Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Audience's expectations of a psychological thriller:

Thriller genre

In a conventional thriller genre, the protagonist deals with death (their own or someone else's). Also the forces of antagonism between actors are strong and most of the time stronger than the role of protagonist yet, the main story line of a protagonist is a character that cannot be put down. For example the protagonist is usually a hero or s villain that seems to be more powerful than any other character.

The main plotline is a mystery that needs to be resolved and the films narrative construction is dominated by protagonist's point of view. All characters are generally very realistic with a natural representation on screen, which makes the thriller seem more believable and real and that engages the audience. The two major themes that underpin a thriller are the desire for justice and the morality of individuals.

The use of sound in a thriller genre differs depending on the situation and position in the thriller. If there is someone in danger, than the music will be quite high pitched or strong and dramatic, which would get gradually louder as the character gets closer to danger, than the music ted to change when there is no on the horizon. However, sometimes in a conventional thriller, there is no suspense and therefore when there is a danger, the music will make us jump, if played all of a sudden.

 

These are the different types of thriller:

Our group have decided to do a psychological thriller. This is becasue we like the typical general conventions of a psychological thriller. This consists of the character, the plot and the element of horror.

Overall I believe that the reason why we have chosen a psychological thriller is to try out one genre that crosses with horror. We found that psychology with horror go very well together. This is because psychology and horror overlap each other in order to have the right effect on the audience. Lily is a psychological thriller that overlaps with horror, because there is the mystery of the thriller, protagonist’s split personality that has psychological elements and horror because of the jump cuts and the Lily’s ghost like appearance.

Audience's expectations of a psychological thriller:

In an ordinary psychological thriller, the audience could expect a protagonist with some sense of quality that no other characters have.  This can be an apparition quality, a detective or someone with a special profession in order to solve a certain mystery. They would expect to see a number of flashback, as the protagonist slowly reveals the truth and some paranormal activity. The ending is usually very confusing, and not at all one that the audience would have hoped for.  The challenge is usually to get into the protagonist’s mind. The locations are either very isolated or spooky, or the complete opposite. Our thriller location is isolated and spooky in order to reflect on the Lily’s state of mind. She has 2 locations: In the location of Graby, Lily seems quite aggressive and deliberately wants to be noticed. However,   in the location of Grimsthorpe castle, Lily seemed very isolated due to the location’s large grounds and no one else being around.

Mise-en-scene, lighting, shot types, sound, editing and narrative in a psychological thrillers.

Psychological thriller- Case 39

Mis-en-sene: lighting

In a typical psychological thriller, the lighting is light and dark, depending on the situation and the place in the thriller. For example; a good lighting is very important here because there is a social worker having a conversation with a young girl that has possibly been abused by her parents. This makes the lighting vital for the audience to catch any facial expressions that could give away any potential mysteries.

In our thriller opening scene, we have focused a lot on the low- key lighting, compromising on lighting pattern with both darker and lighter areas in certain places. For example;

This is a one shot of Lily herself with a fairly good lighting. This shot is however at the end of the opening sequence, and hence the lighting has gone brighter so we can see her face. Here, we have wanted so that the audience was feeling rather scared at this point, because this is the first time that we can see Lily’s face properly. This is using stereotypes of revealing the characters appearance at the end of the thriller opening sequence, to persuade eh audience to carry on watching.

This is the lighting before:

This lighting is at the beginning of the opening scene and we have adjusted our lighting so we don’t give away hardly anything about her. She is black and white in this shot, and the light is quite dull, when we were shooting this, which has made the white stand out even more. This challenges the convention of a thriller because it is conventional to keep a thriller as realistic as possible and this black and white theme suggests that the setting is fairly old and not real to this time anymore.

Mise en scene- Décor

In a typical psychological thriller, the décor is either completely different to what the protagonist represents, or quite similar. For example, in this two shot, we can see the surroundings in the little girl’s bedroom. We can see that the colours are light pleasant with couple of pictures on the wall. This makes the place look friendly but that contrasts the little girls’ demon like behaviour. So this time the décor represents the naivety of the social worker, rather than the character itself.

It is very hard to do a décor because most of our filming was outside, but we have added a dog as a prop. She is carrying it and singing to it and that indicates that she has a psychological issue, due to something that has happened to her in the past. She is wearing a checked long dress with willies and that indicates the old fashioned style of clothing, which reflects on the fact that she is a ghost. So we have used psychological element of décor, to focus and reflect on Lily- the character.

