Director's Interview

Editing Day 2

Today was the final deadline for the thriller.  We were meant to meet at lunchtime but speaking to Efosa he had told everyone that he had finished the soundtrack and we just needed to do the title and the credits. This was really helpful because Efosa took time out of his spare time to come in and actually finish the whole soundtrack. I had come in extra early at lunchtime but my group was no where to be seen so i decided to go and look for everyone. After searching for everyone i found out that we didn't have much to do.

That day the whole media suite was very busy this was because everyone was finishing off their work and we had to give in our films. My group were really relaxed as we had previously completed most of the thriller before.

As a group we had listened to the soundtrack that Efosa made and it was really good. It fitted the soundtrack perfectly. After he showed us we added some extra sounds that would go well with the thriller and at the end everyone was happy.

The only thing we had to do was to add the soundtrack to our scenes and add the credits. We managed to stick to the 3 pm deadline for all media students by my class had until 4.30 pm to complete everything because we had a 3 hr lesson.

Generally our group worked really well and we were really happy that we had finished. Considering we put in a lot of effort and hard work. I was relieved because we had a good range of shots and everything came together. The main important part now is that the audience will like it when it comes to viewing it in the cinema. Also i hope we get really good marks because we all deserve it as we worked really hard to achieve a good thriller.

Editing Day 1

Today was a really good day this was because we started editing our thriller. We had to show Ava all the work we had done this was because she had missed the lesson before.  Whilst she wasn't there we managed to do a lot of editing which was really good. The footage and the editing cuts were really successful. The only thing we had to do was put all the best scenes together as everything was captured and logged.

In the lesson we had finished all the editing and when we looked back at it as a group it was really good. This made me feel so proud and happy because we achieved something out of it.

 Also in this lesson we started to look at several soundtracks to fit our thriller. Me and Efosa stayed and looked through different sounds, we mainly looked at violin and string instruments. Whilst we were doing that Ava and Annie decided to do the credits. They chose to this so we can get much more done considering the deadline was coming soon.

Overall in todays lesson everything went really well and everyone was proud of what we have overcome so far. Hopefully next lesson we can finish everything and give it in on friday, which the deadline was set. Our group decided to meet at lunchtime so we can be ahead and finish off the soundtrack.

filming day 4

This was our short lesson of the week, so we didnt have much time and what made it even worse was that after we checked over our errors last week, we didnt make a note of them so Efosa, a member of the group went upstairs and check what we had to re - film. We were hoping to re -film the bad shots and the two scenes so we could get it all out of the way. However, we didnt manage to film all the scenes because we didnt have enough time and we didnt actually know what we wanted in the actual scenes. We had a few ideas but they were not final, so the next time we film we are just going to have to experiment as we go along. As a group we have to work hard so we can get all the last scenes so we can start to edit. Our time for filming is very limited and we have had to fit a lot of things in a short amount of time, half term is next week and we dont have a lesson on friday. So as a group we have to come in on Monday for an extra filming day, hopefully we can start to edit on this day aswell.

The Observer from 283goswell on Vimeo.

The Observer Evaluation

Before we actually started planning our thriller, we watched some previous thrillers from the past years to get a feeling of what our thriller should be like. In addition to this, we also were told to go off and watch some thrillers of our own, just the first 5mins of those thrillers. At the start I was a bit skeptical about what a thriller was, I had it in my mind that it was similar to horror but I was told the difference and it’s now clearer in my mind, thrillers are more suspenseful and leave the audience asking questions, horrors are more intended to scare the audience.
One film, which really motivated the planning of my thriller, was a film called “Eagle Eye”; this film inspired me a lot because of the way the director was able to create such tension that would just leave the audience asking so many questions if truth be told, it amazed me. It puzzles me sometimes how directors can think of such things, the director of the film by the way was D.J. Caruso. The main emphasis of my thriller; was to leave the audience asking questions and create a lot of tension; I wanted to try to create, to my ability, an atmosphere as similar to that of “Eagle Eye”. Here’s the IMDB page to the film:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059786/ and here’s the official film website: http://www.eagleeyemovie.com/

