Next step

The next step is, as a group, to organise our self and make more researches to develop our idea and trying to get few inspiration clips.

We will be looking for the location as we want to shoot in maze and it is not the easiest location we could ever find. Then we are going to look in deep to costumes and character as this is going to be the main part of the thriller, to end up with props and sound effects.

For sound we already look at some musical sound effects to add as a sound track to build the tension of the sequence. We thought that we could start the sequence with the wind blows effect and the add of few pleonastic sounds for examples steps of the girl, her breath and her hart beating could much more effective as silence is one of the best sound you could every use to build up intensity.

Than the non-diegetic sound will be low tone as we don’t want the audience to get too distracted by it.

Initial Group Idea

Primarily, we gathered all our individual ideas together and picked out the most original details from each persons ideas and considered ways to create a new, effective, successful story line and opening sequence.

Therefore, we happily decided to mainly use Jess’s idea as her thriller will be located in a maze, we wanted to film something creative and original, and realized a maze has never been used before within thrillers at hurtwood, so this could show imaginative aspects, variety and innovation where appropriate.

However, we liked Jess’s idea but we preferred Ella’s story line and her opening sequence, so we therefore mixed the two ideas together to create an effective build up of tension and suspense within our thriller to create a completely new thriller.

So our final initial idea consists of a girl that had a nightmare one night while she was in a maze and a scary man steadily followed her. The girl started to have a nightmare each night, but it was like telling a story so it was not a new nightmare but it carried on and on. During the day the girl is stressed about the situation and would start to get visions of her nightmare in her everyday life routines, for example, if there were a mirror at some point during the day she would see the exact same mirror as in her nightmare. The girl started becoming confused about what was happening but at the end she understood that her nightmare was her death and the vision was just signs of awareness that the moment was coming. This nightmare carries on for 6 days until the seventh day while she was sleeping in her dream, the nightmare actually becomes reality and she ends with her death so she never woke up.

The whole movie is based on this nightmare and her vision and the struggle she has to go through to try and understand those visions and the idea of trying to chase time as it was running by.

Harry Potter The Third Task

The opening sequence is the introduction of her nightmare.

Established shot of the location, the maze, then we will have an extreme zoom, so the camera enters into the maze and immediately follows the girl, who is trying to find her way out. This girl is standing in her night suite and she is really confused and frightened as it is all dark and smoky, she doesn’t understand why she is there and she holding a lantern to help clear the view. So we have many different shots of her walking in the maze.

Then we have a shot of her walking oppositely to the camera and while she is turning we have feet appearing in front of the camera and we are met with a figure that is starting following her.

So we got all this shots where we play to show contrast between the two figures and building up tension throughout the sequence. Then the girl starts to run as she realises that someone is following her and a wall and a full-length mirror standing in front of her stops her. The girl starts to look at her reflection and she notice how scared and terrified she is until she sees in the distance, in the mirror reflection, there is a figure of a man that was following her. Turning quickly around, there is nothing behind her, and confused, she turns really slow and instead of her reflection we have the mans reflection in the mirror instead. The girl gets so scared that she drops the lamp that suddenly switches off. Than we cut to her waking up all sweaty in her bed.

To get to this conclusion we had to discuss few things as we where so sure about the story line and the different shots. I believe as a group we work well as if we don’t get things we talk about it straight away and we are ready to listen at any new ideas to add to the content.

The main problems that we are going to come across is that we are all inexperienced and we are going to need to use all the time we have to organise this idea as well as possible and make more research to develop the idea into something more detailed and well studied.

Initial Idea presentation

Inspirational video, A beautiful Mind 

In class we had to present our initial idea for the opening sequence of a thriller and the story line. This is part of our course work project.

My initial idea was about Edmund Price a young, pretty man with schizophrenia problems. Edmund in the beginning of the movie is around 27, he is quite and shy, we don’t know what happen to his biological parents but he is not really close to his adoptive parents so he left to live by himself as soon as possible, he works in a small printing company not too far from where he lives and he met in a put Caroline a sweet confident students at university so much younger than him, they felt in love and decided to get married.

Five years later things started to change Edmund lost his job and lost completely contacts with his adoptive parents and also divorced with Caroline as she cheated on him.

Edmund was really stressed about his life and it seemed that nothing was going in the right way. Edmund was suffering, confusion was invading his mind as he couldn’t understand why all this was happening and what was he doing wrongly.

At age of 61 Edmund Price is in one of the biggest prisons of the world as considered a murder of many victims. He killed his biological parents as well as he adoptive one. He set fire to a printing company killing 50 employees and he murdered a young student called Caroline that used to work in a pub part time, he also killed many other victims, some still need to be found.

