Dark Room from BDC on Vimeo.

Evaluation

This is an evaluation of the things in the last few months that has lead to the completion of our thriller opening. Our product is like many other thrillers in that it starts with string instruments, has many dark scenes and has credits that are in a cold colour(black in our case). One thing in our thriller that is different is that the forrest seen throughout isn't dreary in the least.
I think that Warner Bros. would be a good institution to distribute our media because although they've reprisented many thrillers such as Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen it has also distributed less conventionall thrillers like The Matrix. Another institutuion that may be good to represent our flm is Fox Searchlight Pictures. Not only has it given us Slumdog Millionnaire but would be able to advertise to a large amount of people taking into consideration the amount of media power the owner of Fox, Rupert Murdock has.
The target audience for our film are mainly males with the average age ranging from 18-25. In our soundtrack for the film we had strings to start of with but then introduced an electro style wich surprisingly seemed to work. I think this made our opening seem a bit more up-to-date.
Having a dark room as one of the settings was very helpful as darkness is one of the things that gives an uncanny grittiness that thrillers are known for. In our film we've used the red light of a dark room, costume and a torch to provide the look of a swinging light in certain scenes. We decided to use the darkroom's light because we thought it would look more authentic then a filter.
From this project I've learnt a lot about filming pieces of action as it has taken longer than I thought it would to get a two minute amount of footage. Before I'd started the course I didn't even know how to use a camcorder. I have also learnt new skills in editing with Final Cut Pro and how to use Soundtrack Pro. This will be useful in future projects. If I did it agai I think I'd try to come up with a clearer and more detailed story board. A lot of valuable time was spent on decideing which shot to make next and where to put it.

Storyboard

The editing process

The editing process i have found really difficult. it has just seemed to take a long time. We found putting it together fine that all seemed to go well. However it has been the looping of sound that has taken time. Also putting on the credits. We couldn't manage to get them on in the way that we had imagined which was annoying. We had to spend a lot of time going over this again and again to try out different things until we finally what we got. Finally we were worried that our opening had ended up looking like a trailer and not an opening so we had to rectify that problem to which meant going back to the beginning and changing some bits to make it better.

The soundtrack that we have had to create for our piece is really hard. I don't really know much about music so i found this really hard. I had no concept of what to do and how it should be composed and i think to be fair is where our piece will fall down because i think the soundtrack that we have created is just not good enough to go witht the filming that we did.

Filming of our Thriller

I found the filming of our piece really enjoyable. The first day in the photography suite i found really hard. I t was very time consuming because we were looking for a particular light to swing across which of course we had to rig up ourselves so it was difficult to get the right speed of swing with the right amount of last cast on the camera so it just took a lot of tries to get it right. However once we had it we managed to do the light on the water table much easier. The arranging of the pictures was also quite difficult because we kept changing our mind and couldn't agree on the way we wanted them arranged and which ones took prominance.

Filming in the forest was a lot easier. We had a little more scope to do what we wanted and there was a lot less to set up. All we needed was the camera and Yolanda. Once we had got the shots that we had scripted down which went well once we had picked the right locations to start we then were able to have a little more fun. We each had a chance to film the bits that we wanted and we all shared our ideas some of which i think worked really well in the end. Better than some of the shots that we scripted. I felt sorry for Yolanda because she did end up doing a lot of running up and down the forest but in the end i think that she enjoyed it.

Shot list for Thursday

This day was a lot harder to write out the shots that we were going to use because we didn't know what the location was going to look like until we went there.
Low close up shot - Shot watching the feet of Yolanda as she runs
Long shot - Panning shot from high up in a tree showing the whole forest
Long Shot - Panning from the tripod on the ground showing the whole forest
Long Shot - Panning from the ground establishing the senery
POV Shot - From in the bushes looking at yolanda running and following her as she runs past
Medium shot - As yolanda travels over a log from one side to the other with the possibility of using match on action
Medium shot - Watching Yolanda run from down behind a hill to up over it and back down the other side.
Long shot zooming in to Medium close up - Far shot of a clearing zooming in to then seeing yolanda run across the screen
Medium shot - Yolanda running through dense foliage and running close past the camera.
These were all the shots that we planned for. Wer also wished to do several shots using the trees as cover and shooting in between them and around them. This meant that we were unable to list these prior to filming our piece.

Shot list for tuesday

Close up - A dark room. A light swings across from the ceiling. The light eluminates a camera, the light goes past and the room is in darkness. Whilst the light shows the room, our credits will be shown.
Close up - The dark room. A light swings and shines on a water tray on the table with some film in it. The light goes across and then swings back into darkness. Credits will be shown on this.
Close/medium shot - The dark room. Light shines on a wall of pictures. We take a long shot of all the pictures. We then zoom in on various close up pictures aswell.
Long shot - Long shot from high in the corner of the room panning slowly from one side of the room to the other so that we can get a whole shot of the surroundings.