Questionnaire

We came up with a little questionnaire to give out and get some feedback about the kind of things to include in our very own Thriller production. We got some brilliant results, Action, Mystery and Crime were the three most expected sub-genres for Thriller films, so we can't be going wrong with our Crime-Action-Thriller.

Confidential

Our results came back as a good variety of male/female, and mostly from people in the 16-20 age group.
For peoples favourite genre, it was either Action or Comedy, because we can't really make a Comedy-Thriller, were going to use these results and go for a Action-Thriller. On top of this, most people expected themes of Action and Mystery in a Thriller film, so this backs up our decision to make an Action-Thriller.
Finally, for age-rating, it was expected to be either 15 or 18, so we'll go for a 15 so it'll have a larger target audience.

Planning for our Thriller opening

Alright,

So today we've been informed we need to start thinking of some ideas for our Thriller task, which is awesome. We need to present our three ideas to the group sometime next month (November, 2011), so we need to get a move on.

I'm thinking we need to have a look at recent Thriller genre films for ideas for our Thriller task, so films like Paranormal Activity Three, Contagion and Straw Dogs. We could make, with relative ease, something similar to any of these.

We need to visit any locations we want to film at so we know what they are like in terms of atmosphere, lighting, what kind of camera angles we can pull off, and so on. We struggled with getting in camera angles in our prelim that would catch what we wanted to film but would also keep in with the continuity of the acting.

No Country For Old Men, the introduction

No Country For Old Men is a 2007 American crime-thriller set in 1980s West Texas.
No Country For Old Men starts with near a dozen establishing shots, these set the location of the film as a desolate, lawless land. There is none, or at most very little movement in any of these shots, this shows how quiet it is in this place, an unusual setting for a Thriller film. There is a voice-over throughout all of this, Ed Tom Bell, the regions sheriff, talking of the rise in crime in the area.
It then introduces the villain of the story, Anton Chigurh, a hitman set to recover a large sum of money from a failed drug exchange. He's being arrested and put in the deputy's car, along with the strange piece of equipment he uses, a bolt-pistol, used for stunning cattle before slaughter. At this stage, we haven't seen Chigurhs face, it is obscured by lighting, or we see him from behind. This keeps his identity a mystery to use, we don't know who he is, where he came from or what he has done to be arrested.
The car drives away with a rising pan of the landscape, to show us how desolate the place is. It also shows how empty the place is, and how difficult it would be to find someone out there.
There is a mid-shot of the deputy talking to Bell on the phone, with Chigurh walking up behind him, his face blurred out or not in the shot. We can see him do this, but the deputy doesn't, it build tension as he slowly approaches the un-aware deputy, before grabbing him with the handcuffs around his wrists and pulling him to the floor.
There is then an unusual birds-eye view shot of Chigurh strangling the deputy, we can see Chigurh for the first time, and his emotionless face as he kills the deputy. A close-up of Chigurhs face shows that he has no remorse in killing this man, half of his face is blackout of in shadow.
It then cuts to him washing his wrists in a sink to clean the blood off, and shows us the floor where the deputy kicked during the struggle, leaving marks, these show the aftermath of the brutal event. Chigurh, unaffected, has bandaged his wrists and calmly collects his bolt-pistol and gas canister before leaving in the cop car, completely calm about killing the deputy. It shows us who he is as a character, a cold-blooded killer.

Prelim Task Review

We've finished our Prelim Task now, burnt it to disc and handed it in,
We had a few problems emerge with the file format of the footage and we lost some, which meant we didn't have a lot of footage to pick from when editing our footage together, so of course, it didn't come out as well as we wanted it too.

I'm happy with it because we managed to get in a good variety of camera angles and we put in a few transitions to make it fit together well, we just didn't have a good amount of footage to work with, so we know for our main task to use cameras that will extract the footage in the correct file type, MP4, not WAV or whatever it wanted it as, and we know to get a good amount of footage of each different action so we've got plenty to work with.

Post Prelim Task Filming, Uploading, and Editing

There's no real importance in this post, I'm just letting you know I'm still here.


Hello. So as you know we went out and filmed our prelim task this Tuesday (4th October 2011), and it went well. We got to the location and decided not to do the shots with the shutter, it was really bright outside and you could see all the shop inside, and it looked silly.

We hoped to get this as the title.

Anyway, we filmed and it went really well, Donleys a pro actor and it turns out i still cant act to save my life. Monty guarded the cameras and it turns out a guy where i work used to own a camera shop for 15 years.






No problems with filming really, got all the footage we decided on in the end, we used three cameras so we've got footage of one scene from two angles, we can use this for good continuity.

The workshop, where all the dialogue happened.

We started uploading straight after we got back, but we found we couldn't upload the footage from the SD card, so we were having to move it to a computer, change the format online, then put it back on the Mac, effort. We then found out how to import it straight off the camera in better definition, much better :)


So now we've started editing the footage together, no problems so far, got some nice title effects going, a company logo, all these crazy things :D

The back door, where most of the action was.