Thrillers 2013

This is the final product of our Thriller.

Final stages

Everything was coming into place. We decided that the scene of Adam driving is too jumbled up and uneven, as we couldn’t get any outside shots of the van because there were signs all over it.  Instead of the scene we are going to blacken the screen and just have the audio. Of the doors closing engine staring up and driving. We are going to have the banging noise back in the back of the van. The screen will come back on when you hear Adam pulling over and jumping out of the van. The screen will then go black again as we have the shot of Adam opening the van door and Mauricio pointing the gun at him. The blackening of the screen and the sound running creates a lot more tension and make the audience focus a lot more on the sound to really hear what’s going on.  For example in the film Signs, 2002, staring Mel Gibson, they have a scene in the basement were the lights go out and its pitch black for about a minute while you hear people screaming and running around. Its quite a big risk doing this because we do have some very nice footage of Adam in the car but I think it will create more tension and that is our main aim. The gun sounds are in place but now we need to do the gun flashes and add some effects to the title at the end. We have now come up with a full name for our thriller. It is called Senseless 

Todays Editing 12.2.13

In today’s editing we explored the layering of sound onto other clips. This Time we didn’t have to go  through the whole searching for the right sequences. We have almost finish the driving scene. I found it really difficult matching some of the sound with some of the clips. For example there a shot when we shot a close up of the gear stick and Adam changing the gears but we shot this when the engine was turned off so we could suddenly ad that clip into the project with the sound still attached. If we did there would be clips in the driving scene where the engine and road noise is on and clips where it suddenly changes. I found the that I have become  much more familiar with final cut pro and sever. We are still in need of some music that will add drama and make the clips flow more smoothly but we are not allowed to use copyrighted songs. To achieve the music we must either create the music ourselves or find some un- copyrighted music up of the internet that we could download.

have tried an d experimented with a few transitions, using fade when one of our clips doesn’t flow smoothly to the other. For example when Matt is pushing  the trolley through the corridor, I used a fade out and fade in transition to switch onto the scene when Adam and Matt are loading the body into the van. I also think that the transition would fit the scene much better if we had music along with it. Hopefully we will sort this out in short time

Todays Editing.

 Today we carried on with our editing for our thriller. We were persistent on getting all the footage in the project and in place so that later on we could editing and trim them down so they run smoothly. We looked through all the keyboard shortcuts, to speed up the process. For some reason all our clips have to be rendered manually after placing them in the project but we just hit the “apple” and the “R” key and it does it. We have placed the beginning scene in order and started to trim it so that it runs well. We have also learnt how to split the clip from the sound and add the sound onto the next clip so that the sound doesn’t suddenly jolt when the clip changes. This was really effective with the opening wheels scene when we just took the sound from the first or second clip and ran it out through the wheel shots so the sound is constant and fluent. We have allot of cuts in our opening scene, too many perhaps as we got some feedback form the media department. We might have to alter that the next session. We have so many god shot of the same setting its hard not being able to use all of them but we have chosen the best of the lot. Having three of us editing can be both a good and bad thing. On the positive side we have all our ideas to combine and improve our project allot more but it can be quite stressful everyone wanting different things but its a good skill to be able to work in a group and to listen to everyone’s opinions. So far we have only positioned up to the clip scene when Adam is about to drive away. we are having a lot of trouble with cut sever at the moment. every time we save to the sever and open up again it changes the order and sequencing of our clips and we have had to start from stratch twice now, hopefully this will not be a problem any more as we are changing computors

Shooting day

The day before we got everything organised for the shoot, we sorted out the van hire for the day, which Adam picked up in the morning of the shooting day. We sorted out the props, E.g the scrubs for Matt and the apron for Mauricio. Peaslake was free so we were free to film anywhere on the house campus. We hired all the props and costumes from our theatre department. 

We filmed on a Monday the 14^th. We were the first group to start filming and we had most of the media team with us. We all meet up at Peaslake in the morning around 10ish. We put all the props in the back of the school bus and a pickup truck. We were taking a trolley that the school had with us for the stretcher.  When we arrived at Peaslake we discovered that the boys corridor was too narrow and  the carpet didn’t suite the scene, so we went upstairs up to the girls corridor where the corridor was more pale and was all one colour, suited the scene much better.  It was quite nerve wrecking but we had the whole day to film and we weren’t under much of a time pressure. Mauricio arrived in white trousers and white top which he had prepared for the day.The van was parked outside. We need a plain white van for the exterior van shots but it was cover in van hire signs.

 So we had to cut the exterior shot but we made up for it by filming more interior van scenes for the journey. I felt like we were completely in charge. It was really good having the full control over the project. We were left to all the decisions I found it very professional. We were left to find all our own shots and angles but the media team did helps us out with some of the setups in the shots and positioning of the camera.

We started to film Mauricio out on the stretcher covered by a white sheet (that gives of the impression of death) and matt pushing him down the corridor, Mauricio’s feet poking out the out of the end of the stretcher giving the impression of a body. We didn’t actually plan that but it works very well back in the footage we have run through.

We wanted a tilt down shot from the top of Matts head to Mauricio under the sheet so we had to place the tripod on top of Mauricio and i had to use the tripod handle to tilt the camera down and the car was moving. It was quite worrying because The table that mauricio was on was slowly cracking so we had to get the shots over and done with quickly but not rushed. we managed to get allot of shots upstairs in    Peaslake.
The Filming equipment we had was slighly different to what we we used to. We had a Boom to improve the sound quality which we pluged straight into the camer. We had to piont the boom face on to where we wanted

 

 

 

Thriller checked to go

We have got out Thriller shoot on monday next week. We have sorted out our main character Mauricio, he is a big guy and italian, i think he fits the part quite well. We are going to use Matt, one of the media team to be the trolley man at the beginning who wheels Mauricio around on the table. Adam my media teacher will be the van driver who gets shot at the end by Mauricio. We could not find a body bag so we are going to have to use a white sheet instead. In a way I think this could be better for the thriller as it gives off more an appearance that it is in a metal institute. We have rented a van for the day but it has the logo of the van hire company on it so we are going to have to cut the outside van shots and we are going to have to be careful about the scene when Mauricio is put in the van. We have got our props sorted out for the shoot, we have Matt’s scrubs, and we have sorted out the handcuffs for Adam and Mauricio is going to bring in some white clothes, we have sorted out a white apron for him. We now going to use the two big swinging doors at the bottom of Peaslake that are part of the basement for the shot of when we put Mauricio into the Van.
I am happy with the organisation and i think we will be ready to shoot on monday.

  

This is our location, Peaslake House. The house used to be and old medical ward and the dull pail colour give off that impression. all though we wont be seeing very much of the house it is a perfect location for our thriller.








at the moment the weather is quite depressing and dull, this type of atmosphere is perfect for when we shoot the van driving away and it will add the grimness of the story.

This corridor is the boys main corridor and we think that this is a prime location
film for beginning scene.




The lights work out aswell for the shot when the camera is moving down the corridor slightly tilted up at the lights. although the lights aren't  perfect as we had drawing in our script they will still work nicely