Changes have now been made...

Since the crit. session about 2 weeks ago, myself & Shazna have made all the changes that were needed to be made on our film opening. The conversation scene has been edited out which has improved our opening a lot. Since watching it back without this particular scene, I've really realised how much it wasn't needed and how much it ruined the rest of our opening. Another point that people brought up was the typography of the names that come up throughout the sequence. We've edited these out, and now have the names of myself, Shazna and Lucy coming up on a black background and written in white in order to make them stand out. We also decided to no longer have the titles on our actual opening images as during the crit. session I realised that they took the attention off of the actual scene, and just ruined the atmosphere that we were trying to create.

Another issue with our film opening that was raised in the crit. session was the title of our film. It was originally 'He's Coming After You', but after the responses about it from people we decided to change this to something more original. I thought it would be a good idea to have something like 'murder', 'stalker' or 'following' in Latin. We looked up the translation of all these words last week, and decided that one of the translations for murder was the best choice. So now, our film is called 'Cruoris'! Now that all of our editing has been completed we're both happy with the results, so now all thats left to do is the evaluation due in for this Friday!

Crit. Session

In Friday's media lesson our film openings were shown for the first time. When ours was shown, I was quite nervous as I had no idea what everyone else would think of it. We did get quite a lot of positive feedback from it, and got some good comments back from our teacher about what we'd done. When watching our opening back I did notice some things that I wasn't happy with that I hadn't really noticed when editing on the macs, and the people in our class also noticed these and suggested we edited them to make our opening better. These include: editing out the conversation scene, changing the title of the film & changing the typography of the credits. It was pointed out that the title (He's Coming After You') gave away the plot of the film, and it was suggested that we possibly change the title to something in Latin. I really like this idea, and will talk to Shazna about what she thinks in our next lesson. The typography also really does not fit in with the sequence, and ruins the atmosphere. This is one of the main things I also realised when it was shown, so we will definitely be changing those when we can. We are planning to start making these changes in the next few days in time for the deadline at the end of next week. Fingers crossed we will get it done in time!

Influences for our film opening

One of the main film openings we looked at for ideas for our own was 'Se7en'. When we watched this film opening in lesson, we both liked the images of the opening which give the audience the idea that the stalker has an obsession with religion and is intricately planning how to kill his victims. This is done in Se7en by the audience seeing the character of the murderer putting a great amount of detail in creating a religious symbol from the Bible and finding out information about the Seven Deadly Sins, a clear sign to the audience that this character is very religious and is planning to kill. We liked the idea of seeing a stalker planning to kill his victim, as like it did when we saw the Se7en opening, it creates tension to the audience and makes them want to keep on watching. We also liked how the opening of Se7en was in black and white and how it gave the scene an eerie and mysterious feel. Again we thought this would be a good idea for our own film opening, so to give our stalker scenes the same eerie feel we edited them to be black and white as they are in Se7en. Our music choice was also influenced by Se7en. The music in the film opening is fast paced but has an edgy feel about it, and as the scene goes on it gets louder which helps create an eerie atmosphere to the audience. By using similar techniques to the Se7en film opening we hope to have created a similar edgy feel and build the same tension to the audience as Se7en did to us when we watched it.

Animatic

So this is our animatic for our film opening 'He's Coming After You'. We decided to draw out our storyboard pictures onto post it notes so that we could move scenes around if they didn't look right. Some of the ideas we have drawn out in our animatic have changed since we originally drew them due to some last minute changes we made when it came to filming. However this only affects a few of the scenes and everything else is pretty much the same as our film opening.

Script

This is the script from our film opening. I forgot to post it on here around the time we were filming, so here it is now:

(victim walks up to friend, who is standing in the park waiting for her. They start a conversation.)
Friend: Hey, are you alright? You look a bit worried...
Victim: Yeah I'm fine, just thought I was being followed again, thats all.
Friend: What, again?! Thats like the fifth time in two weeks.
Victim: I know, but its probably nothing. Nothing to worry about.
Friend: I'm not so sure. I don't think you should walk through here on your own anymore, its getting too freaky.
Victim: Its fine, honestly. As I said its probably nothing. Now come on, lets go...
(as they walk away, victim looks over her shoulder to see if anyone is behind her, with worried expression on her face.)

Pretty much everything is complete...

We've been able to edit the sound on the conversation scene so that now the audience can hear myself and Lucy speaking and still hear the music in the background. Now that we've done this our editing is finished! Yay!
All that is left to do now is to add the animatic onto our blogs. I will be trying to do this over the weekend so hopefully by next week it shall be up on here (at last!).

Continuity Sequence

This is our continuity sequence that myself, Shazna, Lucy and Chris did quite a few months ago.