Evaluation 6 – Directors Script

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing your product? Pre-Production Phase: Research and Planning…..

 “To research for our planning stage we used several search engines such as Google and Bing. Using Google we were able to look at several websites showing us different thriller films and different thriller genres. This helped with our research as we were able to find clear, relevant information quickly. Google and Bing, also meant that we could look at historical aspects of the thriller genre and how it has changed. We also used Google Maps, to research our filming location. This was part of the recce we had to do as part of planning for our Opening Title Sequence, we also looked at several different locations that might have fitted with the purpose of the opening title sequence. YouTube and Varndean’s Moodle allowed us to watch lots of different opening title sequences of some well-known thriller films. We were then able to analyse these OTS’s to decide what aspects we would like to include in our own opening title sequence. This helped give us a range of different ideas from several opening title sequences that we could include in developing our research further and being more informed. We also used ratings given by the public through websites such as Imbd and BBFC, to understand the most popular genre of thriller film, and help understand the audience we wanted to target our film at.”

 “We used PowerPoint to present our pitch to our class. We wanted it to be short but informative so we were able to get across the point of the film, without making the pitch boring and dragging out. This way we could use links easily and use images to convey our film ideas more effectively. To record our pitch we used a Flip Video Ultra camera. Once our pitch was recorded we uploaded the MP3 onto YouTube and then added it too each of our blogs. The blog we used was Quack, which we would add any work to during the planning, evaluation, research and construction stages. We didn’t use this too communicate because we used our college Gmail accounts and texting to quickly be able to contact each other about our opening title sequence.” Pre-Production Phase: Filming Stage…..

 “During our preliminary exercise we used a Canon 600d DSLR camera. We did this to practice continuity filming and in general to gain an understanding of how to use the camera, tripod and make sure the exposure, focus and white balance were all correctly set. We used the same model of camera for our final filming. This time we were all more comfortable with the camera and could set up the white balance, exposure and make sure the camera was in focus for all our shots. We also used the tripod a lot to get nice and clean shots that were all level and didn’t look slanted. One of our group members already knew how to use the camera so we were able to use a variety of different shots within our OTS. We used a lot of camera shots that reflected the thriller genre, such as a sequence of short and snappy shots that increased the pace of our opening title sequence and make it more suspenseful.”

Editing and Sound – Luke In terms of different sound used mainly non-diegetic sound as our opening title sequence had music throughout it. The music that we wanted to use was fairly hard to find as it had to be copyright free and be at least two minutes long, it also had to have a completely different beginning and end as we tried to keep it pleonastic, to find suitable music with these guidelines we went on imcompetech which has royalty free music and soundtracks. Once we found our music we made sure that it matched the on screen action. We got our two soundtracks from the website imcompetech, we also needed a sound of a camera zooming in and out and other camera related sounds so we found some SFX on YouTube then we converted them using YouTube Converter to make a an mp3.file. We did use Foley sound in our opening title sequence to record our sound we used a Zoom h4n recorder. Then we looked at fonts for our opening title sequence, we needed to use titles to credit the cast and crew and show the title of our film, first we looked on DaFont.com to find suitable titles that would match the thriller genre and work well with our film’s OTS, we then created a shortlist to help narrow down our options after a bit of playing around with the different fonts we stuck with the two which would be used for different things one font was used for our title the other was used for the opening credits. Starting the editing, we first organised our shots and then named them to avoid confusion, then we created a rough cut by put our shots in an order that made sense as our opening title sequence was done in a montage style continuity wasn’t as prominent unlike if our OTS was linear. After we had created a rough cut we then cut some of our clips completely and shortened others to give more of a flow to our sequence. Then we used titles to transition some of our shots rather than using a fade or jump cut every time, we got our title ideas from films like se7en. To match the thriller genre we decided to make our titles shudder and move to try and create an unnerving atmosphere, we also used fades to enter and exit our titles. The soundtracks we used didn’t need much doing to them, we shortened both of them to match the clips and increased the volume of both of them, once we had done this we made sure that it fitted well with the sequence after a bit of fiddling with music we matched the clips, the titles and the soundtrack all together.