Shot types-

Psychological thriller; The Shutter Island

This is a close up of a woman’s face. Psychological thrillers use close ups like these so the audience can purposely focus on the features of her face.  For example here we can see that the purpose of this shot was to scare the audience, because we can see that she has got hair missing, so it looks like she or someone else has pulled her hair out. That also links to the place where she is staying because it shows uncontrollable, dangerous behaviour.

This is an extreme close up shot of Lily.

This was a risky shot for us but we have maintained the hidden appearance, yet we can still see some of Lily’s features in order to confuse the audience rather to scare them. In this shot we can see Lily smiling a little bit, and that shows the friendly side of her. We have done this because people might be frightened of her, but the then they would realise that Lily is actually slightly smiling, leaving the audience confused about what to think about Lily because she does not look scary in this shot, the freight comes from the fact that all of a sudden she is so close and a point of view shot, it looks like she is looking at the audience.

Shot types-

The 6^th sense

Two shot

 

This two shot is very conventional in psychological thrillers because we can see the boy’s face as he trying to explain his ‘condition’ of being able to see the dead to his mother, whilst a dead person appears. We can see this from the mother’s point of view, which shows blurred face of the boy, which makes us concentrate on the body that is covered in blood outside of the car.

This two shot indicates the ghost being inside of the car, rather than on the outside, making more physical contact with the passenger at the front, which reveals a clear link between Lily and Ronnie. This creates confusion but also tension, because we have no idea what connection she has with Ronnie and why she is touching her face, which is very conventional to a psychological thriller.

We have done this to mainly show a link between the two characters, so the audience can relate to both characters better.

Shot types

High angle shots

Psychological thriller; The Dark Water

This two shot is also a high angle shot of the mother and her child, looking up at a ceiling, where her daughter seems to be hiding her ‘imaginary’ friend. This is a very conventional shot in a thriller genre, because these types of shots make the characters seem very small and almost helpless and powerless. This way of confusion is definitely a conventional way of making people seem scared and unsure of something because it creates a great tension from the audience, thinking that whatever they are looking at is going to be a lot more powerful than them.

In our psychological thriller ‘Lily’, we have chosen to do a high angle shot of a car that Ronnie is in whilst filming.

This underpins the fact that the powers of ‘Lily’ are a lot bigger than Ronnie’s because ‘Lily’ is a spirit. This creates confusion because we know that Ronnie is in some sort of danger, but we don’t know whether the danger has something to do with ‘Lily’ or not.

. Also the country side adds to the mystery of power, as it indicates a not a lot of people around- this is Ronnie’s location and it is looking as isolated as Lily’s Grimsthorpe castle location!

Editing;

 

Psychological thriller; Omen

In a typical psychological thriller, editing is being used to emphasis the action that is happening. For example if a ghost like, or supernatural spirit is being used within a film, jumpcuts may be the right place to do it, because it will enable us to see a strange change that would not make sense in real life, making things ‘paranormal’ and also makes the audience jump at the same time, creating a double effect.

We have chosen to create a similar jump cut with the ‘Lily’ thriller. These are two very similar shots. Lily is looking into the central mirror and a second after for no reason, she is not there anymore. This clearly shows a psychological and spiritual link because it would not makes sense if it was real. This is one of the conventions to again, frighten the audience and make them jump at the same time.

This has added the discontinuity into the thriller, which is vital in thrillers (Omen).

These are the conventions of a thriller opening. These only explain the convetional titles in other film, and bellow this presentation, i have described the range of titles in our thriller. However, out title sequence is compared in this presentation.

The title of a thriller;

Location Pics here. This is a screen shot of a prezi that describes the use of location in other thrillers.
Bellow, i have taken another screen shot of a prezi to show how we have used location in our thriller.

Our location

Props

A car- 6^th sense

A car is used quite often in psychological thrillers because car has a lot of options of how to scare the audience. For example, The Sixth Sense has done it in a way that ghosts started to appear outside the car. It also has opportunities such as mirrors and back seats, because mirrors and back seats are great way to scare audience (a ghost appears in the mirror, on the back seat).

