The film is complete!

Now that we have completely finished our film, including the music and the editing, the only thing left to do is upload our film and contintuity excercise onto our blogs. Then my blog will be complete :) 

Although me and my group have faced a lot of problems when trying to create our film, i have really enjoyed this project and i think that our finishing product pays off for all our hard work.
Hopefully, everyone else that watches our opening sequence will feel the same :)
thanks for reading.
Samantha xox

Logline!

Here is a brief outline of my groups film.

The film starts with the image of a garage and a close up of the dartboard with the 5 pictures of the girls on it. Then the first character(the murderer) walks into the shot. The camera then focuses on the first character picking up a dart and getting ready to throw the dart through the picture of the girl in the middle of the dartboard. We then used different transitions to get from the shots inside the garage to the 'following' shots we filmed outside. These shots consist of a girl being stalked and then the pictures of the girls on the dartboard flash onto the screen inbetween the different outside shots. The film then ends back in the garage with the dart landing in the last picture of the girls. 
In our film we tried to use a wide majority of different shots including an establishing shot of the garage, a mixture of long shots, medium close ups and close ups and we also filmed a panning shot. However when we went to edit our film the panning shot was not very effective so we didnt end up using it. 

That's the basic story of our film :)

When editing the film we also had to try and think about what would happen after the opening sequence so that we could decide how to end our opening sequence. As a group we decided that in the rest of the film it would show how the murderer met the five girls and the killings of each of them. This helped us to plan the end of our film :D

Influences...

In our film we have decided to use voice overs to make our film seem more thrilling. We spent time researching the film 'phonebooth' because we knew there were a few voiceovers in this film. The use of voice overs in our film also makes us differentiate from the other groups in our class, because none of these have used voice overs. 

These are some of the things we wrote down when trying to think of what to say:
Life is one big game
you have to lie, cheat and steal to win
how would you play the game
its how you play the game that counts
one life, one game, one winner
there are no rules

We ended up using...
Life is just a game, its how you play that counts.

FILMING!

Yesterday me,cerys and natasha managed to get together and go out to film the final scenes for our opening sequence. Its finally complete, now all we have to do is edit and add the music. hopefully, we wont face any more problems. xox

Characters.

Although we decided what the roles of our characters would be a long time ago i have forgotten to type it up on my blog. In our opening sequence we will only be using 2 characters, the murderer and the victim.

The first character will be the murderer, we have decided that in the opening sequence you will never get to see the murderers face to add some mystery to the film. We have also decided for this character to be a woman. This is a conscious choice that we have made as we want our sequence to be different and do not want our murderer to be the typical stereotype. This character will be dressed in dark clothing with maybe a long black coat and clumpy boots.

Our second character will be the victim. This character will be stereotyped. It will be a young, attracive woman walking home. She is vulnerable as alone. She would be wearing casual clothing, jeans, and heels (hard to run in).

Audience

I have carried out some research into which audience i think my groups thriller should target. I feel that it should be targeted at ages 15 and above, the reason for this is that most of the films i have watched for research have been targeted at this age group if not higher. Although i would not like to target our film at 18+ because we want our film to reach out to the widest audience possible.

FINAL STORYBOARD!

I would like to point out that throughout our group we all had different tasks to do to begin the planning for our film. Cerys drew this storyboard, however we all helped to input our ideas.

'Pay it forward' - research into other opening sequences

Whilst trying to come up with the idea for our film and how we were going to film it, our media teacher set us a research task to watch the opening sequences of some thrillers. As a group me,cerys,natasha and lauren watched the opening sequence of 'pay it forward' starring kevin spacey,helen hunt and haley joel osment. This film was directed by Mimi Leder. In the opening sequence there is a scene with a hostage victim and there is a use of blue lighting. Me and my group decided that we thought this looked very effective, this then gave us the idea to use red lighting in our production. We thought that by doing this the film would look more effective and thrilling. Other thrillers have also participated to some of the ideas in our production and have helped us to make some very successful decisions.

Problems with our filming...

In december, me and my group decided that we would start our filming. To do this we took a day off school because we have been struggling to find the time to film. We took time preparing our location and props and then we discovered that there was a problem with the tape so we couldn't film. This was very annoying and meant that the day was wasted.
We then set a date in January that we would all get together and try to film again, but we faced some more problems due to the snow. When we finally got together we managed to film and the results were brilliant. We have now edited these scenes on imovie, but still have a few scenes left to do in the dark. We have planned to do these scenes tonight, hopefully there will be no more problems because we desperately need to get our editing done and finish our film.