Group Screen Flow Evaluation

Finished Thriller Opening

Editing Day 4

We decided to add a clip of our protagonist turning on a radio, this would be he due for us to add the classical music. I really like the audio balance in our opening, we had silence in the first half with a few natural sound effects, then eery classical music for the end scene which is the height of tension. 

We also made some changes to the editing such as adding a bleached effect and changing the opacity and overlapping and layering to create much more confusion and paranoia, this reflected the mental disorder perfectly

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Editing Day 3

Using Dafont we added all our titles and created our company name using a different font to highlight its difference.

We put the titles in in places where we thought they would be the most effective.

I really like the font we decided to use as i feel its eery but also adds to our artistic approach without being too cheesy or predictable.
In this session we decided against the music but we still have a few more sessions left so we might decide to add it in again; although the stillness with a few background noises increase the tension, I think.

Editing day 2

For our second session i was ill so it was left up to Rachel to add some touches to our roughly finished opening.
When returning to school Rachel had added a lot to the audio and a few little tweaks to the footage

Rachel had detached some of the audio of the wildlife in the park and created much more of an atmosphere when our character wasn't speaking. Sound effects were also added from the programme such as drips and breathing effects.

After seeing the edited film up to here as a group we all decided to add some music half way through to create more tension, so our next task was to find this music.

Editing day 1

Day one of editing was a bit slow as we had to get to grips with the programme FinalCut Pro. Our first step was to offload all the footage onto the macs and download them into FinalCut.

We managed to get a lot of the basic editing done in this session, like putting at the right point and achieving the skeleton of our opening. Following our storyboards and shot lists our film looked identical to how we had imagined it due to meticulous planning.

We decided to go for a more artistic approach and chose our shots based on lighting and aesthetic, making our film look much more dynamic.

Animatic for thriller

Thirteen review

After Thirteen being recommend to the Class, a new BBC drama, i decided to give it a go. I was instantly hooked. The story follows a girl who after thirteen years of being kidnapped she escapes, the series documents her broken family life and distress from her past life. Throughout the series you experience many shocking twists and it is an extremely suspenseful and disturbing storyline. I was sad to see that there was only 5 episodes in this series.


The title sequence for this series is really nice having lots of editing and different effects to create more tension. The sequence slightly reminded me of our thriller opening due to the flickers and double exposure effects creating a disturbing sense of phycological distress.

Adding credits

When adding the credits we were very precise with where to place them and how we wanted to edit them coming in and out. We were also very exacts with the font as we wanted it to add to the movie's mise-en-scene and atmosphere, not just be a simple basic text.

For our production company we chose this font, different from the the rest of the text's font as we wanted to make it stand out at the beginning as being different.

This was our main font and i really like it and think it fits perfectly with our opening and storyline.

Oscars 2016

Chris Rock presented the Oscars the year and i thought he was a great presenter, it was much more interesting than usual having moments of entertainment and shock rather than just announcing nominees and winners. It was a revolutionary Oscars for many due to the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio won his first oscar for 'The Revenant' after having six previous nominations and not winning. Brie Larson won her first Oscar for 'Room', Alicia Vikander for 'Danish Girl' and many other well deserved winners.

Finding music

At frist we weren't going to put music into our thriller as we thought it was eery with just the background noise, however we felt something was missing in the end scene of our opening so we decided to add some music. The genre of music we decided to go with was classical, to create a contrast with atmosphere and create more tension and suspense. We used the website 'Incompetech- Royal free' music to find our song. We found it very hard to find a chilling classical song that fit to our opening, however we found it in the end and i think it works extremely well with the opening. We left half of our opening with the silence and sound effects and added the music in half way which i think is much more interesting than having the same music run the whole way through. 

Woman In Black Review

I had read 'Woman In Black' for school and was immediately pulled into the story, so much so that i asked my  parents to take me to the theatre production which they did. The theatre production was breath-taking and extremely terrifying which is hard to create with no computer or editing skills. I remember being extremely exited to see the film version especially as it starred Daniel Radcliffe however i was very disappointed with the film as i felt it didn't use much tension like the book does. I loved how the story had such a slow build in tension, dipping and increasing dramatically at points but mostly just staying in the middle, and I felt the film didn't do this as effectively as i would have liked.
This film received 5 wins and 12 nominations.