The opening sequence of this movie is set in the middle of the woods, there are going to be lots of different shots to show variety as well as the woods in different perspective. Silence would be the main diegetic sound as it will increase the intensity and silence is usually left out as a sound effect as not consider so important, but this is absolutely wrong as it is the most powerful sound you could ever have in a movie.

After the shots to set the scene there would be a wide shot showing a figure in the wood. Getting closer we can see that the figure is man standing by himself holding a picture and a neck less of a girls. Than the character starts a monologue and this would help the audience to understand something more of this character and have a general idea of what would happen next, however that is done with a purpose as the audience by the end of the all movie is something completely different you would expect, but it is done as well to make the audience thinking about it and having this at the back of their mind for the rest of the movie.

Then while the monologue gets more interesting a non-diegetic sound would start, soundtrack, to increase the intensity of the sequence. Then with a close up or a wide shot you can see a shape leaning on the floor just behind the main character. Then we have a close up and you cannot really understand what it is but can easily guess that is a dead body.

He then drops the photograph and the neck less on the body and burns them. At this stage the sound track get louder and louder and the sequence ends it with the character walking away or staring at the fire.

Overall the feedbacks I received from my class mates where positive and they liked my idea as it seems complicated but simple to do and you have the opportunity to play around with it lots and it is easily adaptive to create something really good out of it.

The only drawbacks of my opening sequence are that it is in the woods and it is something we keep seeing in Hurtwood house media as we surrounded by woods and the use of the fire at the end is too predictable and could cause problems to shoot as they would not allow use of fire for a school project for health and safety issues.

Preliminary Task 3

For this preliminary task we had to show continuity throughout our editing skill using four basic different shots that we recorded earlier on. This task not only wants to show us how much we have learnt so far but it wants to challenge us to think what we want to transmit to the audience as well as extra shot to show more details.

We wanted to show anger and mystery as we are working toward a thriller project.

This effect is shown is different ways thought out the scene, for examples to show the feeling of intension the actresses Hanna and Jess did a very passionate performance. Hanna showed the anger through her voice and face expression, the same with Jess as she showed frightened feeling with worried face expression and a low voice and insecure voice.

The mise-en scene for this task was not too complicated as our first filming task we wanted to keep it as simple as possible but interesting for the the audience eye.

The location was a class room and we moved all the tables and students' stuff to give us enough room the film all the sequence without any problems. We than used as props a hockey stick a the door, those objects helped the sequence to gain intensity specially between the two characters having and mysterious argument. The hockey was used as a potential harmful object for the next action. In the sequence we showed a close up of Hanna taking the hockey stick from Jess scared of and not only protecting her self from her but stopping her from doing something wrong. We didn't want the audience to be distracted from it during the dialogue between the two actresses but we decided to incorporated it as it shows a more detailed view of the sequence and differentiation of shots.
Even though this we incorporate this shot in the sequence i personally believe that is probably one of thawed elements if not the weakest of the all scene. This is because the shot has been filmed while Hanna is taking the stick horizontally and the next shot she is holding it vertically, this came across with the continuity and it became a distraction. The distraction effect wasn't minded too much as we already distract the audience from the surrounding with the close ups and this just gave a bit of time for the audience to focus on something different, showing all the props and saving us from a prediction from the viewers of the next shot.
The door was used as a sound effect as well as an entrance and exist for the sequence.
We add a close up of Jess' face expression with the door opening sound effect and straight after we have a close up of the door shutting mainly inly the handle is showed instead of the all door.

The four main shots where wide angle,  two over the shoulder and close ups.

The wide angle is most important shots as it sets the scene and if you have any problems later on editing the scene you can always use it as it won’t destroy the continuity. With over the shoulder shot we had to apply the 180 degrees rule and we had to draw the audience attention to the two characters. The over the shoulder shots of Jess worked really well as it show the general status of the character in comparison with the close up of Hanna that shows her opposite feelings and her face expression is completely different. We wanted to transmit the feeling of anger mainly from the acting and showing the details of the face expression so the close ups where our strongest point.

The use the close up for extras as well, we have a close up of the hockey stick taken from Jess’s hands and a close up of the door shutting.

This two scene added intensity and they draw the audience attention to something different than the characters as we didn’t want it the get bored or distracted from the surroundings.

The hockey stick close up didn’t work as well as we thought. It interrupts the continuity as we made a mistake and the hockey stick position. This is one mistake we won’t repeat for the thriller and we will look more careful when we film the shots to be clear, detailed and exactly the same to each of them.

The editing was the most difficult part, as we had to show the actual sequence.

We had few problems to show the continuity effect during the cutting as the we wanted to show diversity using the different shots but we wanted a clear sound effect as the conversation is the most important element of the all clip. I found editing challenging as it interrupts the flow of the sound but we learnt few tricks with adobe to edit the scene differently with the actual sound effect.

we used clear cut to do not draw the attention of the audience towards the editing put in the sequence generally.