Final Delirium

We have now finished our opening sequence 'Delirium'. From our rough cut we have improved our opening sequence dramatically though the soundtrack and the final cut effects such as layering and all the different cuts and fades used.

I am really impressed with our final product, and feel that it meets the codes and conventions of a typical thriller, especially through suspense and subtle hints. I am happy with where we placed our titles as it flows well and they are easily readable. The font works very well for our thriller genre, however an after thought was that I hope the titles are not too big for when it gets watched on a large screen.

From our audience feedback from the rough cut, I think our final product will meet their expectations now we have taken their criticism and acted upon it. The Video has now been posted on Youtube for others to view.

Rough Cut to final

From our audience feedback on our rough cuts I think we met the constructive critsism and created the right appeal for our target audience. After watching the rough cut and straight after watching the final opening, we can see how important the soundtrack was to create the atmosphere and also how important it was to incorporate as much editing techniques as we could. Also with the credits that give the definite feeling of an opening. With all these extra elements added in after our rough cut and audience feedback we can see a clear change and met everything we were hoping for. This helped to see the improvements clearly that were made between.
Overall we are pleased with the final outcome and with the possibility of more time we may have included more effects such as layering as this was popular with the audience and also movement to the credits to fit with the title name appearing on the book page.

Interview

recently i conducted an interview with a teenage boy who was 17 years old. i asked him what he thought a thriller was, what the conventions of a thriller film were and ask him what he thought of the thriller genre.

what do you think a thriller film is?

A thriller film is a movie that has lots of mysteries running throughout the story. a thriller film will have in it at some point, death crime or abuse (mental or physical) lots of thriller films have multiple story lines and have lots of red herrings to off put the audience from the main storyline which usually has lots of enigmas which are puzzles which the audience needs to solve and the main character in order to figure out who the main antagonist is.

what are the conventions of a thriller?

A typical thriller film will have lots of puzzles to solve (enigmas) and lots of red herrings which will distract the audience into thinking something eg that the who the antagonist is. the antagonist (unless clearly stated) is always a surprise to the audience.  also a typical thriller will have murder in it from both the antagonist and protagonist.

What do you think of thriller films?

i like thriller films because they keep us (the audience) guessing about the plot and the antagonist's motives. i will always try and watch thriller films as they are exciting and enthralling. my personal favourites are LA confidential and psycho.

Final two lessons of editing

Yesterday was our penultimate lesson for editing. At the beginning of this lesson we had our rough cut viewed by our media class. The feedback we received was very good, although at this point we had no soundtrack to be played with it! They liked the different shot types we used and the use of layering! As a group we felt that there needs to be more layering in the opening sequence for it to flow nicely and for it to look like a title sequence- our constructive feedback was that we needed to work on the ending as it did not work well with the footage we had edited well.

The lesson before this we worked on our soundtrack, we added in sound effects such a ticking clock, a cuckoo noise, a beating heart and also an ongoing backing track. Although the heartbeat is only faintly heard, it is still noticeable and I feel it adds tension as it is not overly obvious. Our advice was to take out the cuckoo sound effect as it spoilt the tension atmosphere we was trying to achieve.

During the lesson we managed to add all of our titles and complete and add in our ident, and work on the ending. Which consisted of; adding text and deleting the final clip we originally had as it didn't fit with the rest of the sequence, and add fades. On top of this we layered more clips.

Today is our final lesson to work on our thriller opening sequence 'Delirium'.
We need to:

• Adjust our soundtrack and add it into Final Cut
• Finish off all editing techniques (most of which was finished yesterday)
• And upload

Editing

We are currently coming towards the end of the editing process, we have made our rough cut and submitted that and have also made the basis of our soundtrack and started to put that into our film and are currently adding sound effects to it when certain parts of the film need this.

We have used some editing techniques that we talked about and planned to do before we even started the filing, these techniques are blurred edges to the shots, black and white effect, flash back effect to add a mysterious and giving a sense that she has mind problems, we also used a time lapse on the clock speeding up the time this gives a tense feel and gives you an idea to what the film could be about. We used a fish eye effect in final cut to give a quirky feel to the shot and to emphasise different bits of the shot. 

We have removed all the frames we needed to now and its really starting to take its shape and fit into a good sequence.

We also made titles, credits and other writing to in our film in photoshop and are in the process of adding them and editing them into the sequence to make sure they fit and look good in the film we have added effects to the writing such as it fading out and dissolving effect, to make sure it looks professional. 

We also created some sound effects of our own and are planning on adding them into them to our film to give a more life like effect rather than effect of the computer, we did this using a video camera and filmed the sounds in a quite area of the collage.

Filming

Two weeks ago we finished our filming for our opening sequence, it all went well and we all agreed on the angles composition and lighting to each different clip we made. We decided to use the location of my living room and use the corner of it, we made the room dark and covered all the natural lighting so we had the full effect of the lighting we used (coloured filters).  Throughout the filming we switched jobs and rotated so everyone had a go at everything, jobs such as filming, directing the shot and making sure the miss-en- scene was all correct, including lighting. Most of the shots were taken with a tripod and we used chairs when we did a very high angle shot. We also used the camera hand held to make the shots look more like its coming from the characters point of few and giving the audience the characters point of view of the scene, location and miss-en-scene. 

The mise-en-scene was quite simple but looked very effective we used an old looking wooden chair a small table and blanket for the main look to the miss-en-scene and we added candles old looking papers a clock and diary to the table to make it look like the characters domain to where the main themes to the film could have token place and planned. Most of the filming was done in the corner of the living room which meant we could easily change the camera angle and not need to move all of the props around and never brake the 180 degree rule. Also some of the shots were taking on the street and in the garden just too add a difference to the sequence, we then added effects in final cut to make these shots fit in with the other shots and make them fit the pot of our movie.

Interview on rough cut

I asked an older audience to compare with teenagers from our class on their feedback on our rough cut. They said overall it is starting to come together nicely and the effects used looked effective and fit well with the shots. They especially like the use of layering which hopefully if we have time we can incorporate more in. They also liked the use of the black and white flashback as this made the narrative easy to understand and they could see a clear change in time.
The negative feedback was that also the atmosphere wasnt there without the soundtrack. They said it was very important to fit with the rest of the opening and create the same effect that the filming is giving.
Overall the feedback was pretty similar so we know what exactly we need to do to fit our target audience and that the feedback will be helpful with our final parts of editing.