Archive for March 2017

Home Archive for March 2017

We were able to successfully show the difference in social groups in our opening sequence and there were many points that we were able to show that both adhere and subvert to the stereotype.

Firstly, we could show this social group in gender in the opening sequence through the Mise-en-Scene. Firstly, we showed the men to be in command and important in the opening sequence. We could show this through them having suits and were clearly in a business meeting and were wealthy and powerful. This was then reinforced to show the men as powerful through the fact that two of them were holding guns in the scene. At this point it would make them seem much more important than the woman who is also in the scene who is just stood at the back we emphasised this especially with the two men at the front of the screen to show that they were the focus in the meeting.

We also used the secretary’s costume in the scene to show that she was innocent with the white clothes. Whilst all the men were shown in dark colours to show that they were evil and dangerous. This was part of the reason why at the end she was not shot and all the men were. We were also able to go with the stereotype in the scene by the fact that it was the woman who was the secretary rather than a man and that there were no female business people who seemed to have importance.

However, we were also able to show the genders subvert to the stereotype in our opening sequence to a thriller film. We were able to do this through having the main character and the assassin of the opening sequence being a female who ends up killing three men. This would not be what the audience would have expected and would have helped to show the change and not what the audience would expect to see in these social groups. This was also changed in what the woman was wearing. All black and was ready with a large sniper rifle this is not what the audience would have expected within this social group.

We were also able to show the difference in the gender social group in the way that we used the sound in the opening sequence. Although we had problems with our sound we were able to get around this by adding many sound effects to when the woman was on the screen and put special emphasis on the gun that the woman was using. This helped to show us that she knew what she was doing with the slick loading of the gun. We also put special emphasis on the sound effect of the shots that were fired to make sure that the audience were shocked by the load sound. This made the woman seem even more out of place in her social group.

I also feel that we used the camera well in showing the social groups that people were in. I feel that with the men we were able to successfully show them in power at the start with the relatively low angle shot that they started when they first come into the opening sequence. We then wanted to show the change in their situation as the last shot of one of the men being alive was at a slight high angle which showed his as the sniper’s mercy.

I also feel as though we were able to show the woman as being more powerful and more in control as the scene went on. I feel that we could do this through how we focused first on the gun and then we focused in on her face to show that she was in command of the gun and when this was quickly followed by her looking down the scope at one of the men which immediately showed her intent.

I feel that this was helped in the scene by how we were able to edit the scene together. Firstly, I feel that we were able to do this through the shot duration in the scene. Towards the end when she is shooting the three men we can see when she is doing the quick shots and reloading of the gun showed us that she knew what she was doing and that she was a professional. Also towards the end I feel that when we used the long shot duration of her looking down the scope and the shots of her lying on the floor. This shows her to be calm and doesn’t find it stressful to do this and that again she is in control of the situation over the men which subverts to the stereotype of this social group.

This was further emphasised in the scene with the short shots of the men who are quickly shot and there is little time spent on them.

We also used a cross hair in the woman’s point of view shot to show the what she was seeing as she saw the men. This would help the audience to see that the woman was subverting to the stereotype in the scene and that she was in command which in films like this you wouldn’t expect.

Our secondary social group could be seen as classes and status. There are also many ways in this scene that adhere and subvert to these stereotypes.

Firstly, we are able to see this through their costumes. With the men, we can see that they adhere to the stereotype by how they dress. All the men in the scene are either wearing suits or are dressed smartly. This would adhere to the stereotype of the upper class and middle class men. However, the costume of the woman it is difficult to tell her class in this scene but through the props that she has such as an IPhone and the large sniper rifle which are all expensive items to own so from this the audience could probable assume that she was in the middle classes.

In the scene, we can see that she is dressed in all black and is equipped with a large rifle which we would not expect from a middle-class woman and is subverting to the middle class stereotype.

Overall, we can see that there are many areas in social groups in our opening sequence to a thriller where they both subvert and adhere to the stereotype and also subvert to the stereotype.

Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. The term film editing is derived from the traditional process of working with film, but now it increasingly involves the use of digital technology. The film editor works with the raw footage, selecting shots and combining them into sequences

to create a finished motion picture.

Me and my group have been working on editing our opening sequence to a thriller over the past few weeks and have had to make some key decisions on the way. One of the key decisions that I had to make in the process of editing is that I had to find all of the best shots that we filmed on our shoot day. This was very important to do as it meant that we would have no accidental shots in our scene where there is something that we don’t want in the background or if one of the actors were to look at the camera there was an exception of this in one split second of our thriller which I purposely added in as I think that it would create a good effect on the sequence if one of the characters were to look at the camera just before he was shot.

