Question 7: Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? By Brianna Lewis

Preliminary task Our preliminary task was to create a short piece of footage that includes the three shots; Match on action, Shot reverse shot and 180 degree rule. We took a few bits of footage for each shot so when we edited them on the computer we could choose which ones looked better. Above is match on action. To the right is shot reverse shot and 180 degree rule. When we had uploaded them onto Final Cut because in some cases, part of our clip looked great and the rest of it didn’t look so good. Recording lots of footage helped us with this dilemma because it meant we could use little pieces of one clip, and another from another clip, as long as we edit them so that the audience are unable to tell. By doing this at an early stage in the preliminary task, was a great help to us when editing the footage of our Thriller Opening.

Thriller Opening Task Research From being told that our task was to create an opening to a Thriller, we done lots of research about what our storyline could be. We thought up the idea that our main character could have some sort of unusual phobia so went ahead and researched them on here. There were some weird ones… But the ones that really stood out to us were; 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 These stood out to us because most of them link to a thriller convention in some way. Along with searching for a storyline, we researched lighting, location and costumes. This was a simple task because we already had an idea of what we wanted the location and main character to look like. We wanted to film in an eerie location so we had the idea of a forest or a dark room such as a shed and we wanted our main character to be dressed in dark clothing so that it reflects his dark personality.

Research We then took a look at the opening to Thrillers, Se7en, Catch me if you can and Six feet under. There were others such as How to kill a mocking bird, Halloween, The killers, The history of killers, Strangers on a train but those were the main ones that stood out to us. In these three thriller openings, we were taking a look at the types of font, size, position, style, if they include movement, etc. We noticed that the title was always larger than the actors name so we decided we would do this too. We liked the positioning of the credits in Six feet under as well as the contrasting of colours e.g if it was on a white background the font was black so it stood out.

Research What also stood out to us was the types of shots in Se7en. We noticed how they were often close ups or extreme close ups of particular sharp objects such as the blade and scissors. We thought this was a great idea because it signifies that the character is a violent person. We also cannot see their face just their hands or their shadows which makes the audience tense so we chose to do something similar to this in our thriller.

Experimenting Next, we went on After Effects to experiment and try find some suitable fonts for our opening. We made a video with five different fonts and this was the outcome, Font testing. We decided that the font we liked best was the first one, at 0:09-0:13. This font is called Copperplate Gothic Light. We agreed that it was simple but would be effective in our opening and that this would be the one we would use. We also thought about the transition, 3D Basic Position Z Cascade, and we decided we would use that in our opening for our credits. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to import out footage into After Effects and add titles so we added a simple fade in and fade out for each title.

Planning Then we done our storyboard which is important for these reasons. We practiced shots which we planned to use in our opening. And then plan out our shot list, film script and shooting schedule so that we had a guideline to follow on the day and therefore we would not waste time or battery because we would know what footage we were going to film first.

Editing Finally, we imported our clips in order on Final Cut and began editing our rough cut. Which we were given advice on how we could improve. Which we followed through and this was our outcome.