Use of Digital Technology Felicity Bearfoot-Fallon

Pre-Production

Next, my group and I did a preliminary task of a simple teacher-pupil conference for our blogs. This allowed us to experiment with different camera shots and angles, lighting, and correct camera settings. It also gave us all a chance to use what we learnt from our 1 minute film and put it into practice, including what we learnt on final cut pro. It also developed our filming and editing skills further.

The first thing we did for our blog was a 1 minute film. We filmed a few short scenes on top of a shopping center, and then later used final cut pro to edit the footage. This task allowed me to learn and understand the cameras and equipment that was used and to also experiment with the different tools on final cut pro and learn about continuity editing. This would prepare me for when we were going to film and edit our thriller opening later on.

Our group used a website called ‘Blogger’ where we posted our work onto our group blog, including our one minute film, preliminary task, and thriller opening, as well as our evaluations and other pieces of research.

I also did a post on The Rule of Thirds for our blog. This help to portray that we were showing how to frame a shot, and what conforms and deliberately breaks the rule of thirds. This allowed us to learn more about the rule of thirds and how to apply it to our own filming.

Pre-ProductionInstitutional Research:I went onto a website called ‘The Art of the Title’ where hundreds of TV/film credits and opening trailers are available to see. I picked the TV show ‘The Walking Dead’ to analyze. With this, I created a timeline of when certain credits, visuals and sounds entered the clip. The opening trailer/clip of a TV show or film is supposed to give the audience an insight to the genre of what they're about to watch, as well as the opening credits of producers, directors, actors etc. This activity helped my to understand the conventions of opening credits and how to use them in my own thriller opening.

Conventions of a Thriller:

I created a blog post on ‘Conventions of a Thriller’. This is where I explained what a typical thriller includes and what elements are found in the thriller genre; for example, tension, cliffhangers, suspense, antagonist, protagonist, etc.

My group and I started to do more research on thrillers. We went on the site IMDB and found out the figures and budget for

certain thrillers. Some of the thrillers we found show that the opening weekend is very large and shows the film will most likely

be successful as a lot of people have seen in it the opening weekend.

Research: IMDB

Pre-Production

A massive part of our research was finding different websites and social networks, and finding out a lot of different information from them. For example, there are the official websites for a film (e.g. thehobbit.com), where the official trailer and merchandise can be found, but there are also fansites/pages as well (e.g. thehobbitfancontests.com).

We also researched into different production and distribution companies of thriller films, so we could have ideas for when we were designing our own logo.

ProductionDuring the filming process we had a shot list where we took note of the shot, scene and take, to keep track of what we had filmed and what still needed filming.

Part of our thriller opening features a security camera scene. This is where the shot list came in handy as we could keep track of how many shots and takes there were, and also the filming of different parts of the scene such as Shannon walking into the shop and the security camera footage itself.

We also has a scene prior to this one, which was a completely different environment compared to the shop. That cross-cut we felt gave variety to the thriller opening as we wanted to try something different to typical thrillers.

Post-Production(Editing Process)

For the editing process, this is where our research from Art of the Title was useful as we had an idea of where to put our opening titles and credits. We also added sound and music as we found from our thriller opening research that this was common.

For the visuals, we had discovered that the lighting was slightly off, and experimented with different filters, tones and highlights. Originally we were going to make the whole opening in black and white, as this made the picture quality better and more of a sinister feel. However, we thought it would be best for the security camera parts to be in black and white and the rest in colour, so this defines and notifies clearly to the audience when the main character is being watched through the security camera.

Post-Production

Also, as part of the production process, we got audience feedback from teachers and pupils. We put the videos on YouTube and they told us what they liked, disliked, and what they would change if it was their project. This allowed us to have different view points of our project, and allowed us to praise and criticize our own work.

During our filming, from the images above we can see that we filmed in two different places, due to the lighting, we first filmed with more light which is the images at the top, however we thought that there was too much light, we tried to trap light from coming in however, it was too difficult do we shot that scene in another area at the back were there was hardly any light coming through, with the use of the LED light that we had, we managed to use this to as extra light. We thought that to make it more thriller like, we thought of using a dark area instead of filming where there was a lot of light.