Deadline in 3weeks!

Today is the day where we going to finish filming our opening sequence. The rest of the group members when to finish filming the scene where the girl is walking around the park and it appears as if she is being followed during day light. Then after that we are going to start editing. Today we were sent an email telling us that we only have 3weeks till our deadline meaning that everything has to been done, all the filming, editing and our blog should be completed as well. So therefore this means that these coming weeks we are going to be working hard for us in order to finish our work and achieve a good enough grade.

Location Settings

We are going to film our opening in college, as we need a black background and we are going to use a black background in college. We will use props that are available to use for instance, maybe a lamp to help brighten up the scene but not so it’s not too light, we also need to find a place in which we can set the scene so we will look at different locations throughout college in which we could use and a place in which we could hang pictures up and shoot them. The location also needs to be quiet as not to get any noises which are unnessacary in our scene.

Research Into Films

The research we did into the films was watch openings of thrillers and other films to see if we could get any ideas, in class we looked at some different genres of films, we looked at bhaji on the beach and the unusual suspects, we also had to do other research into films which we did on youtube, we found some ideas in which we were thinking of using.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4bznTvfP6k - Shutter Island

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEZK7mJoPLY - Seven
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTWf9QGdJCQ - Scream


These are some of the films we have watched trailers for to
get an idea of how we want to do for
our opening sequence

We started filming our main task

We start filming main task

We started filming our new idea ‘The Unknown’. During our lessen we filmed the scene where the female character was walking around and it appears as if she is being followed, when we finished filling the first scene we uploaded the video and we viewed it we realized that we had make some few mistakes e.g. speaking on the background while filming, having shaky camera work when not needed, so we decided to film it again. Paige had to wear certain clothes; we decided to make sure that she was holding a specific handbag as it has a meaning in our opening sequence, decided that we wanted the use of clothing/props to have a connotation of an attractive young female character. These are a few pictures we took of the scene.

Information about our Opening Sequence (Overview)

Name of opening sequence – ‘The Unknown'
Duration (run time) – ‘2 Minutes’

Genre – ‘Thriller’

Film location- Dark room and College
Target audience: Our target audience would be people aged 16 and upwards as they would be the main people most likely to watch our thriller as they would find it most interesting. Our target audience would like this thriller as it is jumpy and would have unexpected twists. Audiences who are interested in thriller such as ‘Seven’ should be interested in this one.

Plot summary – Young attractive girl appears as if she is being followed but she doesn’t know it. Strange character is shown in a dark room full of mysterious pictures of young attractive girls. Some pictured crossed out. Later we see one of the girls’ handbag on the floor not knowing what has happened to the girl.

Possible elements to be used-

*Props

*Character- mysterious, bizarre gloomy clothing for outlandish character, young attractive female character in vibrant clothing

Cast

Paige Devonport
Nakeem Pereira  

Amanda Makubo

What role camera shots play in a Film Noire Opening Scene ?

One of the main techniques that makes a successful thriller film is the use of complex camera shots at the start, first of all to gain attention of those who are watching, but also mostly to create suspense of the next coming scenes. A dramatic opening is what builds the noire and scary imagery on the watcher’s mind, therefore what happens is the camera takes shots, which connotes the genre of the film but gives less information about what the upcoming scenes are going to be about.

In our case, as a group we came up with a few ideas of what we might include as camera shots to emphasize the story line of our film noire.

main camera shots:

• Long Shots
• Extreme close up shot
• Close up shot
• Over the shoulder shot
• Tracking shot

Camera Shots

List of shots we will use in our scene

· Close Up

· Long Shot

· Side Shot

· Extreme Close Up

· Medium Shot

Storyboard

We started our storyboards which are graphic organizers such as a series of illustrations or images which are displayed in a sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture or animation. We use storyboards because they help us think ahead about what the idea is going to look like when it is completed, helped us to create direction and the structure of our plan, we found making the storyboard more smoothly and less stressful and also finally we use it as our plan.