Black Swan Review

Black Swan was our main inspiration fro our film. I recently re-watched this film for research and was even more enthralled the second time around. The slow deterioration of such a self-disciplined and together girl is extremely interesting and distressing to watch. The relationship between the protagonist and her mother could be seen as abusive, mentally abusive, which completely matches to our thriller movie storyline. 

It won 1 oscar and had 87 other wins and 242 nominations in total. 

I think Natalie Portman was excellent in this film showing me a different side of her acting as i had only ever seen her in Romantic comedies and comedies, so seeing her take part in a phycological thriller was extremely interesting and new to me

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American Beauty Review

Recently i watched American beauty and i absolutely loved it. I found that the twists and the plot was creepy in a lot of ways, the music especially was brilliant at contributing to tension and conflicting to some of the darker scenes while almost mocking the stereotypical 'american suburban life'. I thought Kevin Spacey was brilliant in this film and was my favourite character, while the film is dark and disturbing his character brings humour to the film making it easier to watch as it is not so heavy the whole way through, the comedy lifted the movie.
This film won five oscars out of 8 nominees, 1 golden globes and 2 BAFTAs, in total American beauty has 108 wins and 96 nominees in total.
                                                        

Filming day

After planning our opening and creates the story board and mood boards to create the perfect atmosphere for our thriller we finally arrived at our filming day. I think it went really well as we had organised the exact scenes down to the smallest detail so we knew all that we had to do on the day. We filmed it shot by shot and followed the shot list and storyboard so it was very easy to tick off the scenes we had filmed so we knew what we had to shoot next. We encountered a few issues such as the location for the bathroom changed on the day as the original house was no longer and an option, luckily a friend of ours lived very near the heath extension which is where we filmed the first few scene, so we had somewhere to film the next bit. Another issue was the mirror, we were meant to film the actress in the mirror and then smash it and have her filmed on the cracked mirror. This did not go to plan as when we tried to smash the mirror it completely smashed and didn't just crack, which was what we needed to achieve the shot we had in mind. We instead came up with a different ideas which worked out to look better in the end.
In general  i think our day of filming ran relatively smooth apart from the two issues we ran into, but these were luckily relatively easy fixed.

Supernatural Thriller

This is also a sub-genre which inspired our film. Supernatural Thrillers introduce otherworldly elements as an antagonistic force. Some people find these films to be less scary than others as they use fictional creatures that are thought of as pretend or made up. However for others it can make them question whether they believe the supernatural characters to be real or not, some people believe them to be which makes a lot of the audience unconfident in their beliefs.

psychological thriller

This was our groups favourite sub-genre and it inspired our idea massively and was extremely helpful when researching into similar films for inspiration. This sub-genre normally involves the protagonist having their mental health threatened rather than their physical health. The battle for the protagonist can sometimes be a personal battle inside their own head or their mental health is being threatened by another character.
 Memento is an example of a Physiological thriller.

Religious Thriller

This subgenre uses the history and myths of religion. Usually a religious artifact or historical secret is discovered, and different people and groups vie for control. Possession and Exorcisms are a current popular genre for thrillers such as 'Stigmta' and 'The exorcism of Emily Rose'. 
Personally i find these films to be the scariest as the protagonist is always out of control and for example in 'The exorcism of Emily Rose' a the beginning of the film they stated it was based on real life events which increases the fear massively for the audience. 
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Deciding on our film title

Deciding on our film title was proved harder than we all thought. None of us wanted it to be cliche but we wanted it to be pithy and for it to capture the essence of our film. We all discussed lots of different names such as 'The Forgotten' but denied this was too predictable so we decided to scrap that idea. We had finally all deiced on a title or 'Remember me' and we searched it into google to see if other films had been title this name. We found a 2010 film starring Robert Pattinson.
 At first we thought this could be an issue but the plot of the films are so different we decided to go with it as within the context of this movie and our movie the title means two completely different things.

Thriller mood board

These mood boards capture the plot of out thriller and the psychologically twisted side of it.they also capture the attitude and aesthetic of the girl which our group decided was important from the beginning as we all agreed that a certain look would make her look more vulnerable and unnerving to the audience adding more to the storyline and miss-en-scene.