THRILLER TITLE SEQUENCE FINAL EDIT

Question 7: What do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

Question 6: What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing?

Question 8: Audience Feedback and Comments!

Here are some videos that we took before, during and after the screening:

Harry Kinsley's comment after watching 'Of Unsound Mind'

Michael Lewry's comment.

Francene and Alexandra's comment.

The atmosphere before the viewing of all our clips in 'The Green Screen'.

We were pleased with all the comments and found that all of them were postive and was happy that they found that our film was unique and interesting.

Evaluation Q;5. who would be the audience for my media product?

'Farhana, 17, currently studying for her A levels, a particular interest in Psychology, loves to go out with her friends to the cinema, shops in high street; Topshop, River island, Dorothy Perkins'

From this interview that i conducted with Farhana, i feel that she is the main audience for our Thriller film 'Of Unsound Mind'. I felt that she was of the right age group as it is centered around a teenager-- of which she is. I also think it would mainly appeal to her because of her general hobbies and day to day life, she enjoys watching television and films and also has a specialised interest in Psychology, as she does the lesson in her A levels which makes our film even more of an appeal to her.

EVAULATION. Q2. How my media product represents particular social groups

'Carrie (1979)'

I felt that the film Carrie was quite similar to my film 'Of Unsound mind' I think this is especially shown in the two stills above.

Carrie, is about a white, young adolescent female of a middle class origin, this compares fully to the Character in our Thriller opening-- White, teenage female. For this reason i feel that the social group that my thriller film would represent would be young, white, middle class people who may have a particular interest in Psychological thrillers. The comparison of the Mise en Scene in both 'Carrie' and 'Of Unsound Mind' is quite similar with the main characters both in some sort of hospital or institutional gowns. The only difference i found in the two stills is that in my thriller opening the surroundings are in an open area (a band stand) whereas Carrie is in an enclosed environment which could represent being trapped not only in a room but also in her mind, which would have been an effective thing for my group to do to show further representations.

'Carrie' I felt inspired me because though it is an old film, made in 1979 it is still widely enjoyed today and may not be what is considered a 'conventional' Thriller film. Carrie's frame of mind was attempted to be recreated in our Thriller opening, using effects that may give the audience the idea that our character too has powers beyond normal means.

EVALUATION: Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

To understand and mantain enough knowledge in the different forms and conventions of opening title sequences we watched several different film openings of all different generes especially openings that are films based on the Thriller genre. The main forms and conventions we found in majority of title sequences are the institutional ident of the production companies always coming immediately at the start of any opening.

These are 9 shots from my title sequence created for a Thriller opening. Our opening i feel both represents real conventions for this kind of media product and but also challenges it in certain aspects. The order of our opening titles are in correspondence of the order they are presented in Panic Room's opening title sequence with the exception of where the film title is placed. However, we realised after carefully placing our titles that Panic Room does not follow the order of titles that a lot of other films have, with things such as the director, writer and producer coming at the end of the title sequence instead of at the start as a lot of films do (in rank
order).
I felt that our opening sequence was most similar to the opening of the film Se7en. In the Thriller film 'Se7en' There are many differences which would make our film seem as though it does not have many or any comparisons to it, however there are certain things within our opening that correspond and are similar to it. In our opening, throughout we used fading and overlapping tools which was also used in the Se7en, mainly of close ups of miscellaneous objects like notes and diaries and books, we similarly did this when overlapped a close ups of a leaf and the teddy which was in it throughout. This is also similar to Se7en because there are various objects that are shown throughout such as note books and sharp metal objects helping to create a theme and set up an idea with the audience about what is coming in the film.

The use of sound in all the opening title sequences indicated the theme, tone and genre of the up coming movie. To show our knowledge of the forms and conventions, whilst creating our sequence we oredered the titles as we thought was appropraite and to how many would fit in our sequence to help illustrate what we wanted present. In our thriller opening 'Of Unsound Mind' we used the convention of an institutional ident to start with. using "candistudios" a low budget production company which could be like a existing company 'working title 2'.

The sound plays a very important role especailly in our opening title sequence, it was the main source that created tenstion, which we also found was similar in many film openings. The soundtrack we created had a constant heatbeat in the background, this made the tension of what would or might happen stronger and therefore more effective and so possibly reveals the pace of the entire film.