The way I decided to incorporate this atmosphere into my thriller is by creating various shots, which didn’t really show everything to the audience, sothat they can be thinking more about what they think it is and what it could be, basically just makes them explore their minds about possibilities. We explored different kinds of shots to see what kind of atmosphere it creates, shots like the character point of view shots which really excludes the audience form the rest of the world, so the audience would be thinking what’s going on around them. Another shot was a surveillance shot, we didn’t know we had actually created a shot like this until it was pointed out by someone else; the shot seems like a camera is watching the person and makes the audience think who it might be, watching the main character. Other shot’s we used were panning shots, and tracking sots, the way we used these shots worked extremely well with what I was hoping to get out of them. When we used these shots we kind of limited what the audience could see, like if it was on a character it would show the front of the character only, or if it was a panning shot it would follow just the front of the character to exclude the space behind they character. One thing which really worked well with one of our shot’s was when the main character ran out through the hall and closed the last door, as that door closed it made a particular shut sound, that went extremely well with the soundtrack as instigation of the sound being cut off. At the end of all of that there we some amazing shots captured and all that was left was which shots were we going to be used. We actually ended up with almost an hour of filming, that left us with a lot of choosing to do and took time as well.

One challenge I had while trying to create this tense atmosphere, was trying to make the right music. I really needed inspiration for this part because I really wasn’t talented in creating music and I had never done it before, it really took a lot for me to do this part. I had a picture of what the sound would be like in my mind, but turning that into something feasible was the hardest part. Finding the right sounds that matched the mood of a certain scene of the thriller, and certain sound effects for the right moment like slow tempo orchestra beat in the background, some diegetic sounds like heart beats helped the mood as well. All of this was tricky to do but with a little time and effort, I really pulled it off. In the end, I ended up creating just the atmosphere I wanted, it didn’t quite meet the professional atmosphere of “Eagle Eye” but it met the standards of my ability and that’s what’s most important to me right now.

My thriller I would say was more representative of the teenage social group; mainly because there's only a use of teenage actors in the clip, and to me I don’t think adults would be too eager to go watch a film where it only included teenagers unless it’s very good. It would also appeal to both sexes because of the characters used and the situations the characters are placed in. Furthermore the situation used is also a representative of society, when there is a distressed situation between a man and women, the women is more likely to be in the distressed position and the man creating the distress because of how men are seen in a higher status than women, and men are judged to be stronger than women as well. Also the film wouldn’t’ be aimed at the higher social economic group of society, simply because of how the actors are dressed in th

e clip, the audience wouldn’t really associate that with high status, and the higher social economic group wouldn’t really be drawn to something not aimed towards them. I can’t really talk on the language because there wasn’t any talking involved.

The type of media institution that would distribute my film would

 be and indie type group or English production studios like Working Title, because the film wouldn’t be so big and wouldn’t need much funding, it would be a low budget film with not a lot of effects (CG). Since it’s bound to be a low budget film, the funds wouldn’t be hard to gather and the distribution is more likely to be within the UK, so advertising is low. Maybe it might be distributed in off sea locations in Europe.

The audience for my media product would be in-between the age of 14-24 (10 yr age gap), both male and female of the white, black and mixed race ethnicity, and with a mid-wage salary in the working class, student’s social background. The way that I would attract this audience is by using a type of language, which appeals to that group, since the group is the typical group of society (working class) and are young, then certain informal language can be used lenient towards slang. Even the dress sense would appeal more to the audience as it’s a casual wear and isn’t very hard to buy, so maybe if the audience were to watch the thriller they may be wearing some of the clothing seen in the thriller. Furthermore the location of the thriller, it’s based near computers and in a college (you can tell by the log-ins on the computer) this automatically directs it to a certain group, which are students, they would suddenly pick up on the fact that there’s a log in and say hey I do that as well.

What really made the thriller great was the technology available to make such perfect work. With the availability of the Mac’s, is what made working on these thrillers easy, editing was so swift and straightforward after we were taught how to use the software which was final cut pro. Over time editing clips couldn’t be any easier, Fin

al Cut Pro really stretched the possibilities of things, which can be done to videos, with the aid of Soundtrack I was able to make the great audio. What also made this thriller practical an ease, was the equipment available as well, the camera’s worked great with the Mac’s and are very easy to use and set up, with a little imagination while using the camera and its stand great things can be made.

