Heroes, (Play)fighting and Guy-Talk

Hello blogfans! Especially those of you who appear to be viewing our blog from South Korea, Denmark or even Alaska (according to our blog stats, we have viewers all over the world!) :)

It's a Wednesday afternoon (roughly 12:45) and I've temporarily been left on my own in the 6th Form IT Room. Me, Katy and Nick are all doing various things to do with our evaluation (inbetween playfighting...) It's also my birthday... so we/I/the whole class have had part of a carton of Cadbury Heroes for work inspiration... oh hang on... Katy's back. *types furiously to avoid potential injury*

We've totally finished our film, and you'll see that on the blog later this evening! (if YouTube behaves itself). We have also started collecting Audience Feedback on our final piece, which we'll be posting here in due course. Inital responses have been extremely positive, and I personally find our film better and better every time I watch it.

Nick at this moment in time is off collecting more Audience Reseach with some of his mates, and me and Katy (who is on my right) are starting to plan out some of the questions for our evaluation which we'll be kicking off after half term.

I hope you all appreciate this blog post, as I'm risking injury sitting at this computer. A rugby ball is being thrown over my head backwards and forwards while I sit here... who knew blogging could be so dangerous? ;)

Finished !

well it would seem we have done the impossible. we have finished, filming and editing our Thriller Opening, and all of us are relieved and distressing in our own way. Even though we have finished, it was a stress filled project, with many hiccups along the way but we have made it through with a respectable attempt at a thriller opening. We have asked groups of people what they think of it, and have received a lot of positive responses from them all. Monday is the premier date for our thriller to arrive on the blog!!

Now that we have finished making this film. i would like to give a massive thank you to both our actors and my fellow Imaginarybeardies for all the effort they have put in and the time they have taken out of the norm to complete this project. Cheers guys...even though it is a school project.

On a side note, i have been rather lazy in posting this but i feel that any of the followers of this blog should be able to see the team being the imaginary beards

We have. from left to right; Nick Anderson(myself)    Katy Mathews    Leigh Last

Audience Research-2

With the first part of our film complete we decided to show the first minute to a random member of our audience we would like to aim the film at. He recognised:

• The light and dark places were able to make it a "creepier" place
• The location as appropriate almost looking as if it was someones basement-a place a prisoner may be kept
• He could not tell that the tracks were different and he thought the tracks used were appropriate to the action
• The only issue was that he could not see the other character at all when Richard our main character talks to him-we are sorting this lighting issue.

We felt the problem this feedback was both constructive and helpful in the further editing of our film.

Note: Audience Research-1 member suggested the harness technique with the camera. We tried this and found it to be successful and it will be featured in our opening.

Editing

With our clips now in chronological order (for the most part) and our music over the top of the first minute our film is well on it's way. Of course this is not without encountering a few problems:

• In one of our clips we must enhance the ligthing. For a thriller we know that one convention we chose to use is a contrast of light and dark-very dark, so dark in fact you cannot see the other character he is speaking to. Using the software in Final Cut Express we can enhance the lighting to make him seen.
• One clip of ours is missing. It is either on the server (that has crashed although all files are backed up) or on the DVD-rom we needed it on to be able to play it on the television in the piece. We have found that we cannot successfully rip the audio from the DVD and only the video. We now play the waiting game in the hope that the technician will get back to us soon.

Our editing is well on it's way and with the thought of titles in mind we have felt it to be so far successful.

Music...

With the deadline for our edited film being Friday and the limited amount of time we have although composing our own music would have been preferable we simply feel we don't have the time to compose our own piece. Instead we have chosen to use unlicensed music from a website called http://www.unlicensedmusicweb.com/. We took a range of tracks from this and all brought in sample music to use for our films. We have so far in the editing process decided to use two of the tracks found. We have merged them so hopefully you cannot tell they are different. We are yet still to work out what music we would prefer to use in the final piece.

Filming... IS DONE!

On Thursday evening, a miracle occured. We have (hopefully) managed to complete all of the filming for our thriller opening. It's a wrap! HORRAY.

We managed to refilm the opening (which was originally damaged on the tape) and film additional shots that we felt we needed to increase variety and effectiveness of the opening - so that meant lots of CLOSE UPS!

Now it's time to get down to the nitty gritty of really getting on with the editing process over the next week. Getting the whole thing done to a quality standard asap is our main goal. All 3 of us will be hard at work on editing over the 3 lessons next week (and more than likely a couple of free periods we have together) to get this complete.

Over the last week, we've started looking at the kinds of music we're going to be using in our opening and come to the decision that we'll be making our own backing music. Music is my area of "expertise" and I'm happy we decided to make our own, as we can plan, produce and manipulate our music into fitting our film better than having a stock soundtrack which would not "flow" very well with our opening.

Audience Feedback-Number 1

We showed an extract of our film to Alex, he works with cameras so we figured he might give us some new ideas. He said that we had some interesting footage though at one point it was ever so slightly out of focus. We were talking amongst ourselves about how we would need more close-ups within the piece but we didn't know how to make them more interesting. Alex suggested that we use some kind of harness to put the tripod on the person you want the close-up of with the camera focused up at their face. This would give a low angle shot and a more interesting variation of your average close-up...so we are going to experiment with it and see where it goes...more updates on audience feedback will be posted after further editing has been done.

How did we use this information to influence our thriller film?

We considered the answers from our initial audience feedback very carefully when deciding exactly what we could take from it for our thriller film. Some of the responses we took from it were:

• A psychological thriller-secrets are revealed to the main character as he complete the challenges
• Ideas from the Dark Knight-Things like the masks we used in costume to conceal identity were used in our thriller film. Had we had a bigger budget future challenges in the rest of the film could have high-tech gadgets like in Batman.
• Mind games are played with Richard, the main character, by the puppeteer-he must complete the challenges to reveal the secrets of his life that he has forgotten
• All of our characters so far are male as we have only really introduced the main character and the controller.
• We used the setting of an abandoned place so we can get the idea that Richard does not know where he is which creates a further sense of disorientation
• We used casual clothing for the average man in our piece
• You cannot tell what time of day it is set as we are inside in a place with no windows (further adding to atmosphere of confusion) but had we filmed further than an introduction it would be at night.

After considering the audience feedback carefully and inputting the most popular ideas we hope that ours will be a successful thriller opening.