The sound plays an important part in the opening of a title sequence, the soundtrack we created was upbeat at faced paced to indicated the fast pace of the theme of the movie and genre overall. "The shinning" uses an orchestral soundtrack to open of which creates an eerie atmosphere and gives the audience a clue of what the rest of the film holds. This is similar to the film Se7en, the pace of the film, steady helps to created the wished atmosphere and so make the audience prepared for what they are about to watch in the rest of the film.

EVALUATION: Q8. Audience feedback and comment

Jessica Comerford: These words in the above picture are from Wordle and are the instant reactions and feedback we received from our class before showing it in the cinema. The words that were predominantly used in each groups feedback were 'Effective' 'good' 'shots' 'Breathing' and 'Soundtrack'. Although four of the words on the wordle seem to be quite general it may show that the audience did not fully take in the message that we tried to give across. It however shows that we created a competent piece that was enjoyed and we felt it represented things and feelings we wanted to get across, especially by the word 'Breathing'. A lot of the audience after watching felt that it was very different from other Thriller openings they had seen, with it not being a narrative opening.

Farhana Maleque: The words in the Wordle represent the immediate comments from the rest of our class members once they watched our 2 minute clip. I have identified that the bigger words are the ones that were the most used from the feedback. The students found our 'shots' 'really' 'effective'. Also 'soundtrack' and 'breathing' came up a lot and we were pleased to find that we successfully aimed to make the features of our clip obvious. I am pleased with all the comments and have portrayed a unique Thriller opening clip that the audience was not expecting.

EVALUATION: Q; 3+4- What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? How will you attract/address your audience?

This is an example of a random students AS Media coursework which was found on Youtube and had nearly 1,500 hits.

As the media institutions have had great and vast changes over the past 10 years it has meant that thousands of aspiring movie makers or potential actors/actresses have the opportunity to share their work with a much wider audience that was ever possible before when the main media institutions were Newspapers, Radio and Mainstream television. All of which would be near impossible for a young aspiring filmmaker to have an opportunity. This is because of many reasons such as high costs which means that people like myself, a student who does not have enough money or any kind of help within the institutions would not have no source of presenting to a wider.

However with the increase of internet access in homes across the world it has meant that i, like the student in the film from above has the opportunity to share videos with a global audience getting hits in the thousands. The internet is also a free place to advertise yourself and has helped many people gain enough publicity to actually breakthrough into a film making career and also quite a lot of singers have used this institution to further or create a career an example of someone who has done this recently is Justin Bieber aged only 16. His mother started posting videos of him in 2007 on the website Youtube which eventually has led to him

becoming world famous achieving UK and US hits.

The Video on the left hand side is of Justin Bieber before he had gained any fame or even received many hits. The video on the right hand side shows how much he has progressed to the stage that he is now globally viewed on high status televison channels such as MTV. This would never have been possible if the internet as a media institution was not available. This shows that extreme success has now become available to anyone who feels they have talent in a specific area.

skills audit: creation of titles

We used our knowledge of using 'SoundTrack Pro' from our preliminary task and applied it to making our titles for our real clip. We experimented again with different fonts, style and colour to choose the best suited for our clip.

skills audit soundtrack

We used a nursery rhyme song 'twinkle twinkle as well as other sounds in soundtrack. It took us some time to choose a component of sound which matched to the soundtrack that we imported from youtube. When we experimented sounds we chose just a simple ' heartbeat' to flow with the 'twinkle twinkle' soundtrack.

Skills Audit Editing

This is a screengrab of our editing. We used many tools such as: speeding, fading, and layering. In comparison to the preliminary task we have majorly improved by linking shots together smoothly and using effects to make our clip interesting.

Location Shots:

Our group found a nice quite square in the east of islington, its quite and spookey location was perfect the only trouble w e had is as the spot wos located next to a University it wos hard to film during the day with such big crowds. and found it hard to achieve the atmospher we wanted. But with careful and clever angles, we seemd to have achieved a remote location.

Changes to be made to roughcut after feedback.

After receiving feedback from my teachers on our rough cut created for the opening scene of our Thriller movie 'Of Unsound Mind' there are quite a few things that we decided to tweak or completely change. Some of these were; adding fades to avoid unsubtly or sharpness, add more to our time line sequence and also start to create titles and add the soundtrack.
At the time our rough cut was due we still had quite a lot of work to do, although the soundtrack was already almost complete we were yet to upload it. Also, we were unsure of what editing techniques we should use or effects and so in between the rough cut and final piece we have tried several different effects and modifications like chaning speed or lighting. Once we had done this we settled on just a couple of effects which we used in several shots. An example of an effect we decided to use after recieving feedback from the roughcut was unsharp mask, which we felt helped give the effect we wanted to be given in our opening for a thriller film

Inspiration for Our thriller Soundtrack

whilst researching for our soundtrack, we came across a video that was highly suitable for our thriller video, with a female vocal singing "twinkle twinkle little star" it gave our thriller a spooky and chilling atmosphere.

the video also inspired us to add extra shots to our thriller, at the end of the you tube video there is a close up of a woman's face. You will find in our thriller a close up of our main character(Jessica).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=menntxDUe4I

Rough cut edit and Changed in Light of feedback from rough cut

Here is our 'Rough Cut'. This shows all our technqiues of using the camera and editing.

