Naomi's Evaluation - Question Six

Technologies


In my group we have all personally learnt a lot more about the technology during the time of the filming for our thriller, 'White Collar Complex' although we had been taught in the past for our preliminary task how to use cameras, and later on we got taught how to use lighting effectively, we were still lightly unprepared on how to use it; but while filming for our thriller we tested a couple of shots with lighting and using the camera, we became more confident on how to use it all.
We all learnt how to use the camera efficiently because we all helped film, this helped us all because allowed us to learn a lot more than we knew when operating a camera before this project. To make sure we had the filmed the best shots possible we decided as a group that if one of us wasn't happy with a particular shot, we would film it again but also we would film every shot more than once just in case it wasn't up to our standards.

http://www.youtube.com/feature=player

Of course we never forgot the importance of white balance because we wanted our footage to have perfect clear colour in it. For our framing I believe that we used framing effectively, therefore we have learned that each shot requires planning on how the framing is used.

We also remembered how important tripods were as we didn't want any of our shots too look rushed or unprofessional, especially if we were going to use a pan shot for the kitchen scene and  the tracking shot for the dog scene; if we didn't use a tripod we would've found it rather difficult to make these shots look impressive and stable as we needed a tripod for every shot in our thriller.

 

Naomi's Evaluation - Question Four

Gender

 

Gender is very important in films as it attracts people to view our film; films that include gender roles that people didn't expect encourages them to watch it. In our film we used two women to play the white-collar criminals, which some people may argue that men would be more suited for the role as women don't always have enough 'power' or aren't 'intelligent' enough to hold out a role, but we wanted to be different and make the audience think.

 

Females typically watch a  romance, adventure, or comedy sorts of films, and generally stay clear of thriller films as they would seem boring I believe that with our film because it only has female characters it would interest them more and encourage them to watch it.  

 

 

Age 

 

 The age we are mostly looking at would be 15-24 year olds; the older generation may not find the film appealing due to the nature of the story line, and younger viewers would likely not understand or not have enough knowledge to know what a white-collar criminal is.

The 15-24 year old age range allows users understand more about the white-collar crime and the consequences from it, in the film they can hear rude language- another thing most people in the age range enjoy.

Naomi's Evaluation - Question Seven

Costume and location

I think I have gained a load more of knowledge from the preliminary task, looking back at our preliminary we didn't think everything through and just thought everything would be fine filming each shot once, when we were working on our preliminary film we didn't put as much thought and effort into where our location was going to be set, or what sort of costume each character was going to wear; but for our 'White Collar Complex' film we researched and discussed in detail every single idea to make it the best to our ability thinking about hair, make up, etc.
As we were filming outside of college we needed permission to film in each of our locations which we put evidence of on our blog so that we were allowed to film there. 



Sound 

For the preliminary we learnt where to add Foley effects and where to increase the sound to crescendo. From what we learnt in the preliminary we were experienced for confident to use it in our main task, although we didn't put many effects for sounds to make our preliminary film seem more interesting, we did in our main task, we tried to make our film more interesting and build enigma for example the non diegetic sound at the end of our film when Natalie hears the gun shot makes the audience questioning what happened and wanting to know more.

 

 

Editing
   
Our preliminary film hardly any editing done on it at all; as it have the basic cuts and match on actions. Our sound have very little editing done to itself.

Our thriller opening was much more complicated and diverse, when beginning to edit our footage for the main task we labelled every clip to make each shot easier to work with. We created folders labelled them for each scene (for example, kitchen scene, dog walking scene) and what shot they would be used in; we rated each shot out of ten on how smooth and impressive the footage was. This made our editing a million times easier and simpler to create into our film, we kept all the footage just in case we needed to use a snippet if none of the footage worked together. I believe by doing this it made our editing quicker to create.   

From techniques learnt from the preliminary film, we over-layed answering phone sounds to create good music effects, by overlapping Foley sounds at different points it made it easy to understand how many times Natalie tried phoning Hannah.

 

 

 

Lighting

For our preliminary task we didn't use any lighting at all apart from natural lighting which make our shots different colours, when working on our main task we got taught about different lighting and how to use it, so when filming for our 'White Collar Complex' we used lighting to make our shots look more realistic for each scene, we also set the white balance so that each shot was the same colour and didn't look darker or lighter than others.

White Collar Complex (The Completed Film)

Opening Thriller Sequence Research: Panic Room

Panic room 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sqIclb4qsJI



In the Panic Room opening sequence, the credits appear almost to infiltrate their surroundings. For example, here Jared Leto's name is only just visible against the background that it blends in with.