We have also used a car in our thriller:

 This is a shot of Ronnie and Lily. This time, the ghost has appeared in the car, rather than outside the car. I think that this is unconventional because usually we do not get ghosts that are friendly (and Lily here is showing a clear link between her and Ronnie). It is also a bit emotive, which we do get in psychological thrillers, because the psychological aspect usually comes from children being involved, and hence it is quite emotive for some.

 

Wellies – Possession

This really reminds me if Lily herself by what she is wearing, the hair colour, and the wellies.  This shows that the girl is no longer caring for her looks, and makes her look dirty and grey, just like the demon that possessed her. I got this from the google images, after I have watched the film on my laptop. It definitely inspired us because we have tried to make Lily look similar; hence we have used the wellington boots and the dress on Lily.

 Props  in our thriller

Teddy bear and Umbrella, and wellies

We have chosen to use a teddy bear as a prop, because it belongs to her world of loneliness. The teddy bear reflects on Lily’s age and also her mental state. We are using conventions here, as we are making Lily look like a ghost, but we are slightly challenging them because we do not know the character’s real personality, so we dressed her up to scare audience by making her look like the girl from possession, and yet her behaviour in some clips does not correspond to this, making the audience feel more emotive towards her.

The umbrella and wellies have been used because it was raining, but we have used this opportunity to adapt to the situation and used this to hide a part of her identity.  It could be said that the dull, rainy weather did us all a favour with the appropriate lighting and props. This has added the atmosphere that fits perfectly to Lily’s clothing and her attitude. It has added pathetic fallay- the weather clearly mirrors the character and fits in very well with the setting.

Blanket

This blanket clearly represents a girl that has some mental issues. It has her name on it, so people know that this film is about her.  The name however is not visible as such due to the theme changes whilst editing. We had to transform the theme to black and white and that changed the visibility to detail.

Car

We have decided to use a car in order to do our car sequence. It is the car sequence setting, where the audience find out that Lily is a ghost. It enabled us to use Lily to communicate with Ronnie by editing her in and out of the car.

Titles and fonts

We have made all of our titles by ourselves. Whether it is our title sequence, or our title of the film.

We have done this one by writing on the road. Lily has to drop a stone on to the box and a name would appear. We did this by splitting the clip and making some longer whilst editing. We did not want anything computerised because it would spoil the complete visage of Lily. This font looks childlike and messy, just like Lily.

This title of the film itself, Lily, has been done by hand, copied onto photo shop and added on top of the final layer. This is conventional to our thriller because the title and the cover should reflect on the film, very briefly. This reflects on our thriller because I have added the Lily flower to suggest a sense of innocence that Lily has, but the face, is scary to the audience because if we look at Lily’s mouth, it makes her look quite serious, but then we look at the shadowing near the mouth, and we can see that the shadow of her mouth is in fact smiling, reflecting on her split personality.

Titles and font in the Sinister

 This is well done on a computer and it looks dark and evil, just like the film is. However I think that titles that are made by hand have a much scarier effect on the audience.

Title sequence:

This title sequence seems well thought about, because the title of the film’s name is underneath the picture of the symbol. This enables us to look inside the cultural and contextual side of sinister. However, again I feel that the titles are more effective in thrillers that do their own title sequence.

.  Our symbol was the flower Lily, which was overlaid by Lily’s face.

Narrative and how the opening sets it up
The Butterfly Effect opening scene

These are some of the screen shots that i have done to help me explain the conventions of narrative and the set up of an opening. Bellow, i have compared this to the narrative and the opening set up to Lily, by creating a director's documentary.

In The Butterfly Effect, there are two settings in the opening scene. First setting is in a dark room, and someone, dressed in white, is hiding under the table. The opening scene in this thriller is very conventional because the lightning is dark and makes us feel tensed because we can only see the person, and we don’t know what is going to happen.

Then, as predicted, the story takes us to the past "13 years ago", to be precise. This is a dissolve form of editing and was used here to create a sense of time, as it dissolves slowly, so it mirrors the duration that it took, which is conventional because in thrillers, they often change from time to time, to create a sense of understanding. We have used lots of transformations to indicate danger, because we have set them up for a split second, they make people jump:






The setting itself, 13 years ago is a very nice looking place, quite peaceful and green, which indicates that it is quite relaxing. It works well though because it gives us a sense of reality, so we can be drawn in more in the film like a normal starting life but it is very unconventional for a thriller, because it is the opposite to what we have expected it. This however reveals that the place itself is a bit too perfect for a thriller which uncovers the mysteriousness.

