thriller opening the best it could possibly be. Some of the things we talked about was the type of shots. We will make sure we use a more sophisticated range of shots (e.g. type of shot sizes, type of shot angles, movement), also if the type of camera shot links to the scene (e.g. a close up shot would be expected if we wanted to show the victims expressions). The use of tracking shots, whether we needed a dolly or not. This discussion was useful as it gave us an idea of how to make our thriller more flexible.

FILMING - Shoot 1

On the 8th of February our group did our first filming, we think it went quite good,
We spent the whole of the 3 hours of our lesson at the schools undercroft, we think that we filmed a adequate amount of footage in that time period.
Before filming, we had to move some things lying around in the space we wanted to film inside the Undercroft because it made the place look overcrowded and we didn't want anyone getting injured during production.
When we first started filming, our pace was slow but after about half and hour, we speed up because we knew what we were doing though our storyboard was quite short and vague, Because of this, we made sure we had a large array of different types of shoots and a lot of excess shots,that we most likely wouldn't use, with the thought that it may become useful if we had any other idead during our editing process and this also resulted in us improvising a minority of the scenes, mainly the one when the antagonist was violently dragging the victim and when the antagonist hits her with a hammer.
We watched the footage on the camera to give as a idea of what other shoots we could film and too see if the lighting in the footage was too light or too dark since we had to use one of the camera lights because the Undercroft was so dark.
We mainly focusing on close ups to ensure we had a increase of tension thoughout our open.
 Though we tried to be careful, we did make the mistake of leaving the equiptment bags in the shot for the and the tripod leg being seem in the first three shots but luckily, we hadn't gone too far ahead in filming to go and re-shoot every single shot and waste time.
Danielle was the main person in charge of the camera whilst we assited her, suggesting different shots and possible angles we could use for our footage.
Overall, we think our first day of filming went very well once we recognised and learned from our first mistakes.

RESEARCH - Final Cut Pro

For us to edit our thriller opening, we will need skills on how to use Final Cut Pro. We have looked at some tutorial videos on youtube on how to use Final Cut Pro, these include using the scissors tool to cut clips, how to slow down clips or increase its speed, and others. We all have some experience using Final Cut during secondary school but this Final Cut is now upgraded to a Pro version in which i am not used to the new features involved. We will use these tutorial videos to increase our knowledge so we can apply it to our real thriller opening to make it as advanced as possible.

Here are some of the videos we have looked at:

PLANNING - Preparing Pitch

On the 5/2/13, we made some last minute touches and improvements to our 'Undercroft' pitch. We all came in during our lunch time workshop in order to better our pitch. We added a final three slides, included animation and added a snippet of sound that we may be using in our end thriller.

PLANNING - Pitch Feedback

When presenting our pitch, the only feedback we was given was to make our storyboard longer since it did not have many shots. We explained that we did not have much in our storyboard because we were in the mist of changing our plot line.
To improve, we brainstormed a mass of shots we would use for the different parts of our opening and we decided to focus on using more close ups to create more tension.

PLANNING - 'Undercroft' Pitch/Feedback

This is our pitch in which we presented in the class. We were praised for the idea that the location we chose, the plot and Mise en scene. For example, the protagonist will be wearing a suit which will demonstrate the two personalities of the character, in which he is a business man and a serial killer. The props we will use as "torture weapons" are actually real weapons which will make the shots look more realistic, these include hammers, blades, and others. These were items that are already there in the undercroft, we understand the health and safety hazards that may occur and will take extra care when filming.

PLANING - Catch Up (Pitch)

We went to the Tuesday workshop before our afternoon class to finish the 'Undercroft' pitch and made a Soundpro draft track for the opening.

RESEARCH - Thrillers and their target audiences

'He Loves Me .. He Loves Me Not' is a hybrid physcological thriller and has conventions of a romance film. The film would be aimed a young women aged between 16 and 30. This may be because women enjoy watching films associated with love and may be able to identity with the protagonist. 

'Momento' is a neo-noir physcological thriller. This film may be aimed at men between the ages 28-40. They may enjoy the elements of mystery used and may use the film as escapism as a distraction of day to day life. 

PLANNING - preparing for our pitch.

So far we have been working on our pitch for tuesday. We have researched about intertextuality and have decided to get our inspiration from the film 'momento' and 'Se7en'. We plan to base our film around the plot of 'Momento' and base our sound track on the film opening of 'se7en'.

We chose 'se7en' and 'Momento' as our base idea's because we believe it is unique and original. The techniques they used to create the opening are very original due to the fact that they use special techniques such as reversing the film and including montage editing. 

Se7en opening

Momento opening

PLANNING - Production Schedule

Here is the production schedule that we hope to stick to. We first planned to film for only two lessons but we then thought that it wasn't enough time to get all our shots so we extended it to three filming sessions, including the friday in which we can film the whole day since we do not have college on that day, but we can still come in just to film. The friday would give us the valuable time we need in order to film a variety of shots.