Editing Day

This is a sumary of what we did as a group on our editing day:

• We started by putting our credits in order, then we actually made the credits, by editing text on a design 'credit' and by dragging it on to the line. We then put the credits in order and then rendered them. To render the credits we used the 'cmd' button and 'r' on the keyboard.We also changed the fonts on the credits.
• We worked out how to put clips on the line inbetween other clips on the line, as we had difficulty doing this when we tried before. Originally when we tried, the clips just went over the other clips, and messsed the whole line of clips up. We just had to hold down the'cmd' button and click on the clips that we wanted to move along. It was quite simple.        
• To cut clips, we had to had to click them twice and then use the 'cutting tool to shorten our clips to the length of time we wanted. We originally had over 4 minutes footage. We cut all of our credits to 2 seconds, and cut out tiny parts of our clips. We were left with 2.10 minutes of footage.
• We then added transitions to our slides, to make them fade slowly in and out, and to make our piece smoother.
• When we had finished editing our piece, we went to the music suite to record our music. We used an Mp3 recorder. Firstly we recorded our music on an actual piano, and then we recorded it on a keyboard. Although the keyboard took away echoes, the piano played louder, and so we decided to choose that! We played our piece fairly quietly at the beginning with stacatto notes and used a crescendo to gradually make the piece louder. We sped up the piece towards the middle, to increase the tension.  We ended up with 1.04 seconds of recorded music.
• We placed our music on the line on the computer, and then we used a loops to repeat the music. We tried to coordinate the music with the clips, and i think we were successful at doing this. Once the music and the clips were correctly placed to gether, we exported our piece, using final cut express, and then we uploaded our completed piece on to youtube.

Our Finshed Thriller Piece

 

This is our Final completed piece, and the link is to watch the clip on youtube. 

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK9sLtS9f80

Evaluation- Question 1 2 3 4 5 6 and 7

Question 1

Two Pairs used. Two Pairs developed. Two Pairs Challenged.

Used: Our two conventions we have chosen to show in this post from our film are use of cross cutting and our use of a reaction shot. We chose these because we thought they were ones which stood out most and we could give good comparisons from other Thriller films.

Cross cutting: We cross cutted the "Volunteers" entering the experiment room with shots of Freddie. For example her running up the stairs crossed with a volunteer and then her getting out of her car and then crossed with another volunteer. This added to the suspense as each time we saw her she was in a different place and moving faster in each shot. When this was cross cutted with the different volunteers entering the experiment room it set of the feeling that there was something not quite right happening in that room. A sense of urgency.

We can link this to the Thriller Film "Phone Booth" . It cross cuts from the image of the building (below) to his face when he is in the phone booth ( below

Him in the phone booth cutting to the person on the other end of the phone who is hiding in one of the buildings. Like in our opening this adds ultimate suspense and tension as we do not know where the person on the phone is hiding, we don't know what window he is shooting from but we do know that he can see him from a location that the victim cannot Sus out.

Reaction shot: The reaction shot we are using out of our Thriller opening is Freddie's face when she comes out of the experiment room after being late for her appointment there. We chose this shot because we can really see her face and it shows that something is wrong. This still adds to the suspense as we do not know what she has seen or what is going on. All we know is that there is something seriously wrong.

 

 By having her coat up around her face i think it really adds to the seriousness of the situation, keeping the audience attracted and willing to continue to watch on.

  We can compare this reaction shot to the one that agent Starling gives in "Silence of the lambs" when she sees the pictures on the board in her bosses office. At this point in the film we do not know yet what she has seen, so again it keeps the audience interested and give you their full attention.

 We can see her face has a blank expression, showing us that there is something very different pinned on the wall, something unsettling.

Used

Developed: To show how we have developed areas of our thriller opening we have decided to use the use of our music and the use of dialogue as our two paired examples. We chose these because we felt that they were our strongest development points.

Music: As part of our music development we are using two factors. The first being the crescendo we used, we sped the music up as the tension built up. This also timed in with the speed of the action in our scenes. As the opening continued the music got faster as did the scenes. We did this to help the suspense, again  keeping the audience intrigued. 

Our second factor of developing the music was that we made the piece ourselves. This was a really big advantage as we were able to match it to the pace of our scenes and we could edit it so that the fast bits were in the right places to reflect certain areas of the opening. When we were filming we all had ideas on how our music wanted to be but we couldn't find any suitable music. We then decided to make our own music so that it could be how we had imagined it and it worked out really well. We recorded it in the music studio and then uploaded it on to the computer. We found that the music was just two short for the film piece so we copied the last few bars from the music and repeated them again.
The film i have compare this music to is that from "The Negotiator." I chose this because the music speeds up slightly as it prolongs. It is the same tune more or less that is being repeated with the odd change in note. Like ours it is quite bouncy but in a cynical way. It is serious and keeps you listening, even though its more or less the same tune and i think this is important as it will stay in the viewers head.

