For the preliminary task, we were asked to film a scene that included:
- Someone walking to a door
- That person walking through the door
- The same person sits down
- Has a conversation with another person
Once we had done this we went to look for a location to use and all decided that it should start indoors with the person going outside as we wanted it to be quite different. However when actually going to record this we experienced a few problems ( loud music inside, the sun glaring onto the camera at every angle, the distance from the door to the other character.) So we decided that we needed to film from outside to in, and so we found that walking in from the front of the school to sitting inside worked better than expected and had perfect natural lighting.
We then went on to edit the clips together using the programme final cut pro, however once putting the clips together we realised that we had made a few mistakes. We realised that we had broken the 180 degree rule when the conversation was taking place, the result of this is the audience feeling almost disorientated and believing that perhaps something had changed or the scene had changed. We also found that when doing an over the shoulder shot we had left a large amount of space in either side of the frame, but this did mean that the audience could see the characters faces clearly which was also highlighted by the interesting lighting inside the building.
Overall, when completing the preliminary task we did learn about the different techniques including the 180 degree rule and we were also able to learn the basics of final cut pro.
Our music became complicated when we began to overlap different sound clips to help create the atmosphere of our film, we started out with a music box that we had managed to find on soundtrack pro, this fit well with the film and added to the eeriness of the film. However, as our film progressed we felt that the music box became more and more tedious as it went on and so we needed to add something else over the top so that the sound would blend together. So we began to look for more sound that we could possibly add to our film, we used soundtrack pro for a while and ended up deciding to add a heartbeat over certain parts of the film and deleting the music box sound from the same parts so that when the heartbeat was playing the effect was much more intense.
For the part when the girl is standing behind a tree and is then grabbed, we felt that by putting a blackout between the two clips it would add to the intensity. We looked through soundtrack pro but nothing seemed to fit with what we actually wanted within this clip, we then decided to look through youtube and locate videos that we would be able to take small clips out of without any copyright issues and luckily we were able to find something that worked well with what we were trying to achieve.
When the killer is walking away we first had the music box and heartbeat playing singularly over the clip but when watching this back we felt that it didn't look very good and so we once again used soundtrack pro to look for something to use. As the killer murders children, we felt some sort of noise of children playing would act as contrapuntal sound to what the audience was watching. We first found sound that was of an audience, but this didn't fit in well with the clip and in the end we managed to find a playground sound clip which fit perfectly with the clip.
Although font may not be seen as a crucial part within a title sequence, we felt as a group that we needed to get the perfect font in order for our title sequence to have the right feel to it. We first decided when beginning our pitch that we wanted to use lucida handwriting as it looked as though someone had written it, but the problem was that it looked too neat and tidy and this was not what we wanted. So when writing our credits and the title we began to look again and although we found some good options none of them seemed to fit with what we wanted they were either too neat or so messy they were unable to read. Our teacher then recommended looking for something along the lines of a type writing styled font and that is what we found, in the end we downloaded the type writer font and installed it onto final cut pro and it fit perfect with what we were trying to achieve which was a slightly messy but controlled type mess.
^Within this shot the colour correction has made the ribbon stand out the most by keeping the red colour, the rest of the colour within the shot has been made to look much more bleak which creates a dirty look to the killers skin and also the background.
^This shot has been edited to show the pale pastel colours of the clothing that the girl is wearing adding to the conventions of her character- innocence, purity, goodness etc. This is made more powerful by the dark dirty colours of the woods within the setting.
^Within this shot the pastel and white colours show the clean, pureness of the young girl. The rest of the background is almost black and white to once again highlight the colours that are on show and make the colours stand out for the audience. What is interesting about this shot is that a certain amount of colour has been taken out of the girls skin, which is almost suggesting that she is becoming grim and dark like the background.
These are a few images of an outcome 3-way colour correction, we decided to use it to de-saturate many of our clips to take away the vibrancy and create a far more grim sinister feel. The decreased saturation has meant that the blacks and whites are emphasised much more than other colour to focus the audiences attention to the colours that are bold enough to see, the brightest being the red ribbon in the girls hair so when it falls out of her hair the audience are immediately drawn to it.
The use of colour correction was also used in clips when the killer is writing and playing with the jewellery, the use of colour correction here also adds to the dirty look like the killer is unpure perhaps?
However we didn't use the colour correction just to create dirty and harsh colours, we also used it to maintain a lot of the soft pastel colours.
Within this image you are able to see the music within the bottom half of the box and the video clips are in the top half of the box, although this doesn't show the whole of what we have done it gives an idea of what we are building up. What we have been using to edit our title sequence is final cut pro, although it can be difficult to use at some points but there are alot of points of it that are extremely useful with different techniques and is easy to follow.
Although not very clear this is an image vignette, colour collector, blur amount, mix, saturation, size and darken that we used to edit our title sequence. We used the vignette to create darker shadows to add a harsh atmosphere to our sequence, the colour correction we used was to highlight the red ribbon in the young girls hair but also to give a 'dirty' type look to the killer when handling the jewellery and such. The saturation was used at the same of the colour correction to brighten the red within the ribbon.
We used a slight blur effect when the killer was crossing out the girls names in the notebook and by doing this it creates a type of enigma code for the audience of who he has killed.
The darken was also used at the same time as the vignette to create the dirtiness of the room with the killer and to create harsh shadows as well.
We got the initial idea of vignette from the film 'Se7en' as they use a large amount of vignette within the title sequence as the dark atmosphere makes everything appear very grim and evil. So we decided to use this when the killer is doing things with the box and the notepad, the vignette distorts the shot making it creepy and mysterious.
Sound:
Non- diegetic: Although we didn't decide to use all of these options within our title sequence we felt it was important to include all of these options just as a back up. Some of these options however did seem like a key feature to use such as music and sound bridges to create an atmosphere.
Diegetic: In the end we didn't actually use either of these within our title sequence, however we did use the little girl breathing to create suspense for the audience.
Camera angles and movement:
Different angles can be used to show different things and within a thriller this is crucial, an example would be with shots like close ups as we were able to show the young girls frightened face which in turn would make the audience feel frightened for the girl.
Lighting:
Lighting plays an important part within any genre of film. Within something like a romance, soft lighting is used a lot to create a romantic feel whereas within a thriller when hard lighting is used it makes the lighting seem very harsh and sinister. We wanted to create a similar feel within our thriller and so tried to create as much natural lighting as possible, but if needed we also use very artificial lighting.
Mise-en-scene:
This is used throughout all films, but what it is used for can change throughout the genre of the film. For costume we used very dark colours for the killer to show the evil and danger of his character which the audience would pick up on although they never actually see his face. Oppositely, the young girl was in pastel and white colours which shows the purity and angelic feel.
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