Notes on todays lesson.

What we expected from the first 2 minutes of a thriller:

An introduction to protagonist, titles, who will be starring, non diagetic music, a few background details of the protagonist, an establishing shot.

What we actually saw in the first 2 minutes of Mememto:

We meet protagonist who wears a wedding ring and has a tatoo on his hand/arm, we see titles and cast members, we learn the man kills someone, the photograph is important as it is focused on for a long amount of time, rewinding of killing is a symbol of loss of memory?Dark, bloody, broken setting, music is syncronus and non diagetic along with the noise of the phtograph flapping-diagetic and syncronus- , the man wears a suit portraying him as a professional? cut face, violent man, emotionless worn out face, exhausted.Planned the whole thing, camera, gun, sheets surrounding the two men, derilict building.

A late evaluation of our preliminary task.

I thought the end result was good quality. The continuity was fluid and i believe we had a clear understanding of the task and this was reflected in our work. I do however think it would have been better with a little more non diagectic syncronus sound, but this was difficult and took a long time to produce at good standard so late in production.

The response from our peers was very supportive with a few constructive points about the sound. Perhaps we could also have added some diagetic syncronus sound, although this would not have been consistant with our 'noir' theme.

Overall i am pleased with our film and its been a very useful task that will undoubtably help with our thriller opening.

The Definition of the Thriller genre and a list of the genre's key director's

Definition of a thriller:

www.answers.com simply puts that “a Thriller is a suspenseful, sensational story or film”. However www.wikipedia.org goes into to much for detail stating that “...Thriller is a broad genre of literature, film and television that includes numerous and often overlapping sub-genres. Thrillers are characterized by fast pacing, frequent action, and resourceful heroes who must thwart the plans of more-powerful and better-equipped villains”. www.illteraty.com claims that “a Thriller contains certain characteristics. The pace must be quick, there has to be a lot of action, and there should be suspense and plot twists aplenty. Thrillers should have the reader on the edge of their seat, wondering if the good guy can get one over the bad guy and save the world (even though it's extremely rare for the bad guy to win, in your classic Thriller).”


Famous Directors of the Thriller genre:

Alfred Hitchcock, AKA the master of suspense, directed movies such as The Birds, Psycho and Vertigo.

Martin Scorsese, known for collaborating with Robert De Niro directed films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Cape Fear.

Stephen Spielberg, one of the most successful directors of all time, directed classic’s like Jaws, the Indiana Jones series and Jurassic Park.

James Cameron, who recently released £200 million blockbuster Avatar, directed films like the Alien Series, the Terminator Series and Titanic

Quentin Tarantino, known for his non-linear storylines and the sue of violence, has directed films like Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs

Christopher Nolan, best known for reviving the Batman franchise has directed films like Memento, (a film we are to study as a class soon and one I would recommend!) The Dark Knight/Batman Begins and The Prestige.

David Fincher, known for his dark and stylish movies, directed classic film’s like Fight Club, Se7en and Zodiac

Examples of thrillers

To clarify, here is a list of the most popular thriller films according to IMDB website and filmsite:

The Shining, Fight club, A clockwork orange, In the line of fire, Basic instinct, Pulp fiction, Silence of the lambs, The godfather, The dark night, Rear window, The matrix, Memento, Se7en, Leon, North by Northwest...

Here is a link to a movie clip of 'Memento' a film we will be studying in class and also a link to 'Leon' a film i particularly like. Later on i will post the actual clips of the films directly onto this blog.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vS0E9bBSL0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc1KzpMnuX0

Thiller conventions and sub-genres

CONVENTIONS: thillers are generally fast paced, action packed and based around a hero defeating the plans of a villain or indeed killing the villain- typically the hero is a butch male accustomed to fighting, but this is not always the case. Female heroines are becoming more popular as are heroes who have accedentally or unwillingly been drawn into the situation.- There is also usually a helpless heorine in need to rescue from the villain, hense the masculine hero.

Thillers are often compared to mysterys due to the defeating of the criminal or antagonist. However the general scale of the crime is much larger (multiple murder, torture, general jeapody and violence...) heroes often know all along who the villain is, and defeat their further plans unlike mysteries that tend to uncover the villain at the end.

A thriller must be emotive, it must 'thrill' the audience and lead them from one thing to another allowing them to geuss what is to happen next, only to be proven wrong, but adding to the suspense.

SUB GENRES: These are ever growing. As long as the thriller contains the conventions there appears to be no limit as to what kind of sub genre could be in the background.

Here is a list of frequently used sub genres:
spy thriller, action-adventure thriller, medical thriller, police thriller, romantic thriller, historical thriller, political thriller, religious thriller, high-tech thriller, military thriller.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thriller_(genre)

Our Production Logo

When we were starting our film, Hannah and I had a discussion of what our production name and our logo should be. It was me that suggested "Palendrome Productions" when it had come up in conversation earlier that day when I told Hannah that her name was a palendrome. After brainstorming some ideas for a coupkle of minutes we also decided on the logo of 2 "P's" with the second one backwards in reference to the title.