(mp3 of our piece)
(mp3 of the negotiator)

Use of Dialogue:  For our second example of development in our Thriller Opening piece we are going to represent the use of dialogue used in our media film. When i say use of dialogue it is actually quite the opposite, its the lack of dialogue we used. We decided to make our opening have no speaking in it what so ever. We thought this would add to the curious aspect coming from the audience. It gives them more to think about. More to work out. The only noise apart from the non diagetic music overlay is the the scream coming from behind the experimentation door. By only hearing the scream and nothing else means that the scream is stronger and more captivating. By only hearing the scream we felt it made the opening more powerful as the audience would not be expecting anything. We hope by using this method we will make the audience more engaged with the Thriller.

"The Volunteer" and "Se7en", it shows that it is not always necessary to have speech or other noise accept that of possibly non diagetic sounds. However this does not work for all films. Some films have to have speech and other sounds going on to set the atmosphere and create a certain ambiance

Our thriller opening sourced from YouTube

Opening for Se7en sourced
  from YouTube

Developed


Challenged: To show how we have challenged areas in our film we have decided to use examples of how we have used a young person as our main character and how our lighting was used. 
Main character: We used a young person as our main character because it reflects on our target audience age. The reason this is one of our challengers is because in most thrillers an adult is used as the main character like in "Phone Booth". I guess this is to make the film seem, possibly, more serious and more likely that adults would go and watch it or buy it but this isn't what we were aiming for. We want our target audience age range to see and buy this film and by making the lead character suitable for their age range it is more likely it will be popular for that target group of people. By having our main character of a younger age we think it will appeal to a wider range of audience as it includes the younger ages. However we did think it was important that we showed they could drive because that's what most 17 year olds are learning to do but younger ages like 15 and 16 are starting to get excited about driving. This will also make it slightly more appealing to the older ages from people in their 30s and possibly older as they can relate to this aspect of the maturity of driving.

Freddie getting out of the car. Showing she can drive and showing how old she is.

Showing that the main actor in "Phone booth" is an adult. Showing how we have challenged the media.





Lighting: For our next example of how we challenged the media conventions is our use of lighting. It is normal for a thriller to have dark lighting. All the main thrillers do. For example some areas of "Silence Of The Lambs"
               "The Usual Suspects"
               "The Negotiator"
               "Hannibal Lecter"
               "Psycho" (although all in black and white the ambiance is dark)
               "Funny Games"
We decided to to this to make it slightly less scary as our certificate is a 12a but also to make it seem clinical.The plot of our film is based on a psychological experiment which is occurring in an empty building block. We thought it would be appropriate to make our lighting significantly lighter ( especially compared to other thriller films) to fit the ambiance and atmosphere of the situation going on. By making it bright we felt it really fitted in to the theme of experiments and medical issues.
Another Thriller film we found to be quite bright is Phone Booth. It is challenging the media in its self by setting the hostage situation right in the light of day making it obvious for all the public to see. The events which happen involve the public and make them a part of the hostage situation unwillingly.

----------Example of "Phone Booth" being shot during the light of day and getting other members of the public subconsciously involved.

  ---------- Our Film "The Volunteer" showing that we have used bright lighting. By doing this it created an atmosphere to suit our thriller theme.

Example in "The Usual Suspects" showing how the lighting is dark, representing the majority of thriller films.














Question 2
This is a Prezi slide to show how our media product represents particular social groups. I enjoyed using Prezi as you can lay out your information in whatever way you want. You can custom it to fit how you imagine it to be and show how you want things to be shown!

How Does our Media Product represent particular social Groups on Prezi

Question 3

This is our Wiki spaces account answering question 3

http://nfgsmedia.wikispaces.com/The+Volunteer

Question4

Our ideal profile of our perfect model audience. The gender will be both male and female aged about 16. They are happy and fun to be around and always up for scary movie nights or film-a-thons.

They go to 6 form college and has a strong social background group of friends. They are friends with both genders but will normally watch a movie with only their own gender.They have been brought up well but like to rebel every now and again. They may do this by sneaking out with friends or telling white lies to enable them to have fun or get out of jobs.

Our perfect model is part  of a big family and they have learnt to share their things but the one thing they can happily not share is their DVDs and film choices. This gives them a chance to create their own profile within their family, having different interests to their siblings therefore creating their own character in a family role. Their family shops at Tesco as they have a lot of branches such as Tesco Metro, Extra, Normal and Express. This gives their parents a wide range of places to shop. This fits in with collecting all the children from all their different places and activities. Also Tesco sells alot of things other than food, for example TV and electrics, furniture, clothes, toiletries at decent prices. This means that our perfect model can buy the DVDs they like for cheap prices.

The house owns two televisions, one in the lounge and one in the playroom. This is so the parents have one room and the children have a communal area to meet and watch TV. Our model doesn't have a television in their room as this would mean that every child would and this is too expensive but the television they have in the playroom is a decent wide     f l a t s c r e e n.