The narrative and settings in the Lily opening scene director’s documentary…

Question 2- How does my media product represent a particular social groups?

Gender, age, victims villains and heroes

This shot is from the film ‘possession’

When I have seen this shot it reminded me of Laura, because of the eye make- up, the way she is dressed and the wellies.

Here we can see Laura’s full body. She is wearing a dress, and willies, exactly like the girl in ‘possession’. 

In this close up of Laura, we can clearly see that the eye make-up is the same as the girl in the film ‘possessed’. Their roles in the films are quite similar, as they are both giving away some sort of apparitions. In Lily, we can see clearly that Laura is a ghost due to her disappearing and appearing in and out of the car. In ‘possessed’, the girl is possessed by a demon and that is affecting her behaviour, in a very psychological way, whereas we claim to believe that Lily’s behaviour is more mental. This is because of her split personality behaviour.

We have wished to represent age, gender, and victim and villain at the same time in the character of Laura. We are represing the age of 15. This is becasue of its psychological nature, but there are not gory parts of the film, with no sexual scenes, making the ideal age of this thriller a 15. The female gender in Lily is confusing because of her split personality- vilain and an innocent little girl.

This is just a prezi to explain the villains, heroes and victims in other thrillers. To compare this to my thriller, i have explained how villains, heroes and victims are presented in our thriller.

Victims and villains in ‘Lily’

It is very difficult to judge whether Lily is a villain or victim. This because of her split personality. One side of Lily seems nice and lost, so much so we feel sorry for her;

This is a shot of Lily skipping. The fact that she skipping tells the audience that she is very childlike, making the audience feel sorry for her, assuming that the location that she is empty and too big for a child to be in on her own. This makes the audience believe that she is a victim in this thriller. The lighting here is very old fashion, because it is in black and white, which makes us sympathetic towards her because it seems like that she stuck in an in between world with no one else around.

However, our reaction changes when we see the other side of her;

This is a close up shot of Lily, revealing her full facial features. This shot is scary because of her face expression, being quite serious and intimidating. This is because the way I have done her make-up. She has clear dark circles underneath her eyes. This makes the audience believe that she is villain. This is a close up shot of Lily, revealing her full facial features. This shot is scary because of her facial expression, being quite serious and intimidating. This is because the way I have done her make-up. She has clear dark circles underneath her eyes. This makes the audience believe that she is villain. The audience may also think that she is villain because the lighting here is very natural, compared to the previous screen shot. This makes her actions very real and therefore very intimidating and frightening. Lily represents a female character as a vialain and a an innocent little girl. It si a psychological thriller, so there are going to be times where the audience will change their minds about Lily.

Question 3.What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Our production name and logo;

The name of our production is LRS productions. We have chosen LRS because it represents the initial letters of our names- (Laura, Ronnie, Shannon).

I like the idea of having a dog as a production picture because it has a very mysterious sense to it. This is because the lines in the dog’s body; they are very unusual and this makes this picture look a bit freaky. Also the background is red, highlighting danger and warning, making ideal logo fro thriller –type movies. It could be said that hence, it mirrors our thriller just fine.

It took a time until we have found a good way of making a link to the thriller itself. These are the stages that we have taken in order to get the finished logo.

This is the first, none edited version of our logo. The background is plain, indicating no danger. There is no shading on the dogs body, perfecting the logo, which takes away the mysteriousness.

 

This version is slightly edited. This looks like it has just adjusted its lighting and shading, rather than actually changing the colour of the background, hence, we have thought of something that would indicate danger, and mysteriousness.

Personally i do prefer the last and piece which we are using at the moment. This is becasue the background is red, which represents the danger, but is also a little misleading because red also meand blood, and in our thriller there are no gory moments at all. This is an advantage becasue we did not want to give much away to the audience to start of with. Red seems more apropriate for a thriller, and hence has the best relationship with ours.

The role of media institutions is to distribute a film, each aimed for a specific film genre. For example we have chosen BBC FILMS as our distribution company.

BBC Films

BBC Films co-produces around eight films a year, working in partnership with major international and UK distributors. Christine Langan is Head of BBC Films, responsible for the development and production slate, strategy and business operations.

