Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? By Peter Summers

Preliminary Task The task our group was set was to create a short bit of footage that includes three different types of shots these included 180 degree rule, shot reverse shot and match on action. Our group took a number of different clips of footage as so when we added this onto the final cut we could choose the best bits of footage. Editing our footage was a bit of a challenge but helped clearly in our thriller opening. Match on action This is 180 degree rule as well as shot reverse shot

Opening thriller task When this task was set we immediately started researching into what the storyline to our thriller could be. We all had an idea that the main character could have some sort of strange phobia that the main character couldn’t control. The phobia’s that looked most appealing to what we wanted our thriller to be about was: - Venustraphobia: The fear of beautiful women. - Heliphobia: The fear of sunlight - Spectophobia: The fear of mirrors - Athazagoraphobia: The fear of being forgotten - Mnemophobia: The fear of memories Our group already new the location that we wanted to use, which was my shed and we wanted the costume’s to be dark to give a gloomy look to our thriller.

Research We took a look at the opening to Thrillers such as Se7en, Catch me if you can and Six feet under, How to kill a mocking bird, Halloween, The killers, The history of killers, Strangers on a train. We looked at these to see how they have set out the titles of their films to give our group an idea of how to go about making ours. For example, we looked to see the text sizes and saw that the majority of the films had the title bigger than the credits showing the actors name. Our group liked ‘how to kill a mocking bird’ Title sequences as the black and white colour stood out to us and gave a creepy old feeling, which would be perfect for a thriller.

Research Another film that stood out to us is the film Se7en. We noticed how they used different camera angles to portray the genre of the film. These shots are close ups or extreme close ups of different types of sharp objects such as the blade and scissors. Our group thought this was a good idea to represent in our film as it signifies that the character is a violent insane sort of person. In the clip on the right the characters face isn’t in the shot just the hands or their shadows which makes the audience wonder who this mysterious person is, our group chose to do something similar to this in our thriller.

Testing and Experimenting Our next task was to go on the software, Adobe after effects we had to experiment on different types of fonts to find the ones we wanted in our thriller opening. We decided that we liked the first font we picked 0:09- 0:13. The font we used was copperplate gothic light, we agreed in our group that we would choose this font as it stands out and is an ideal font for a thriller. However, we didn’t get to import these into our final footage as we didn’t have enough time so we used fading in and out for our credits.

Planning and Storyboarding The next step we took was to create a storyboard to guideline us through our thriller opening making. Firstly, we planned the shot list so we new exactly where we would need to place the camera on the day to avoid wasting time. We then created a script to follow and learnt it off by heart so we would know what to say on the day of the filming. We also created a shooting schedule to know how long we should spend on taking each shot.

Importing/Exporting and Editing Once we had the footage we imported it into final cut and edited them to create our rough cut thriller opening. We were then peer reviewed and assessed on ways of how we could improve the final editing stage for our thriller opening. For example a comment said that the lighting of the whole opening was too bright to really suggest a thriller genre. We then tackled this feedback by changing what was said onto our thriller opening and this was our outcome, Mnemophobia.