They enjoy going out socially at least once a week and they have a part time job at a restaurant to get extra cash to fund their nights out and buy clothes and DVDs etc.

They like using the computer to play games and go on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/) and Twitter (http://twitter.com/). They can also watch DVDs on there alone which gives them a little time to escape from their busy family involved life.

They are studious but love it when the weekend comes to they can let their hair down and relax and go out with  family and friends. They enjoy action and thriller films as they are excited by the movement and thought process. Because they are studious they like to think and link things to their own life. This works well when watching Thrillers and Psychological Thrillers as they find it interesting to think about the logic behind the situations. The have a creative memory and will think about how they can apply this to their everyday life and what would happen if that actually happened to them in their real life. As part of being creative they took art as a subject as they feel they can express their feelings though this.

 This also gives them time again to get away from their busy family life and gives them a chance to relax before having to work hard at school or help at home with different jobs or looking after younger siblings.

Question 5
This is our final video with annotations explaining how different aspects of filming and our use of different methods affectes the audience.
It is our link to our film which we put on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK9sLtS9f80



hope you enjoy.



Question 6


This is me using the camera on the Tripod. We used the Tripod because it made the I'm,age and filming steady. We didn't want alot of shaking in our piece as it would look really unprofessional. But in some places we made it more shaky to make it seem like the audience are more involved. This helps the effect of feeling like they are there and getting involved in the situation. 

It was good using the Tripod because you have total control. There is a bar that you hold (as shown in picture) so you can get smooth transitions to follow a character whether they are moving left or right or whether you have to move the camera up or down. It also makes it alot easier to ZOOM in when the camera is on a Tripod as it feels a lot more steady.  

In some places we used the camera hand held to make it seem more realistic, so the audience feel like they are there. This method was used in films like "Clover Field" and the "Blair Witch Project" which are both considered as Thrillers.





After filming everything we then plugged the camera in to the Apple Macs via USB. We used final cut express to cut our video and put the scenes in to the right order.

It took a bit of time for me to get used to using the Apple Macs as the keys and different and the key board feels strange at first. Different keys i had to get used to was using the instead of "cmd""ctrl, Alt"

The keyboard felt weird as it is very flat and i soon realised that i didn't need to press the keys as hard as i normally would.

 Using final cut express took alot of getting used to but once i understood it fully it was more simple to use. The reason i found it so hard to use was because there were so many different tools and devices that had to be used for specific things. For example you couldn't copy and paste images from an outside sources like photos from "My pictures" , you have to import and export certain files. These are the keys i couldn't get used to (below) I was so used to pressing Ctrl C or Ctrl V.

This is a Prezi presentation explaining how i feel about using Prezi

Prezi! on Prezi

Question 7


This is my preliminary film on youtube with annotations on how i managed to work with and use all the different and new conventions.

 This is the preliminary video to watch on our blog


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb9PwLcsdzE\    
This is a link to watch it on YouTube


For our preliminary we just wanted to get a feel for using the camera and working out how do do different things. I am glad we did the preliminary before our actual piece as i learnt alot of things. Also when i watchd our preliminary back i was in the position of the audience so i knew what they would want to be adapted and changed. I realised that i needed to take my time and had to get in my head that anything we didnt need could be edited appropriatly so it didnt matter if we had alot of extra film.
When looking back at our preliminary i noticed the different lighting that was used. I knew straight away that it was too light and didnt suit the situation occuring. It was an police interview so thetrefore a much darker lighting would have been perfect to suit the theme. I took this in to consideration when filming our final piece.

Transitions and Cutting scenes

After having all the scenes in the right order on the film line we then had to cut them to the right length to fit the film. We had 4 minutes of footage which we had to cut down to 2 minutes so we had to cut appropriately.
We wanted the scenes to fit together perfectly and have smooth transitions from one slide to the other so it was crucial that we cut the scenes in the right place. We had to be careful that there weren't any p....auses or stills that weren't needed so we made sure the cuts were made in the correct places at the correct times.

Moving from the end of one credit on to the next visual picture scene we have put in a fade so the black background of the credit fades in to the colour background of the next scene 

After filming all of our shots we needed we uploaded them on to final cut express.
This was a new learning curve for me as there are different ways in which you have to u
                                                                                                                                           p
                                                                                                                                           load them and       d r a g  and d
                   r
                   o
                   p them in sequence. Its not as simple as copying and pasting things .
We had to restart our film line about 3 times as we kept getting scenes muddled up and in the wrong order.
We set out our movie line in the perfect order of scenes and then started making credits to put in between certain scenes but this wasnt as easy as i first thought. things kept overlapping in the wrong places and were being cut out.We then decided to totally start a fresh and created all the credits before hand. After doing this we were then able to put every single scene in the right order. The only thing left was to cut the scenes to an appropriate l e n g t h and then create transitions.