Initial Thriller Ideas

I had 3 initial ideas for the thriller task, so here they are:
IDEA #1
A woman finishes work late at night, she goes down to the carpark, looks around, she feels unsettled for no particular reason. She gets into the car, fastens her seatbelt, checks her petrol gauge etc., it's full. So she starts driving. Outside it's dark, she's driving through an isolated path . Then she realises that her fuel's empty, she doesn't understand because she'd checked them before. She stops at the nearest petrol station. There she fills up her tank and then goes inside to pay. She then gets back into her car and drives off. In the car she reaches to the backseat (where she had left her purse), with her eyes on the road. She then stops suddenly, there's a closeup to her eyes which open wide. Then alongside a sudden sound effect it goes to a black scene, silence and then a very loud scream as the title comes up.

IDEA#2
My second idea is a political thriller, it's about a hidden message transmitted by the tv and radio which people can't hear with their bare ears but registers into their brains either way. These messages contain information that changes peoples votes, political, racist and religious views, and also there are some major companies that use this method to sell products.
The title sequence starts with a recording tape (sound: the dialogue of the hidden message), we follow the tape into a studio where the sound changes into the commercial, programme etc that people think they're watching. Finally we come out of a tv in an empty living room. The camera then zooms out the window showing an isolated yet extremely corrupted city, with offensive graphitis on the walls, burning buildings, and some people lying shot on the floor. Then we see a man throw a flaming bottle and cuts to the title of the movie (which will be a positive name), in flames.


IDEA#3
The Reeling:
There's a strange calling that certain people can hear which is a creepy song sung by children. The people who hear it get into some sort of trance and start walking away from what they were originally doing (sleeping, working etc.) We see shots of different people who hear the reeling  (ex: a husband and wife sleeping, the man gets up and leaves while the woman continues to sleep). In the end about 70 people (in trance) meet in a common spot where they commit suicide all together in a mysterious way.

My Mood Boards (Thriller/Horror)

Thriller mood board

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This is my Thriller and Horror mood boards i created about some things i would find creepy and disturbing. I created these in order to help me come up with some ideas for our opening sequences.

Horror mood board

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My presentation

We were given a task to choose a thriller or horror movie and prepare a presentation about the opening sequence. I chose Kill Bill vol.1 because it's one of my favourite movies, however the opening scene didn't include the opening credits therefore i couldn't comment on the placing of the words. But there were plenty of other things to comment on such as the black and white effect in the scene which gave it both a memory effect and also not seeing the actual colour of the blood, bruises etc makes it more realistic because a shot that close up and held so long would surely appear to be fake if it was in colour. This opening scene is also very important because it gave us some important information of the storyline and the camera time given to the woman in the scene immediately caused the audience to side with her.


Even though I thought it was a brilliant opening scene, i think some credits could have fitted in there, the leading actors, director etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew5EYd5_i6M

Opening Title Sequences

When we're talking about opening title sequences, we come up against some very important names such as Saul Bass, Maurice Binder and Kyle Cooper. Saul Bass could easily be considered as the father of graphical title sequences which was extremely futuristic at the time. He influenced many others after him and he worked with very big names such as Alfred Hitchcock.

Kyle Cooper is by far one of the people who have developed hugely in the art of opening title sequences. This is a fast combination of his work, it is truly inspiring to anyone interested in any sort of media.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf2yk1x-Fis

Final result of prelim task

This is our prelim task after being through the editing suite.

PRELIMINARY TASK (second time around :) )

Location:
We used one of the classrooms as a location. Although it wasn't the most relevant location to the script, we were more interested in learning the shooting process rather than the script. We also had a redhead and a  blonde (lighting), to support our shoooting. We didn't really know how to use them, so we improvised and set the lighting in a way that their would be the shadow of one of the actors in the background while we were doing the medium close up on the other actor. By doing this we connected them in a single shot even though there was only one person in the screen.
Actors:
We had used two of us from the group for the trial, this time we thought it would be more convenient for all of us to give our full attention to the shooting. For this reason we used two other friends to help us out by acting in our scene.
Shooting:
We were told that we could finish the whole shooting process in only 5 shots (2 close ups+2 over shoulders+1wide shot). Ofcourse, we couldn't manage that because of the classic corpsings (uncontrolable laughters that puts actors out of character), and the occasional camera confusions etc. But in the end we managed to get our five shots ready to go to the editing room.
Editing:
The editing was more complicated than what we had expected. There were some shots that we were rather proud of and some cuts which were hardly flawless, however in the end I think we pulled it off quite well.
Sound:
We were going to add some sound effects using the program Final Cut Pro, and we tried out different options. In the end we decided that the fake sound effects made our scene less realistic, so we ended up not using it. Although we did not use the program, we did spend loads of time on it to learn how it functions because it's certain we'll need it in the future.

