Editing update

Today, myself and my group continued to edit our footage on final cut pro. I was a lot happier with how the editing went today as I felt we had become more accustomed to the programme and were able to make a lot more progress. We were happy with each addition that we made and felt that it made the opening sequence look extremely effective and appropriate to the genre.

we were able to find a soundtrack that we all liked and imported it to run throughout the forest scene. The soundtrack really enhances the suspense and drama of the film; helping our film to follow the conventions of a typical thriller. It took more time than we had planned to find a soundtrack that was suitable for our film; considering that the soundtrack needed to be royalty free. However, we are all now happy with our chosen soundtrack and believe that it really improves the quality of our product.

We also added a calm, ambient soundtrack into our first scene, the soundtrack needed to be fairly neutral in order to fit in with a casual kitchen scene. This soundtrack was even harder to find as a lot of the "neutral" music we searched turned out to be too upbeat for the scene or too sombre. Eventually, we settled on one which didn't convey any unwanted mood within the scene. Adding the soundtrack brought a lot to the scene as it allowed it to flow much smoother.

We also decided on the title of our film: persistence

We embedded this title onto a black screen with suspenseful music playing in the background, followed by the sound of a smashing glass. We placed the title after the climax point of the opening sequence because we thought it would be a dramatic way to introduce the film title to the audience. The title reflects the persistence within our villain; who is determined to seize his victims and is relentless in doing so.

Editing update

To begin editing, myself and my group had to import and order all of our footage into final cut pro. After this step had been completed, we could start to add the essentials to our film such as sound and light effects. We were slightly apprehensive when beginning the editing process as we had only used final cut pro once before; when editing our preliminary task

Myself and my group began to play around with the features included in final cut pro, we started to get accustomed to how the programme functioned in order to make the editing process easier. For our first addition, we included a bug that flew onto to screen displaying my name, and along with the name display came a buzz sound effect which helped to effectively introduce the text. We may decide to change the font of the text or the speed in which the text comes in at later on.

After this, myself and my group explored a range of bird sound effects with the idea that we could incorporate one of these sounds into our scene in the forest in order to blend in with the surroundings. However, we decided to remove the sound as it sounded slightly unrealistic.

We continued to play with some more sound effects that we thought would blend in appropriately to our scene in the forest. We chose to only make small alterations for our first editing session, so that we were able to get accustomed to the programme and play around before making any huge changes. This will hopefully enable us to add more advanced features next time.

Filming update

Today, myself and my group filmed scene 2 and 3 of our thriller opening sequence. We were pleased to complete the task and felt that we completed it effectively and in a decent amount of time.

We filmed in a forest as it was going dark which was effective for the atmosphere of the film, however, this was a potential problem as we had to be sure that the lighting was clear and that the shot quality wasn't effected at all. We acomplished this by using flash and getting to the forest in plenty of time so that it wasn't fully dark.

We thought for a long time about our choice of location before finally settling on a forest. We thought this would be an extremely effective location but knew that it could cause some minor issues; it was difficult to capture some of the shots due to the location, for example, when filming the worm's eye view, we were concerned about getting our equipment covered in mud and damaging it.
However, myself and the group managed to combat this issue by bringing a waterproof cover, which kept the mud and rain away from the technology.

As a group, I feel that we all worked succesfully together once again. Our roles within the group stayed fairly similar; myself and Keeley filming and Anyia acting. However, this time I played a character within the scenes too and we brought in a friend outside of the media group to play another character. Each person within the group was eager to put in equal effort and because of all of our work, we were all extremely pleased with the final result. We are now excited to play around with our product through editing to enhance it further.

Filming update

Myself and my group filmed the first scene to our opening sequence yesterday. Overall, I feel that the filming process went successfully, myself and my group worked well together in order to complete the first scene effectively and in a reasonable amount of time.

We filmed the first scene in my kitchen, all of us had been assigned different roles in order to manage the task easily; Anyia was staring and myself and Keeley were filming. There were difficulties within each role; Anyia needed to follow our shooting script whilst myself and Keeley needed to capture the shots effectively.

As a group, we didn't face many problems whilst filming our first scene, due to how we worked together and communicated. We had to retake a few shots due to them not being clear enough, but aside from that, we were all extremely happy with the first scene and are looking forward to filming the second and third scene.

Final idea: detailed planning

Plot The plot of our film revolves around a young teenage girl. At the beginning of our film, the protagonist is proceeding with her every day, regular life in her kitchen at home. At this point, the character is happy and isn't phased. As the kitchen scene progresses, the character receives an eerey text message reading "I haven't forgotten what you did". This mysterious text message will immediately introduce an element of tension and suspense into our film, additionally, the method of using communication through phones is extremely popular throughout thriller films and is known as an effective way to build mystery and tension, this method has been used in popular thriller films such as speed, phone booth and taken. We decided to conform to this convention in order to easily introduce an element of anticipation into our product.

