Preliminary Task Complete!

Yesterday, me and my peers Jack & Sam had completed the editing; adding a title and closing credits to my edit as well as the lighting settings mentioned in the last post on the filming progress.

Jack insisted on some Reggae music at the end whilst the credits scroll, which I couldn't exactly argue over, and for a task like this, it's not going to get us marks down.

On our Opening Titles task, we are considering linking it with this short 2 minute film as it fits with the requirements of a 'fictional' theme, and would seem nice to have a constant theme throughout our coursework, but we probably will go with another idea for the opening titles to at least show a wider understanding in the thriller genre as a whole rather than sticking to a particular theme.

Here's a link to the video on my personal youtube channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSokcnxlHNo

I think we have a good understanding of the 3 cinematography rules, but due to a few technical difficulties and time we didn't show a lot of the switching-between-shots within the 180 degree rule.

Filming Progress 4; Preliminary Task

In the time of a week, I have finished my section of the editing and have left my 2 other peers (Sam & Jack) to finish the final stages which we all agreed on; improving the lighting in order to make it feel more dark and distressing.
These snapshots show Sam cutting down the exported video of my edit and adding particular brightness settings to a certain shot.
We considered at one point to reduce the volume of the music I used in my edit that I had gotten from some media resource folders on my school's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), but in the end we agreed the music level fitted the tone of the film anyhow.

As well as darkening shots, it was up to my friend to lighten up some of the shots where you can barely see our figures; although being barely able to see our faces was really intentional for the mysterious atmosphere of the thriller.

Last but not least, the my other peer Jack is going to be adding on the credits to the end of the lighting edit, and then we will be moving onto the Opening Titles task.
I'll be uploading the final video in one of my next posts.

Speed (1994) Review

From reviewing the 2 films ‘Psycho’ & ‘The Birds’ which come into the sub-genre of a Psychological thriller, I've now watched a film that comes into the Action Thriller sub-genre which I tell from the wording that this will use active, tense situations to drive suspense in the audience e.g. some sort of high action, hugely tense/ nerving car chase of some sort which I could tell Speed would be similar to by looking at the italic-like typography of the title and the bus flying through an explosion behind the main actor/ star of the film; Keanu Reeves.

From what I've seen, Speed and its respective sub-genre seem much more realistic and use realistic events/ possibilities in turn are more effective than ‘The Birds’ as you could imagine yourself on the bus in Speed, and what’s frightening is how it’s much more likely to happen in terms of terrorism than birds that have become interested into killing humans.

What me and my peers should try and do for our Opening Titles task is to attach the audience to the concept of the film, so that it makes them strong feel like they are/ could be the character in the situation of the film.

The use of music in this film ties in with the amount of switching between camera shots hence the fast paced action to keep the audience intact and interested, and a similar thing is used in music videos where the music helps assist the fast switching shots, so that the viewer isn't getting dizzy and is multi-tasking rather than concentrating on an array of quick camera shots.

This could be used in our Opening Titles if we were to have a fast paced/ tense scene of fear/ suspense hence our theme of Thrillers.

The Opening Titles of this film have you descend down a lift shaft, as a way of keeping the audience interested whilst the opening credits appear from behind lift frames as you descend and disappear as another frame flies past the camera, which we could try to incorporate into our opening titles if we were to have an opening scene; especially on the move.