PRELIMINARY TASK (trial)

After a lesson on how to work a camera, we were put in groups of four and sent off to start our first shooting. We were given a very simple scene that included a wide shot, two over the shoulders, and two closeups. The only direction made was to shoot the whole scene in all the shot types, after that the groups and our cameras set off to find a location. We chose the studio for our task, however it had been used for another project, therefore it was decorated like an office. The studio wasn't a very good choice of location because the scene included an entrance and exit but there was no door ! Other than that we made a couple of mistakes such as shooting right next to a brick wall, which made it very difficult to obtain good angles (specially for one of the over the shoulder shots). We also found that the camera work is slightly more difficult when one of the two actors are in a seated position.

BACK IN THE EDITING SUITE:
It wasn't until we saw our shooting on the screen, that we found out we had done the whole thing wrong by shooting all shots with only the dialogues belonging to those shots instead of shooting THE WHOLE SCENE IN EVERY SHOT. When we suggested that we had paused inbetween lines to be able to edit, Matt explained to us how that would be a problem of continuity in the dialogue if the conversation was edited together. This experience deffinately tought us alot, specially because we weren't given much instructions, we tried to sort things out by ourselves. Mistakes were bound to happen, but surely the same mistakes will not repeat themselves :).

STORYBOARDING

The first time I used a storyboard was during our prelim task. We were given out a set storyboard which we could slightly change in the editing room. A storyboard is basically prepared to put things in order and to give a rough idea of the required shots. It includes storyline, dialogue, shot durations, lighting and camera details. Because it's a flexible preparation it's better not to stick solely on the planned shots. So it's pretty much to give the crew a hand on the shoot day.

Video Cameras

In our video camera session we used a Sony NX5 camera. The basic idea of using a professional video camera is to always keep in mind that it's very stupid. This means that we have to remind it wether it's inside or outside, in the dark or light, even it's position meaning how far it is from the objects being shot!
After we have set the camera firmly on the tripod and made sure it's not crooked, we turn it on and start telling it where and what it's going to be filming. To get a clear shot of an object, we first zoom in and focus on objects after this we can zoom out of the object, now the camera knows where it is and what its filming. We adjust exposure to have the desired view. Whilst we're shooting we see zebra stripes on some parts of the frame, this does not come out on the actual footage however it is there to show us the brightest areas in the scene. We can achieve colour balance simply by zooming into a white area and pushing the white balance button.

If we wave in front of a camera, we can see that we have a blurry effect. Shutter Speed is made to adjust the visual in these situations. The shutter speed can be identified as the number of frames photographed and the composure is the size of the hole so these two have to be set up in harmony depending on the desired footage.

Photoshop

I was always aware of the existance of photoshop and how it transformed not-so-attractive people into super models; dreadfull sandwiches into delicious looking, hard to resist burgers, however I never knew quite how to work it.
In our first week of media we learned a bit about this miracle making program. Using Adobe Photoshop, we practiced first by using several movie adds.
TOOL BOX:
On the tool box we used the rectangular marquee and lasso tools to cut around the wanted parts of the pictures and move them around or on to a different poster using the move tool. To bring out certain colours we use the dodge tool, to darken colours (gives people sharper expressions if applied on cheakbones etc.) we use the burn tool.
LAYERS:
This is probably the most important section on the screen. Whenever we have a problem and we can't seem to work the program properly, it's most probably a "layers problem". Layers tells us which background we're currently working on, so if we want to work on different backgrounds and pictures, we should check that we're on the correct layer.
TRANSFORM:
The transform section which is under edit is very usefull. Scale changes the images size, by this I mean it could blow up someones head, make them skinny, fat, tall and short (yeah it's quite cool:) ). In this section there are also rotations etc that comes very much in handy for making accurate posters.

These were some of the more important things we've done on photoshop, other than these we've also learned other things like colour and saturation changes. Basically one of the expectations of our teachers are; no more amateur facebook photos :) .

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