After the young girl receives this mysterious text message, she seemingly disregards the incident and carries on with her routine in the kitchen. The screen will fade to black and suddenly, the girl will be shown lying on the floor of a dark and unknown forest. This quick switch in location and lighting will build huge suspense and mystery for our viewer. Our character will then be shown frantically running through the forest, calling her friend's name. Quickly after this, another young girl will be shown, tied to a tree by dirty rope. The viewer will become aware that this is the friend that our protagonist has been attempting to find when our protagonist quickly approaches her, continuing to shout her name. There will then be a few moments of our protagonist attempting to free her friend before her efforts are halted; a black, gloved hand will appear from behind and pull her down onto the ground. We will then draw a close to the opening scene by showing a close up shot of our protagonists' eyes, accompanied by a suspenseful soundtrack for further effect. I feel that this will be an extremely effective opening sequence as our audience will be left eager to discover the fate of our protagonist and her friend.

Location: Myself and my group have decided to film scene one within my kitchen. Scene one is set in a kitchen to show the situation as being normal and casual before the moment of impact hits. We thought this would be an effective way to surprise the viewer by showing them a normal situation and then quickly switching to dark, dramatic scene. The kitchen scene will also introduce the plot to the viewer and will include a moment of tension when character one receives a mysterious text.

We will film scene 2 and 3 inside a forest, myself and my group decided to film here as it is an appropriate location for a thriller genre. The two scenes within the forest will be filled with mystery and suspense in order to appeal to our target audience of teenagers and young adults. Our aim will be to engage the viewer throughout, and the dark forest location will help to achieve this.


Costume/makeup
Character one is being kidnapped, so we have decided that it is important to portray her as innocent and vulnerable, this can be achieved by dressing character one in a white shirt; to connote those two qualities. Character one will also have blue eyes in order to symbolise her innocence.

Character two is the girl who is trying desperately to find her lost friend, therefore we have decided to apply dark makeup to her eyes in order to portray the drama and darkness of the situation. There will be close up shots of the girls dark eyes while she is in the forest to mirror the darkness of the location.

Character three is the kidnapper, we have decided to dress the kidnapper in an all black morph suit, this will represent the kidnapper in a negative, eerey light from the outset. The colour black represents many negative things, so by dressing the character in black, we are showing the evil within the character straight away. Furthermore, a morph suit covers a person's body entirely, so the suit will suggest that the kidnapper has something to conceal, possibly a dark secret that he is hiding. Additionally, it will add more mystery to the scene and create more suspense for the viewer if they can't see the kidnapper's face/hands etc.


Props
We have decided on a number of props that will enhance our film. We will use rope in order to tie character two up, this will ensure that she will appear trapped and vulnerable.

We will need a cloth which will be used when the kidnapper gags/gasses character two. In order to add effect to the scene, we will make the cloth appear dirty and worn in order to convey something unnatural and corrupt.

We have also considered using a baseball bat - this will be used for the kidnapper to hit character two (his victim) over the head with.

Lighting
Throughout the first scene, we will ensure that we use high key lighting to convey a calm and positive atmosphere within a mundane, casual situation; a girl in her kitchen. This will create a significant contrast between this scene and scenes two and three. Scene two and three will be filled with low key lighting within the dark forest, creating a negative, suspenseful atmosphere. Because we are filming the forest scenes in the dark, we will ensure to use flash to make sure that the shots remain clear.

Characters
The two main characters within our film are young, teenage girls; this adds to the vulnerability of our film as this particular age group is often considered to be weak and feeble. This stereotype will lead to the audience feeling enhanced empathy for the helpless characters and thus enhance their viewing experience. Additionally, our target audience for our product is teenagers, therefore, our teenage viewers may feel more engaged whilst viewing our film as our protagonists are of the same age group, making our characters more relatable.

Ident ideas and update

As a group, we gathered some ideas about what our ident should look like and how that will relate to the thriller genre. The ident that we create will be incorporated into the beginning of our thriller opening sequence. We drew out our ideas roughly to get a feel of how effective they were and how they will look:

For our first idea, we thought we could film a girl running and following her would be our company name: "CDM studios". In order to relate to the thriller genre, we will film the girl running quickly up a dark alleyway, to portray danger and uncertainty. We decided that it would be effective for the logo to appear to be chasing the girl as it is an interesting way to present the company name and also makes it look menacing. The company name CDM studios represents our group as it includes the first letter of each of our last names: Cox, Deignan, and Malkin.

For our second idea, we thought that we could pan across a dark sky and the tops of some bare, lifeless trees. This relates to the thriller genre as it is dark and mysterious. Then at the top, our second company name would fade in above the trees. We thought that the name "suspenseful studios" would relate to the thriller genre as one of the main conventions of the thriller genre is suspense, therefore the title would effectively introduce our thriller opening sequence. We will also incorporate some suspenseful music that will play in the background. The trees within the ident will not appear like the ones shown on the drawing, this was just a rough drawing that we did in order to document our idea.

Ident update:

These are our finished idents, ready to be incorporated into our film. We developed both of these ideas from our drawings, obviously ensuring that the ideas were developed effectively through technology in order for them to look professional and visually appealing.

1.

Ways in which we have developed our initial idea: this ident has changed a little from our initial plan; instead of the name appearing on this ident being "suspense studios" we changed it to the name used within our first idea "CDM productions". We decided that the name "suspense studios" sounded a little unprofessional and not as effective, therefore, we decided not to use it.

2.

Ways in which we have developed our initial idea: instead of filming a girl running up an alleyway, we decided that it would look more effective if we included a silhouette running against a dark screen instead. We chose a different name for this ident too as we felt that "runaway studios" linked very effectively to both the ident and the genre.