Questionnaire

This is our questionnaire to give out during our opening sequence's screening.

Reflections on Second Shoot

Although our real actor wasn't available on this shoot we had to test out some shots. The shoot went quite well on the whole:

+ Again, we finished earlier than expected. We tried a few variations of shots in the spare time.
+ We were more creative this time around, shooting each shot at different angles and distances.

- In addition to the dialogue we recorded the dialling tone and the person answering the phone separately to see if the sound will be clearer than before.
- We managed to turn the distracting light in the background off for most of the shots, but we forgot sometimes.

We now have to edit this into a second rough cut and figure out what we need to improve for the final shoot!

Reflections on Test shoot 1

+ We'd done all the shots we planned to do with time to spare! So we improvised some shots at the end of our 2nd 4 hour session. This should give us more variety and options when editing.

+ Our actor Nima quickly understood what he had to do and we got his shots over and done with pretty quickly.


 -We filmed the dialogue and the person answering phone with 'Hello?' using the shotgun microphone on the camera but they may not have come out clearly.

- For the curtain shot we needed the light outside to be bright, we thought this would be earlier in the day but in fact it was brightest around midday.

- Also as we only used the paglights some of the time, this may affect continuity . We'll have to be more wary of lighting issues for the next shoot...but we'll find out what we need to change once we've edited the sequence!

Group Meeting 3 - 02/02 - 60 Minutes

In this meeting, we felt as though we really had to start drawing our storyboard and preapre for our test shoot. We had secured our actor, location and equipment hire. we now need to do a shot list and storyboard of what specfic shots we are going to shoot such as:

Pan across body and floor

Tilt up from foot to knee

Above, the pink rectangle is a stand-in title. As it is an opening sequence we thought it was best design some shots with the intention of outting titles on them - so it was important to leave space. 

Proposal and Feedback

 Using our blog as a visual aid, we proposed our idea to the group and gave out the following handout to summarise:

Feedback:

+ Arty elements

+ Idea of the morning after

Character Issues:

- What was her motive - is she crazy?

- Who is the antagonist?

- Idea of her doing normal things didn't go down well - as it seemed like she had no reaction

Narrative issues:

- Unclear on the rest of the film and the sequence of events

- Will there be an investigation?

- When is the body revealed?

Practical issues:

- Room issues

- Rethink choice of male actor

We're re-presenting on Friday, periods 4 and 5!!! This is because our idea seemed to vague and whilst they liked the general idea/style of it - the plot details and action codes needed to be more specfic.

Psychological Thriller: Genre Research

Soundtrack Research and Ideas

Music is an important part of a thriller; it makes the genre clear and anchors the mood of a sequence. Although we haven't considered any specific music for our opening sequence, we think that something similar to the following would be appropiate:

Seeing as our visuals will be quite unconventional to the thriller genre the music will be important in anchoring the genre of our sequence. Here is an example of how music and a voiceover can effectively change the 'mood' of a film:

Analysis for the opening sequence of Memento (Nolan, 2000)

+ Iconography - bullet & glasses on the floor, blood, picture of the dead person
+ Character - LA of the main character makes him look dominant and menacing, esp. as the gun flies into his hand
+ Music - enigmatic, sad, tense
+ Enigma: picture developing is played backwards, and we realise the sequence of events is backwards
+ Titles - slow and fading in and out