Until 2007, BBC Films was based in Mortimer Street, near Broadcasting House in London, while still under the full control of the BBC. A re-structuring of the division integrated it into the main BBC Fiction department of BBC Vision. As a result, it moved out of its independent offices into Television Centre and its head David M. Thompson left to start his own film production company.

This company is apropriate for our thriller becasue we wanted a film that would be made in Britain and BBC FILMS Production Company is in fact British. This also means that it would not cost us too much money to distribute it, rather than if we were using an American, wide known company.

Example of a thriller from BBC FILMS

Death Defying Acts- supernatural romantic thriller

A 2007 supernatural romantic thriller. The film is a UK-Australian co-production directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones. It concerns an episode in the life of Hungarian-American escapologist Harry Houdini at the height of his career in the 1920s. It was screened in a special presentation at the 2007 Toronto International Film.

Another example of BBC films production company is the film called "Blood Synopsis". This is a pyschological thriller about two brothers, Joe (Paul Bettany) and Chrissie Fairburn (Stephen Graham), who collapse under the weight of their father's shadow (Brian Cox). Desperate to fill their father's shoes, Joe and Chrissie commit the ultimate crime, and the fear of being caught out by their police force colleague, Robert (Mark Strong), turns their lives into a downward spiral of guilt and paranoia.

The titles

There are different job roles whilst making a film. Examples of these are;

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a video of mu mum Jana, comenting on our thriller oepning scene for my audience response.

 

We have added all of these to our title sequence, under our names.



Question 4

Different media audiences that we chose from;

1)      Psychographics

We are going to focus on Explorers because we believe that our thriller could bring them the adventure and mysterious atmosphere, where they could explore the answers and unsolved mysteries.

2) Demographics

     We have chosen a group B, so we can focus on the second highest category. We believe that this thriller is challenging enough to watch and the best audience for our thriller is someone who is willing to see both sides and analyses as they go along and professionals tend to do that with an everyday life. We have not gone for A., because from our research, most poeple that are most likely to watch a psychological thriller are group B.  Also this group might have more time to watch films in general.





This is what we have found out from our audience...

We have asked our audience what is their favourite genre, and 25% of all the audinces replied thriller genre is their favourite.

We gave out thriller age 15 onwards becasue of the psychological elements and the disturbing nature of Lily herself. However it has not got any sexual scene of any type and only a mild language. It should not have any elements of imitable behaviour, or drugs but a very strong element of horror and psychological disturbance. This disturbance is heard and seen. We have chosen a child's song "Twinkle, twinkle little star", to emphasize on the fact that Lily, inside is still a little girl. We have played around with it on the garage band to make.


Thsi is why "Lily" Thriller got a 15.
Elelments of horror and disturbing behaviour.

Shot types

This is very disturbing shot because we can see Lily through Ronnie's point of view, making the audience to live the experience that Ronnie is living in the thriller.








This is a close up shot of Lily. It is dusturbing becasue it has a clear element of horror in this shot. This is becasue Lily's unpleasant apearance. The dark circles under neath her eyes and on top of the pale, white skin makes Lily look like a ghost. Also it is quite powerful because she is looking straight into the camera, making the audience think that she is looking at them.





Editing

Thsi is quite disturbing to the audience because This is the time when Laura appears and disapears in the mirror. It is also a jump cut and hence, it will make poeple jump.

This is an example of some of our transition, to represent danger. We have made this transition only a
0.6 seconds long, so we only get a flash between scenes. This emphasize the danger and also makes people vary of what is going to happen next.



Sound

We have picked a children's song called Twinkle twinkle little star. This is because it reminds the audience that Lily has a different state of mind of a child, emphaiszing on her innocence. However we have twisted this song by transforming it into Grage Band and make the song echo. This has transformed the song itno a different purpose becasue it makes the song sound creepy, especially becasue we ahve synced it with Lily, so it looks like that she is singing it.



Question 5

To research our audience, we have used the questionnair method to get the result.

This was one of the questions that we have asked the audience, and this was their response.

In mind of this, we have decided that our protagonist is dead, by is still present, making her presents well known too.

   This is bar chart showing if people like suspense music in order to create slow suspense.

Bearing that in mind, we have decided to use quite slow theme music running all the way through the opening scene, with a couple of stutters in the tune, to indicate suspense and fright.

This bar chart shows whether people like blood and gore, and the results were exactly like we have expected them to be.