The good thing about this 'classic'-considered film is that the story line is very simple as it is obviously an action- thriller in which most of the film is targeted at delivering high paced action scenes in Los Angeles. The Story starts off with an old, clever man/ terrorist planning to make money by  killing/ threatening lives in an attempt to blackmail the authorities (i.e. the police) to pay him a very large sum of money. This man targets a lift shaft in a building where small explosives have been set onto the lifts  which could of sent dozens of people falling to their deaths, but the L.A.P.D (Los Angeles Police Division) special ops are contacted quickly and get the citizens out of the lift before it plummets where they find the armed, old man in a unused lift who runs off into a room whilst being chased down by 2 of the special ops. From what they see, they see the old man walk into the room and explode from the explosives strapped to him around his torso.
Somehow he survives and seems to have a plan B, where he contacts one of the L.A.P.D members on their time off duty and sets off an explosive on a bus down the road and warns him that the same explosion could happen to a bus nearby (a km or so)  which is heading for a highway where if it reaches 50mph, it will explode if it drops back down below 50mph. The man also tells him that the bus will explode if anyone tries to get off, where you see shots of the man in his base with screens showing CCTV, news channels, helicopter cameras to see the amount of work he has put into doing his terrorism, and his control. So the rest of the film simply takes this police officer onto the bus where he tries to outsmart the old man in order to get the passengers off safely without falling below 50mph.

The pacing of this film is very constant luckily, as there isn't a moment in the film (maybe except the L.A.P.D presentation scene 30 minutes in) where I got really bored/ peered away from the screen, as when the bus phase of the film arises, it doesn't settle down in terms of suspense and action until the closing credits. The pacing of the film is helped by the gimmicks/ parts in the story where when you think some of the minor problems have been solved e.g. the highways/ roads being cleared  for the speeding bus, more small problems arise to keep the viewer engaged i.e. sharp turns the bus has to make or even an extreme situation of jumping over a 100ft-ish gap on a highway interchange. So I can say the writers/ others behind the film definitely thought out well how they were going to keep the audience entertained with this speeding bus and what obstacles are going to arise on its journey.

Overall, for what the film is (an action- thriller), I really enjoyed it and would agree with reviewers on sites like IMDb who would regard this as a classic. Thinking about it, I cannot think of anything really wrong with the film as a whole, as the pacing is well made, the characters/ actors are believable in the tense atmosphere of the film. I would give this a 4.5/ 5.

Filming Progress 3; Preliminary Task

In the last week, I have produced an almost finished 2 minute long thriller-crime themed film for the preliminary task. All we need to do as a group is agree on whether the film is decent enough to leave aside and move on- as it is after all only to get the grasp of 3 basic techniques in cinematography.

Our film is meant to be a mystery, crime thriller in which a  cold/ dark detective (played by me) is interrogating a suspect who for unknown reasons, kills him off blatantly but by unknown means- the only clue the audience has is this briefcase he has on the desk in the room which he opens just before the suspect falls to the ground dead.

To edit the video, I used Sony Vegas Pro which is similar to using Adobe Premiere except that it includes more ways of personalising visual effects installed on the software, which we may use in the next task.

One of my friends had done a quick draft of the film beforehand which we all liked, and all it needed was some cuts at the beginning to show the Detective enter the Interrogation room. 

To make it better for I personally & hopefully for my friends acceptance, I've added some music pretty much to the whole video except for the majority of the interrogation to present and atmosphere of suspense and focus on the detectives dark voice.  

I used a lot of cutting between shots where the camera view is at a different angle, so that you end up with a smooth professional flow of shots of me (the detective) walking down an corridor.

The cutting technique helped on a key part of my audio where I stammer on a line, so that in this (hopefully) final piece, the dialogue flows as if I didn't make a mistake. I could of also fixed this dialogue problem by using audio from another take which I decided not to. 

I used this function of fading audio in/ out so that the atmosphere made with audio doesn't suddenly fall flat when the audio has finished playing. 

What is also useful on this and any other video editing software is the ability to easily change the volume on particular audio rather than all the audio together, but on this video the audio doesn't seem to be a problem.

There's some shots at the start in the corridor seen where no audio was  accidentally not recorded, but thanks to the mystical/ horror/ thriller- like music, you don't really recognise it as a big fault when watching as the sound is still flowing in the form of music and it can give the sense of isolation the corridor shots give, but now we've sussed out how to make sure the HD cameras are recording.