The feedback that we recieved from our teachers seeing the rough cut was:
* Not to have many effects, just stick to one to portray one aspect instead of several to make it absolutely clear

* To smooth the connection between one shot to another

* Be better to do more fading shots
and
*to add a soundtrack to have that extra effect on the clip.

We now have to apply this feedback and produce a clear smooth clip of our film.

Analysis of 9 shots from Art Of The Title Sequence-- Se7en

The screen shot above is the for the opening of the film 'Se7en'. The movie's story follows a retiring detective (Morgan Freeman) and his replacement (Brad Pitt), using a joint attempt to investigate a series of ritualistic murders inspired by the seven deadly sins.

It is apparent from the moment the opening titles begin that the film will be ominous and thought provoking. You can see this via various things such as the small glimpses of objects with no meaning of yet, like the book which we see someone flicking pages, the Dollar Bill and negatives. The money that is shown in the opening, as seen in the ninth shot in the title sequence makes it clear that the film will have religious connotations as the word 'GOD' is highlight, being cut out by a character you are yet to completely see. The fact you do not immediately see the character carrying out these actions also helps the ominous effect clearly being given over to the audience.

There are many black shots in the opening scene, with titles in white, UPPERCASE. I feel that this is a very effective way of both promoting the theme of being thought provoking and displaying the credits without taking any attention away from the events being shown. The effects used on the titles in the opening had a similar appearance to the 'frigid' effect on Live Type which is where we will be creating titles for our Thriller opening and since seeing 'Se7en' i feel that it could be an effect we use in our own opening.
The majority of shots throughout the opening are close ups of miscellaneous objects around a room, the close up shots work very well as they give you a limited places to look and so emphasis's the object that may otherwise be overlooked such as a notebook.

The lighting in the scene is generally quite dull creating a dingy effect and eerie atmosphere that darkness can often create. It leads the audience to think about why they are being shown this room and that the room holds i high importance that is yet to be found out. The music and sounds in the title sequence also play a large role in getting the wished feeling of the audience across; it starts with small generally irrelevant noise like pages turning and creaking which is heard mainly throughout the title sequence, then eventually moves onto a beat being created which speeds up slowly right until the end where another reference to religion is made when it says 'you get me closer to God'.

This title sequence interested me particularly by the way the titles are laid out and the fonts, effects used for it. I also really liked the overlaying effect of things like unreadable writing and flashes of other objects over the main action being showed in the opening. I think that the overlay effect gives what may otherwise seem as a non interesting scene much more impact. What i most liked was the way the soundtrack, titles and editing produce the opening as without just one of those features it would not be such an effective scene.

Cameras & health and Safety Tutorial

At the start of our lesson we received a cameras and health and safety tutorial to ensure that we know how to use all equipment correctly to prevent damage in any way. The equipment that we were taught about how to use were:
- Tripod
- Memory Card
- Battery
- Video Camera
- Video Drive

We learnt how to set up the Tripod correctly, making sure all legs on the tripod were the same length to make it sturdy so would not tip and damage the camera. We also learnt that its a very good way to use panning from different angles smoothly.

I also learnt how to use the video cameras that we would be operating when filming our Thriller opening. We learnt several things including where and how to place the two memory cards which will save all our footage and be what is used when transferring the footage onto the Macs, how to insert the battery, how to switch it on and off, record, play recorded clips and also things like changing the camera mode incase of a lot of sunlight and how to change from manual to automatic.

Each group has a video drive in which is used to save and access all of our filming, sounds or titles and work that we have done such as final cut pro, editing, soundtrack and livetype.

During the tutorial we were also taught that there are three basic rules to abide by the health and safty rules to make sure no damage occurs while using the equipment:
- If raining use an umbrella to protect the video camera by keeping it dry
- Do not touch the video camera lense as marks would be left which could effect quality of footage.
- When finished filming the lens should be closed.

Animatic Storyboard