I created the two P's that you can see on the top of our blog on Photoshop using my brothers Mac and a tutorial on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pOkaC4eHsE) The rest of the text was simply laid out using the text tool. This created a JPEG image file. Blogger gives you the option to upload JPEG images as headers, so I clicked this link, uploaded the file and it placed the image for me and drew a border round it.

What we did today!

Well actually I'm first going to tell you what we did yesterday first. Yesterday, we started off the lesson by creating the title's music that occurs at the start of the film. ( see link below!! ) We did this on Garageband on the Mac's. I found this program very useful and Hannah and I had a lot of different types of music to choose from. In the end we chose an energetic, high beat piece that we had created ourselves as we found this matched the mood and the genre of the film. We also decided to go in at lunch as we had run out of time in the lesson to finally tidy up all of the editing and add in some subtitle's to the conversation scene in our film.

However today, as a class, we decided which 5 areas we would be analysing our films on. After much debate, we decided on Continuity and Editing, Fullfilling the Brief, Camerawork, Mise-en-Scene and Sound. We then watched each other films and gave each film either a "poor", a "good" or an "excellent" for each area. Here are the results we got from each group:

Ciaran,Milly and Sophie:

Camerawork: Excellent
Fullfilling Brief: Excellent
Continuity: Excellent
Mise-en-Scene: Good
Sound: Good

Harry and Chris:

Camerawork: Excellent
Fullfilling Brief: Excellent
Continuity: Excellent
Mise-en-Scene: Good
Sound: Good

Jake, Daniel and Emma:

Camerawork: Good
Fullfilling Brief: Good
Continuity: Good
Mise-en-Scene: Good
Sound: Good

Rachel, Roisin, Gemma and Jade:

Camerawork: Good
Fullfilling Brief: Excellent
Continuity: Excellent
Mise-en-Scene: Excellent
Sound: Excellent

Matt and Will

Camerawork: Good
Fullfilling Brief: Good
Continuity: Excellent
Mise-en-Scene: Good
Sound: Good

Looking over this feedback, it seemed that most of the groups did like our film. The one area that seemed to be marked the lowest was Sound. This is most probably because the only sound in our film is the music at the start. Though we used subtitles to go over the conversation scene, this seemed to not appeal to most of the groups and this is maybe something we should think about when we do our proper task.

The Film!

About our film.

I've realised we havent actually explained what our film is about or the reasons/motivations behind it, so here's a brief explanation.
Its a preliminary task for our AS work in media. The aim is to create fluid continuity throughout, and show development and understanding of the task. We were asked to create a film showing a person opening a door, crossing a room, sitting down and having a conversation with somebody else. It should also include 180 degree rule and shot reverse shot.
The short film we have created is very simply about a woman delivering an envelope to a man. The circumstances behind it are very much ambiguous so every audience member will think somthing different of it, based on thier own representations.
The ideas we first came up with were based around more of an action film but it changed as we filmed, and found flaws and difficulties in shots and settings. The silence and the black and white idea came about when we did our pre-preliminary task. We found it looked smarter and made the whole piece something a little different.
I hope this clarifies things and we both hope you like the final product.

We'd appreciate your input.

We've been working on our editing today and the film is coming along well, soon to be posted; if you have any comments or questions about the film please dont hesitate to write. Music is to be hopefully be completed tomorrow

Our First Post!

We know this is quite a late first post yet me and Hannah had difficulties getting into our blog after making it,(Password issues!). Well, we finished the main bulk of our filming last week which me and Hannah both thought went rather well. We did have a hard time getting a "Dolly" to do some moving shots in our film (especially getting one that worked properly) yet in the end we were quite pleased with the results.

At the end of the week, on Wednesday's and Thursday's lesson I was without Hannah as she had other commitments with the American exchange program she is a part of. I therefore spent my time alone uploading our footage onto the Mac's at school and started to edit our footage. I managed to roughly edit all of the footage we chose to go in our film on the first lesson on Wednesday and on Thursday I managed to make a Palendrome Productuions Logo and the Productions film clip with help of Davide Hodgeson-Lorente with whom we did our practise Preliminary task. he also is an Actor in the end section of our film.

In Today's lesson however, Hannah was back and we spent most of the lesson making sure she liked all of the editing I had done in the previous lessons and that she approved of the companies logo that Davide and I had created. She was in the end, very posotive and approved with the logo. Hannah then spent the rest of the lesson experimenting on Garageband in the hope of creating a piece of music that we could include in our film while I tried to tidy up our storyboards which you can see at the the top of the blog.

We now have tomorrow's lesson to finish our film and then on Thursday we will present it to the class!

Ruaraidh

Our Storyboards!

Slide 1




Slide 2


Slide 3