7. EVALUATION - Progression from preliminary task to full product.

I feel that I have greatly progressed from when I first attempted to make a small move in my preliminary match cut to now when I have completed my final edit of my thriller opening.

The first problems I encountered when it came to editing was using the whole of the screen.

For example, on the left from my preliminary task you can see that we haven't used the space very well, there is a very large space in the middle of the two characters with which is not occupied with anything of interest, when it came to filming our final piece, I kept that in mind and tried to make sure that all our frames sufficiently used all the space possible.

Below is another example of a lesson I learnt, in my preliminary on the left the text looks awkwardly placed, it is slightly clashing with the wall and the attention of the audience is more focused on the character walking rather than what the text says.

To transfer this knowledge to my final edit, I tried to make sure all my titles were clearly placed out and were all the same size, font and colour. I tried to make be aware of where I wanted my audiences attention to be at all times.

Another example of progression is exampled below, on the left is my preliminary task and as you can see the character is blocking what she is doing (opening the door), we had originally planned to do a close up of the hand on the door handle, however, in practise it did not look as good.


On the right is my final edit and as you can see I have taken into consideration the problems I had with my match cut exercise and made sure no object was blocking another. From the example above you can see that I have made sure the pigeons did not cover up the fact they were eating bones, which would have ruined the purpose of the shot.

8. (Part 2) EVALUATION - Feedback

The feedback we received for 'Final Cut' was very encouraging and I was very pleased that people struggled to find a fault with our opening, however, we asked them to think of one so that we could further learn from this experience.

Unfortunately due to technical errors we lost a couple of clips and were unable to rotate them, however, this has become a positive as it is an extra thing I have learnt from the task and that is, never rely on technology.

6. EVALUATION - What I have learned

Arlington Road Opening Sequence


Watch Arlington Road : opening title sequence in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

5. EVALUATION- My Audience

Penny is a 21 year old woman , who enjoys psychological thrillers. During the week she is a shelf stacker at ASDA but she also has a weekend job at her local cinema which she thoroughly enjoys, "I get to see films as soon as they come out so it's a very exciting job for me", Penny added. She is currently studying Psychology at UCL and loves to shop in thrift stores or read detective novels in her spare time.

Content of Pennys bag:

2. EVALUATION - Representation

As there isn't a variety of characters in my opening it is difficult for me to compare a character with another character from an opening of another film. So instead I have chosen to compare objects or certain images and what we associate them with socially.

Here we see a shot from my film and a shot from the film Deja Vu:

Both of these images are of a single doll, alone in a vast quantity of water. This connects two aspects of ordinary things which many film makers use to their advantage to scare people. The large open water is seen as something to fear by mean people.

The difference between my shot and the shot from Deja Vu, it my shot consists of the doll on calm, still water while Deja Vu shot shows the doll in very rough choppy water.

While I personally think that the still water holds more suspense (as you you have no idea what is waiting beneath the surface).

Above is a screen grab from the film Arlington road (left) and a screen shot from my thriller opening Final Cut (right), both scenes are of an empty playground. Again this plays on taking pretty normal things/situations and making them seem truly eerie. While the park is clearly deserted there the swings are still swinging gently. This is very disturbing and works especially well for a thriller. Although Arlington roads version is done in negative which is also a very good effect.

3/4. EVALUATION - Distributing and Producing my media product.

As 'Final Cut' is an independent film, most likely financed and produced by Plan B Productions (an independent film and video company started by Clay Walker) it is more likely that we would be advertising at film festivals such as Raindance or the London Independent Film Festival.

Following from film festivals,

and taking in the reviews and praise, I would then move into incorporating my film in to society and work to further distribute my film.

This is a mock up advertisement for my film Final Cut. Here I have utilised the double

bill board by choosing to use one solely for the title, this will make it clear what the film is called . The black background combined with the large, bold white letters will cause an impact on the audiences memory. The other billboard uses one screenshot from the film, it is difficult to completely make out what you are looking at but you get an eerie feel which is representative of the general ambiance of the film.

I feel that as we would have a lower budget than a mainstream, highly financed film so we would not be able to afford many large advertisements, because of this I placed one of my major advertisements at a train station. As the posters are at eye level, many people will have to look at it daily, especially during peak times such as rush hour, getting the

film maximum attention.

However, news papers such as The Metro and The Independent.

Due to the genre of our film (Thriller/Horror) our marketing strategy is a different to that of of, say a mainstream action. As we are unable to appeal to children via happy meals e.g. toys or games due to our film not really marketed at that age group, and to advertise in such manor takes away from the scary feel of 'Final Cut'. However, when the film comes out on

DVD it could be bundled with other films within the same genre, e.g.One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

'Final Cut' would typically be shown in art house cinemas such as Screen on the Green in Islington, Picture house in Clapham or Renoir in Bloomsbury.

