EVALUATION - QUESTION 2

Evaluation Question 2 is written by Eliza Teale.

EVALUATION QUESTION 1

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

In the process of research and planning we investigated the conventions of thrillers for our own film introduction. We reviewed thriller openings including ‘Kidult hood’ and ‘London to Brighton’, taking notice of the social realistic style of the films and techniques used that we could include in our product. 

It was clear there were some gothic representations, often shown through darker lighting and night time scenes, creating suspense and darker gothic tone. This created an almost horror type atmosphere, with the presumption that something bad is eminent. We wanted to develop this, creating both the suspense of a thriller while incorporating this darker gothic element.  Both films mentioned above are social realistic, a genre that we wanted to incorporate into out product, as there was a natural feel to the shots that we thought we could develop into our piece. Thrillers often present action and pace, which is shown by the use of camera movement, and high speed cuts. We used this in our opening in the chase scene, sometimes using handheld shots and high speed cuts to represent the frantic situation and build suspense.

Annotated final cut:

Written by Ewan Leslie

Rough Cut with finished Music

This is a second rough cut of our piece with a rough cut of music along with it.
Our friend Joe Reeves has composed the music himself.
We are happy with the way he has composed it, it is very nearly the finished piece that we want to use. It includes the urban modern techno sound to it whilst also being thrilling and fast pace.
We are very happy with the way it builds in tension, constantly layering the track.
We want to improve the soundtrack as we think it's a little too upbeat at the moment, we want it to be heavier and darker with some lower notes to build some more tension.
We have also added a new element to our narrative, we realised that it didn't make sense. People who were viewing our piece didn't understand why our Protagonist was on the run. We discovered it was vital that a threat or a change had to take place in order for the narrative to make sense.

Rough editing cut

There was a problem with uploading, the clip is not 7:45 mins long but in fact ends at 2:00 mins

This is a rough cut of our editing. Though we decided most of the editing and the way we wanted our piece to look like, most of the editing was done by myself whilst Ewan developed the graphics of the ident and the title sequence.
I tried to create a smooth finish with the editing; we wanted high speed cutting to create tension and thrills.
Elements of psychological thrillers includes high speed editing, motivated editing, cross cutting and a face pace thrilling soundtrack. We have tried to create this in our first rough cut of editing.
However, upon attempting to edit our piece at first to create a similar opening to our animatic, we realised that cross cutting between the two parallel times was confusing and didn't make sense.
We have tried to clarify our piece by changing our narrative slightly, so that our piece is not cross cutting between past and present but stays in the present the whole time and only cross cuts between locations.
We thought this would would make our piece easier to follow as the audience follows the story of the protagonist at the same time.

Embarking on the Editing process

Embarking on the editing process was difficult. It required me to become accustomed with using 'Final Cut Pro'.

In terms of camerawork, I wanted to edit the piece as closely resemble a psychological thriller as much as possible. This included cutting the shots as close together as possible to create high speed editing. I cross cutted between shots on two different locations, interspersing shots of our protagonist running down a tunnel with panning and tracking shots of our antagonist. We hope that the change of speed of action during the scenes will cause tension and build suspense. The slow looming shots of the antagonist interspersed with shots of the protagonist rushing around her bedroom or running down a tunnel builds suspense. It was hard to find the right balance when editing, sometimes upon reviewing the editing I had done, I realised it had become so quick and fast pace that it was actually hard to follow and understand so I had to elongate some shots to make it more understandable.

We had problems with our narrative, and decided to reorder our series of shots to make our final version of our opening sequence more easy to follow. This included rearranging sequences of shots and tightening certain shots to move seamlessly into others. When editing two shots of our protagonist running, I tried to match up the end and beginning of each shot with the next foot our protagonist landed on. We experienced problems with continuity and had to reshoot some scenes. We include a variety of interior, exterior and low light and day light shots.

Sound was also hard to figure out on Final Cut Pro, all music and sound effects had to be matched directly to the video and we used fade in and outs in the music to build suspension. I had to edit the recording of our protagonist's mother in order to make the recording sound like it was coming from our protagonist's mobile phone. I learned how to enable and disable certain clips so i could layer the atmospheric sound that our composer sent us; for instance in shots of our antagonist i layered the original soundtrack with extra creepy atmospheric soundtrack to make it more eerie.

We decided if we used a title sequence inspired by 'True Detective' TV drama for every actor then it would become confusing. So, we have tried to match the 'True Detective' inspired photos on top of the film, using fade in and out transitions. We hope this defines the illusive, thriller aspect of our film.

TITLES

Originally we were using this name (Night Falls Fast) for our ident, however we decided the name would be better suited to out film title due to research into the factual book named 'Night Falls Fast'. We created a logo for the ident already, but then decided that we could try and incorporate it into our titles for the film. This is shown below:

The graphics wouldn't necesarily be on a dark background, but could be overlaid on the video, such as the still shot shown below:

Ewan's Post on Ident

Here is our ident, we wanted the minimalist feel of an independent company, while maintaining enough motion and for it to be swift but interesting. We used a simple fade for the 'Productions' and slowed the spin of the EE as the ident then fades to black.
It was all made using motion.