As it proofs- a bit of additional information has been added to this as this question has provoked a lot of reaction. “Blood and gore has gone old fashioned and most of the time too stereotypical”. This is why our thriller is based on psychological issues instead as “It leaves a longer effect on people”.

6) What have I learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I have learnt about Blogger because I have never used it before in my life, and it took a lot of practice to find out how it works. Now I know pretty much everything that I need to know in order to have a decent blog.











I have also learnt how to upload videos on Youtube.  I had to find a way of how to transform a video into a movie, in order to be able to upload it onto YouTube, which was interesting becasue it has taken me a long time to figure out how to do it.

Prezis are a great way of making presentation in a very fun way. They have lot of themes, from which some are 3D, making it very realistic to watch. It was hard to use at first, but eventually I got the hang of it. I have used prezi for analysis, for evaluation questions and for ISL work. They are brilliant! They are very easy to upload on my blog for everyone to see in seconds.

This is another way of making power points look more interesting, with plenty of themes to choose from, which made my life a lot easier, because all the templates were there already and I just had to write and not spend ages trying to do a simple table of a text box. It took a while to find out how to put this on the blog but have managed eventually.

I found creately on the internet when I was looking for something a little bit different. Creately is also free, and has some very nice templates for spider diagrams and mind maps. They are very difficult to save (it takes me about 20 minutes to find out how to do it each time). I learned that I had to save it first into a computer before I could do anything else. It is a pain, but it’s worth it.

Photoshop- I sort of knew how to use a Photoshop, but the DVD cover experiment has taught me more things that I didn’t know before. Such as that over laying on photoshop, to add different layers on top of Lily's face. I have learnet how to change eye colur and to be very careful with colouring it in.  

We have used i Movie to edit and put together our thriller. I have never used it in my life, nor did I ever edit. I have experimented with a few things and eventually got the hang of it. I learned how to add music to a project, how to split the clip in order to link bits the way we wanted and also we have learned how to add transitions and themes. The most difficult bit was to add music to our project because the music had decided to quiet its self down for no reason, and to this day we can not find a reason why it did that but it miracuously repared itself aftre a while. 

I used garage band in order to add music to our thriller because we had the beginning of a song that we liked on there, but didn’t want the rest of the song, so we had to put it on garage band and adjust it. I have also made a couple of tense moments. These are the music that we hear before something bad is going to happen.
The most difficult was the main themed music, because we have used a whole song but we only needed the first bit so it keeps repeating. However, once we have cut it down to the bit that we needed. the opening that we needed was only a couple of seconds, os it would never cover the entire opening scene. So we had to go back onto Garage Band and cut more of these songs so only the beginning was playing, and then we had to put them together. Thsi was a nightmare because we had to put them together so there were no jump cuts in the music, and a slight jump cut was very noticable. Then we had more stress when the music decided to make itself quite in the middle fo the thriller scene for no reason what so ever.

Camera work and handling a camera, making different shots that create different effects must have been the biggest challenge. I have learnt the different shot types, such as composition and framing, rule of thirds, the golden mean, mid shot, close up, long shot, extreme close up and point of view shot.

Also I have learned a lot about camera movement. For example the high angle shot, low angle shot, pan, tracking shot, zooming in/ out.
The hardest was the point of view shots, especially in the car becaus there was nto a lot of room for tripod as well. Hence, we had to make all of our point of view shots by holding teh camera in our hands. Thsi was tricky because we had to be careful not to shake too much. Also one of the harder ones was the shot of a car, which was also and held, but Shannon had to climb up a ladder to get a good high angle shot. The easier ones were the ones on teh tripod- which is the long shots, close ups, mid shots and pans.
 

 

Editing
We had to learn how to manage our specific editing issues;

For example, we didn’t get enough shots in order to have proper continuity and a lot of the shots that we did have, were in fact shots that were against the 180 degree rule.

This is a shot of a car going the right way.

This is a shot going the opposote way.

 

So we go from this..

To this....

Also we wanted to make the Grimsthorpe sequence seem old but at the same time a place that is out of this world. We have chosen a range of shots to do this.

We have picked to do a long shot from a top of the hill so the audience can acknowledge the amazing scenery. This has also shown that Grimsthorpe is a large area, emhasizing on the fact that Lily is lonely here and it seems like too big a place for a little girl with noone else about. 