1. EVALUATION -The ways my media product challanges conventions

I chose to compare my thriller opening 'Final Cut' with the opening of the film 'To Kill a Mockingbird', I have chosen this as I feel that both these opening title sequences challenge the conventions of other media products.
As the images are relatively abstract they do not give away any major plot points, however, there are seem images the reoccur.


For example in 'To Kill a Mockingbird' there is the reoccuring image of the fob watch, in comparison to this in my thriller opening 'Final Cut' there is the reoccurance of the long corrider, which the audience will realise by the time the film has ended is the corridor of the mental hospital my antagonist escaped from.

I feel that this style of opening is better than the regular openings which give away far too much of the plot within the first few minutes.

Thriller opening-Final edit

TASK 8 - EVALUATION (PART 1)

Putting our thriller opening together

Putting out thriller opening together was a difficult task.
Originally we imagened it to be fairly simple but we were stumped from the first hurdle when we had to come up with a plan.
We all tried to give our own creative imput and try to include all of our ideas in a way that would not look messy or 'thrown together'.

Once we had the basic plan we sat down and did the storyboard, this involved thinking about fitting all of the shots into a two minute timeframe aswell as making it look appealing and getting a good variation of angles and effects.

Then we decided on the locations we we're going to use

Storyboard for preliminary match cut exercise

Skills Audit: Filming and editing preliminary match-cut exercise

Filming our match cut was very fun and interesting as we learnt the difficulties that came with the '180' degree rule.

Coming up with the storyboard was pretty simple but trying to stick to it or work around the problems we encountered was a little harder. We ended up finding a compromise between what we thought we could do in theory and what actually looked good in practice.

Because we would occasionally mess up our lines but kept the camera rolling we decided to add a 'blooper' or 'gag reel' to the end of our exercise which involved a clip of one of us messing up along with our names.

Editing was little harder as we had to get the voices in perfect sync and

we had many clips to sort through.

We enjoyed playing around with Soundtrack Pro and making the track perfect for the feel of our Match Cut.

Skills Audit: Live Type and Sound Track Pro

To make our thriller opening look professional we were shown how to use Live type, a program on macs which enables you to create very effective tittles using different fonts, backgrounds and special effects. It helped us a lot to have the tutorial as there is such a variety of things which you can do on this program. The thing I especially liked about Live Type was it's clear laid out manor and the ability to manipulate the text.

We were also shown how to use Sound Track pro another programme on the mac which enables you to create music from a wide range of beats and different instruments or special effect sounds.

Intro to Cameras/health and safety tutorial

Before we could use the cameras it was necessary that we learnt how to properly handle them and all the things we could utilise to get the best film possible.
After learning all the different buttons, such as how to turn the camera on, and an excellent feature called 'Quick Review' which enables you to quickly view what you have just recorded, and all the menu buttons.

We were then shown how to properly insert the memory cards into slot A and B and how to transfer memory storage between the two.

Then we were shown the basic functions of the camera, such as zoom, how to focus etc.

Once we ad become familiar with the camera we were shown how to correctly attach it to the tripod and how to move the camera while there, also how to correctly and safely de-attach the camera from the tripod.

Technical Audit of Bait Tutorial

In todays lesson we experienced using Bait for the first time. We were given a set of short video clips, which were out of sequence and were asked to cut, and rearrange them into the right order, while also adding sound and titles, using Final Cut, Live type, and Soundtrack Pro.


This will help us greatly when it comes to editing our thriller opening as we have already experienced editing with guide from a proffesional.

Pitch for Final Cut.

This is the pitch for our film "Final Cut" there are many differences between the pitch and the piece of work we have created as we had many restrictions however the core ideas are present in both.

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Thriller Sub Genres

So what is a Thriller, how can it be defined?

Many people find it difficult to distinguish where the line is drawn between a thriller and a horror, and the line is pretty thin.

The term thriller refers to a film which is full of suspense, often with mini cliff hangers throughout which are added to engage and entice the audience. Also, thrillers tend to leave the audience scared or uncomfortable in some way.

The genre that is 'Thriller' is also very versatile, here are some examples of Thriller Sub genres:

-Horror/Thriller

-Psychological Thriller

-Action Thriller

-Religious Thriller

-Political Thriller

-Comedy Thriller

and many more.

Thriller Opening Storyboard

The Bag Exchange