Looking back at my preliminary task, I can see that I have truly advanced through the stages. My skills on editing have drastically improved, I have reduced the continuity errors to a minimum or nothing at all, even certain rules that had to be followed like the gap over the head rule, and all other rules were followed. In terms of planning, I think we were more organised than before but I can’t really judge on that because before; we had a shorter time to film in, and for this task I can say our planning skills weren’t of the best; we could have got it finished a lot earlier. The group I was in I can truly say was the perfect group for me, but it’s just the lack of focus that sometimes gets to me and not being able to sacrifice some time to help film, but I can honestly say there wasn’t a better group for me. The main thing we lacked in the group was imagination, we weren’t as creative as we wanted to be with our thriller, and we could have produced something a lot more creative only if we had adventured long enough in our minds just to find the right ideas.

The Observer

Evaluation

Media Evaluation

The media task was to produce a two minutes thriller clip over a period of roughly two months. Our media product was supposed to develop, challenge forms and conventions of real media products. Over the period that we had of planning time we were given lots of examples in class, watching films such as the shining, and were also shown last year’s AS thrillers which was good because it gave us an idea of what we had to do, what worked well and what had already been done. Over this time we also had tutorials in how to use the cameras and editing to work best with our thrillers. This was a good task as it would benefit us in the end.

My media thriller ‘The observer’ is about a girl being watched. Our choice of location costume and genre was pretty obvious to the task set to us. Costume was everyday clothes, the location was a computer room in the college which was convenient and as this was the type of place out thriller needed. The types of camera shots and movements were done to get the best out of the scenes we planned to film. We used long shots, close ups medium shots, over head shots, high and low angle shots to show a range of camera works. We chose the ones that best displayed the acting and to make it thrilling. During the editing we added the necessary sound effects to bring it together. We also added a few effects such as slow motion and black outs. 

Our thriller doesn’t really represent a certain social group, however it shows a young average student, which could be portrayed as the youth of today. Her age and status is shown by the costumes and location (college) as it accompanies it and shows us that she is a student.

The kind of media institution that might distribute our media product are ones such as Film 4 or Blockbuster because the thriller is something that has aspects of a real film that you could to watch at a cinema. Our film could also be a small independent U.K release or we could release it on the internet and networking sites because this would allow all different people to watch it.

                                                                                                               

I think that the main target audience for my thriller would be young people e.g. teenagers and people in their early 20’s as they can best interact with the character as they are around the same age group. However anyone who enjoys thrillers could also watch it they just may not enjoy it as much. Male and females may both like this as it isn’t biased in any way.

To address my audience and attract them, i will have to use different advertising strategies. There are many ways in which i can do this. Firstly i can advertise them on websites such as Myspace and Facebook by having different pages where people can explore and get information on the film. I could also view the trailers on websites such as Youtube. Posters are also a good old fashioned way of attracting the audience.

Over the process of making my thriller I have learnt how to use a lot. Firstly we had to get used to the Mac computers although I was already familiar with them. I learnt how to use final cut pro which was a hard task but once I got used to it was alright. I’m glad I learnt this as it has taught me new skills that I can use later on in my career. We learnt how to log and capture our work after each day of filming which was helpful in case we lost any film. This also helped me to get used to the Mac computers. We learnt to use sound track to put the sound into our thriller which actually played an important part of the editing. As well as using the computers we had to learn how to use the camera which was obviously the biggest part of the process. Luckily my group all pretty much got the hang of using them quickly and we didn’t experience any trouble with them. The cameras we used were very good and efficient and I’m glad I learnt how to work them. We learnt how to use WebPages such as www.blogger.com in which we had to leave regular blogs of our progress throughout the task. We also used www.vimeo.com to upload all our finished pieces. This was topped off by a viewing of the years work at the VUE cinema in Islington. This was a great opportunity and experience as its likely your work will never be shown on a screen like that again.

                                                 

Looking back over my preliminary task I feel I have learnt a lot within the progression to the full product. I learnt that planning and organisation is very important as it provides the stability for you work and makes things run according to plan. Research is important to know about existing products. i learnt how to work well in a group and with my chosen team members. Most importantly i learnt to work under pressure and i am happy without final piece. Our thriller got a good reaction in the screening at the cinema, and therefore i believe we done well in our task.