In order to make the place old, as we intended to, we had to change the theme. Again, we had to click on every Grimsthorpe sequence clip, click on themes, and select a ‘dream theme’. This has linked nicely to the beautiful scenery and emphasises on the fact that we wanted this place to be Lily’s fairy tale place.  This makes teh audience to feel sorry for Lily because they can see that she looks trapped in there and perhaps she is just asking Ronnie for help...

We wanted to make our title sequence as interesting as possible. Our initial idea was to have Lily drawing on the road. We have thought about it and then thought we could do something really interesting here.


We drew hopscotch on the road, and the idea is that Lily is going to jump onto an empty box, and as she leaves from it, our titles will appear. Whilst editing, we had to make some of these clips shorter and some we had to or split to get the dis continuity in order for the letters to appear. This was tricky but this is what we have done…



 

This shot has nothing in teh boxes..

 

 

This is still continues. Lily is on the same box now.

 

 

We have used this shot so the audience can see that there is no writing on the boxes before that.

And as soon as she took her feet off the first square, the writing has appeared.

            Question 7

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

Things that went well where the range of different settings- we had 5 and for a prelim, that is quite tricky to link in nicely for people with no previous experience in filming before. These are the settings;

We have used a pan shot here and in edit, the task was to link in setting from around the corner and where James is standing. 

Again, we had a bit of a trouble here because when we went through the first set of doors, we had a continuity problem; hence we had to use a transition so it makes sense.

I like this location the best because this was the location where the ‘cheating’ was happening, and it enabled us to use a lot of close ups. It was also effective because the lighting was good and it was a location where we could stay and film properly.

Overall I think that there are quite a lot of jump cuts and other little mistakes that we have done, due to lack of experience.  Another big advantage is that we have worked very well in a team and we have compromised with each other’s wishes.

We have addressed these by constantly thinking about continuity. The only time that we have forgotten about continuity, was with the car sequence, but we have learnt to flip it, so it still looks like it is shot from the same angle.

Another problem in the prelim task was the jump cuts. We have addressed them by taking every shot at least 4 different times, so that we have a wide range of shots to choose from, in case some transitions are harder to link with another shot. We had to do it this time all in one day, so that we don’t get lighting problem (as we did in the prelim)- it took us 2 days and hence one day it was sunny and the next day it wasn’t. This was really noticeable and nightmare to adjust just the lighting and not our faces too. This also made a jump cut because it became very noticeable and unexpected. Hence, we have shot all of our shots on the same days. We had 3 different settings that did not have to be the same lighting, so it was not that difficult.

Therefore, we do not have any unwanted jump cuts in our thriller; there are a few, but we can justify those because of the situation in the plot. For example, this is a deliberate jump cut because one minute Lily is there, and the next she isn’t. Also the shots are not the same, initially, they look the same but the mirrors are positioned differently in both shots. This was not so deliberate, but after a while of thinking about this as a problem, we have decided that actually it is a good idea to keep it because the clips of this are quite slow, but it will make the audience jump twice as much because there are two changes. As it happens, this has turned out to be one of the most powerful shots. We got the highest reaction levels from our audience whilst they were watching this- (as shown in question 5).

Our ideas…

We got our ideas from a period, where I have watched so many thrillers and horror films that I have actually noticed that there is something missing from all the horror films and psychological thrillers out there. Yes, our thriller too has a young girl as a protagonist, as many horrors/psychological thrillers but I have spotted a gap.

This gap is the car sequence and the Grimsthorpe sequence. I have seen car sequences in psychological horrors where people have ran over a strange body or see a dead body in front of the car, but I have seen a figure of a ghost, living in a large area of in-between world, and never seen a ghost actually going in and out of the car (I have seen a ghost in the car) but not so much actually making a physical contact with a passenger without actually hurting them. So if tere is one thing that actually went really well in our thriller, it the plot and the settings and mise en scene that link in the plot very nicely indeed.

What went well... one thing that went well were the transition whilst editing. We have made them shorter, so it just flashes on the screen very quickly. This has emphasized the danger of the thriller and hence, worked really well as a transition, rather than our transitions in our preliminary task, which were long because of the amount of contiunity problems that we had.

Another thinkg that went well was our music of Laura singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. This is suitable for our thriller because it emphasizes on the fact that Lily has a mind of a child. It also adds a creepy effect to our thriller, especially when we can see that it is Lily that is singing in.