Another area that I feel made many of the key decisions was in what order the shots should be put. I came up a lot in my free time to see if I could find a better ways of putting the sequence together to make it flow much more easily and make it easier for the audience to understand.

Finally one other aspect that I feel I had a large part in influencing in our thriller was in the organizing the sound in the scene. I selected many of the sound effects that we have put into the sequence from a copy right free source. I felt that I had a large part in working on this as I found many of the sounds after looking at the completed footage and figuring out what kind of sounds we needed at a certain time. I feel that this was especially important in ours as we in our thriller the sound when filming didn’t record so we are having to do both voiceovers and all of the sound including the background noises such as the wind and animals.

There were many expectations in the run up to the editing including that my group and I would create a realistic and engaging piece. My group expected me to be doing much of putting the clips together and making sure that they ran smoothly.

In the process of editing our thriller we only cropped a small part of the clip and added to the same footage but a little earlier on. We did this to show the action of the two characters as before one of the characters had stopped acting whilst the other wasn’t doing anything that bought any interest so instead we split what the screen would show straight down the middle so we got the best two parts of the same clip but instead put together at the same time.

We also used to tool such as the razor tool to make sure that the shot transitions were in exactly the right place at that certain time to make the sequence run more smoothly and improve the continuity.

The timeline also helped us to create continuity in many ways. Firstly, we were able to do this through making sure that all of the shots that we needed were organised into areas that were similar to the other shots such as all of the shots of Fran (our main actress) were all organised into one place so that we could access them quickly. We would then get all of the shots that we needed and put them into the order that we thought was best to make sure that our film made sense and ran smoothly.

We had to crop one of the shots in the sequence. One part on the inside of the house there was a moment when the secretary and the bodyguard weren’t quite in sync as one of them stopped acting before the other. So, we cut the screen in half to make sure that we were able to get the action of both of the actors to make the scene even more exciting.

After having put all the shots together I made many key decisions to ensure that the piece would work. It was one of my jobs to ensure that there were no mistakes such as the actors looking at the camera or that there were no extended periods of time where there was nothing happening and to try and make the sequence short enough to work so that it would fit into the time specifications.

We used many layers in the making of our film. Firstly, we used 2 layers for the visual side of the editing as we wanted to be able to distinguish between the shots so different shots would be on different layers so we could see clearly when the transitions were. This would also mean that they would not overlap. We also used one layer to add the title cards that we used in the sequence. Finally, for the sound we used five layers. We used so many as the sound of our piece didn’t record on the day so we had to instead add all the ambient sound which took up two layers on each of the shots and all of the sound effects to make it work which also took up two layers. Finally, we needed one more layer to make sure that we had the soundtrack in the sequence.

The sound in the sequence we used a non-copyrighted sound track and many of the sound effects that the school provided and we were making few of the sounds ourselves such as the walking in the woods we thought that we should have made this ourselves as it was difficult to get the timing right.

We added the titles with the names at the start of the sequence but we left the name of the actual film to the end as we didn’t think that it would work as well if we were to have it within the names.

We were able to match the action in three areas in the film which made it slightly more difficult for us. We did this firstly by when the woman looks away at the start we then cut to the room hopefully showing that she has perhaps just seen the room or the house that she was going to shoot at. We also did this with the men inside to show that they talking to each other by alternating shots between the men. We were finally able to show this through the eye line match when the woman was looking through the scope to then see what she is seeing through the cross hairs that we would then put on the screen.

We used sound to help to engage the audience in a few ways. Firstly, our soundtrack was designed to make sure that tension was created in the scene. We also made the first gun shot in the scene very loud to shock the audience and engage them further.

We only used the sound effects of the gun to make the scene seem more realistic and to create a diegesis in this opening sequence.

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Final Thriller

evaluation task 1 in what way does your media product use, develop, or challange form and conventions or real media products

evaluation task 2 how does your media product represent particular social groups

evaluation task 3 What institutiom would make my film evaluation task

evaluation task 4, facebook profile of typical target audience

evaluation task 4, Questions on target audience

evaluation task 5, how do you attract address your audience

evaluation task 6, what have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

evaluation task 7, Looking back at your Preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product

editing reflection