The names also stay static on the screen, so they do not move from the position we originally see them in, as if the image was a still. However, we know it is not as here for example we can see the traffic moving in the bottom left hand corner.

The names themselves are positioned for the most part in the centre of the screen, with some being revealed as the camera pans and some being wholly visible straight away. 

Interestingly, the title of the film appears in the same font as the credits, and is positioned in the middle of the title sequence, in amongst the credits. As the title appears, the music changes to become more fast paced and threatening. A noise that is similar to that of a ticking clock is also introduced which creates the impression that time could be important in the film in the sense that it could be running out for one of the characters. 

Opening Thriller Sequence Research: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcp9Ysi75f0


The sequence starts with a series of flashing clips and a fast paced intro on the soundtrack. The credits last for longer than the flashing clips, allowing us as the viewer more time to read them, though not distracting from the nature of the opening. The beginning clips are very closely cut together, about one cut every second, which creates a sense of distortion at first, though as the opening continues the things in the clips are slowly revealed further.

The name of the film appears after the names of people we would assume to be the male and female lead. The font is similarly coloured to the rest of the opening so far - grey and black, which creates quite a sinister mood.
The title is then engulfed by what appears to be water, almost as quickly as it appeared to begin with. 



The credits appear in a different font altogether, and are in white so contrast well with the background. They mostly appear off-centred and over a 'dead' part of the frame where nothing is happening to draw your attention to. 

Opening Thriller Sequence Research: Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI1yt38A9-E

The opening for this film starts with a short scene with two characters who we assume will be important in the film, before the credits themselves begin.

This scene lasts for just under fifteen seconds. The last frame of the scene is held as the soundtrack starts to play, before the screen cuts to black.

 

The title of the film pans in from the bottom of the screen before being positioned in the centre of the screen. The font is bold and colourful, which seems to link with the upbeat soundtrack that is playing over the top. The title stays here for about a second, before it slowly starts shrinking backwards for credits to appear over the top.

 

The credits stay central for over half of the opening, before they start to appear grouped. When this occurs, they appear like the title did in the beginning, simply rising upwards from the bottom of the screen. 

Making An Editing Decision

The Making Of Our Logo

In order to create our logo we took this image of film:


We then used this, a typical image associated with film and production companies, to make our own creative and individual film.

We used photoshop in order to make the logo black and white. To do this we have to use various eraser tools, such a magic eraser and background eraser tool. We had to go all around the film and carefully make the background black and even had to do each individual little square!

 Finally we cropped and changed the whole logo to black and white giving us this as our final result

Opening Thriller Sequence Research - The Untouchables

The way the text is represented in this sequence is interesting as it engages the audience in a very simple way, by making the shadows of the title move therefore the audience is intrigue from the beginning of the sequence.

What's interesting in this title sequence is that there is no shots unfolding the storyline of this particular film, but instead what they do is that when they show the names of the actors is that they tell the audience who is who, for example Robert De Niro is Al Capone and this lets the audience understand what this film will be about as Al Capone is a very famous American gangster.

The font that they are using is very easy to read and also the contrast with the colour of the text and the background makes it, again, easier for the audience to read.

Considering the fact that this film was made in 1987, not many effects could of been used in order to present the title of this film but they zoom out the whole title sequence to show the title to the audience.

The reason why they decided to zoom out the whole title sequence is to show that something big is going to happen and what's big is The Untouchables and it gives this sense of suspense to audience which is what this targeted audience is looking for in a thriller. To reinforce the idea of the importance of this title is that when the title appears, there is a long pause for more text to appear so that the viewer's attention is on the title of the film, but then the text is placed underneath the title and in post-production they carry on this zooming out effect to show that something big is about to happen giving this nerve-racking feeling to the audience.

when the text disappears there's a sudden fade to black which gives the viewer a sense of wander where and where the story is going to start.

And then we have a straight cut to the first shot of the whole film which is very confusing for the audience as most thrillers would start with a chase scene for example but there it is just some man getting a shave.



The soundtrack during this title sequence is very stressful which again with the title adds to this nerve-racking feeling and it makes this title sequence effective as it makes the audience believe that something big is about to happen.

But when it cuts to the first shot, it kills the climax that was built when the text was showing as it makes the audience believe that the opening scene would be full of action and therefore it makes the audience interested in watching the rest of the movie as this film seems to be full of surprises.