Chosen Idea (Final Idea)

Final idea

We have decided to use our third narrative which is about a girl who is being watched why someone but the audience has no idea who, we came up with the idea whether there a strange character wearing black is in a dark room looking at pictures or two certain girls, one of the girls face has been crossed out, and the other there’s writing in near her picture saying next, we see that there is a lot of pictures of this particular girl. Later we see the girl walking about and it appears as if she is being followed. Since this is on opening thriller, we cannot tell the whole story to the audience as we want to keep them in suspense and wondering who this strange character wearing black is and what his plan is with these girls and why?.

We plan on using the camera in different angles to create suspense and tension. Using shaky camera work. We’ll also focus on the silence at the end of the sequence. We decided to use this idea as a possibility for a thriller opening because we thought that it would be popular with our target audience as it is a thriller and aimed at 16-25year olds. And also we won’t have a problem finding props for this, and also we have possible ideas for the location we want to use. We where inspired by the opening credits for the movie ‘Se7en’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEZK7mJoPLY

Ideas for opening sequence

In our group we made up and discussed possible ideas that we could use as our opening thriller sequence, once we’d made detailed notes on each idea we then chose which idea we would develop and use as our opening thriller sequence. Examples of ideas we come up with are:


First Idea
We wanted the narrative to be set in a deserted place late at night. The narrative starts with our female protagonist who is running in the middle of the road during night time, we see that there is another protagonist who is fallowing this character but the protagonist’s face is not shown to keep the audience in suspense, later there’s a male dead body. We then end it showing the female protagonist’s bag.


Our group discussed doing this idea because it is an original plot, positive thing of us doing this idea would be that there aren’t a lot of props needed and it is pretty low production. A problem we may encounter if we did this though is that we’d have to find a place that’s extremely deserted so therefore just decided to use a park as a deserted place.


Our target audience would be people aged 16 and upwards as they would be the main people most likely to watch our thriller as they would find it most interesting. Our target audience would like this thriller as it is jumpy and would have unexpected twists if we were to film the whole thriller.

Second idea
The narrative of our second narrative is set in a school/house. The opening sequence starts with a news reporter opening with the news of a group of teenagers who are suddenly dying due to a phone call. The footage starts with a point of view shot of the school/house and a close up on a girls face then suddenly her phone rings but she misses the call and listens to her voice-mail, this is where the twist is, the voice-mail is herself, she is listening to herself dying, she then starts to panic, later we see her running and at this point to audience does not know whether someone is actually following her or what, shaky camera work is used to create tension. We discussed this idea as a possibility for a thriller opening because we thought that it would be popular with our target audience.

Films such as ‘One Missed Call’ and ‘Paranormal Activity’ helped influence our idea and these films have been hugely popular with the audience we are trying to target.


We plan on using the camera in different angles to create suspense and tension. We’ll also focus on the silence at the end of the sequence when the antagonist has killed one of the protagonists. If we were to use this idea as our thriller opening we’d have to either film in college or someone’s house.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1F7hJNsi5M

Final idea
The narrative of our third narrative is about a girl who is being watched why someone but the audience has no idea who, we came up with the idea whether there a strange character wearing black is in a dark room looking at pictures or two certain girls, one of the girls face has been crossed out, and the other there’s writing in near her picture saying next, we see that there is a lot of pictures of this particular girl. Later we see the girl walking about and it appears as if she is being followed. Since this is on opening thriller, we cannot tell the whole story to the audience as we want to keep them in suspense and wondering who this strange character wearing black is and what his plan is with these girls and why?.
We would have to find a location for this, for example find a dark room where we have pictures of the girls all over the black wall.


We also plan on using the camera in different angles to create suspense and tension. Using shaky camera work. We’ll also focus on the silence at the end of the sequence. We discussed this idea as a possibility for a thriller opening because we thought that it would be popular with our target audience as it is a thriller and aimed at 16-25year olds.