Friday 19th March - Rough Draft Hand In

In this lesson, Shaun, Charlotte and I uploaded the video. This took us most of the lesson but it eventually uploaded. I feel as though we have worked well as a team to get the outcome we have got. I feel as though the ideas contributed were helpful from everyone and were all used in some way towards the final thriller. We helped each other out with props and location and each contributed to the research such as risk assessment and drawing up the storyboard.

There were some downsides to the task. For example when we could not get the film to capture properly in the first few lessons and we had to keep making a new project. However, we overcame this even though it made us a few hours behind; we all caught up outside of the lesson.

Overall, i am pleased with the outcome, and the ideas we all contributed to it.

Monday 15th March

In today’s lesson, Charlotte, Shaun and I again carried on with our editing. We decided on the final name of the thriller, which was 'The Associate'. We chose this name through the questionnaire that we carried out, which resulted in the decision for that name. We then looked back through the scenes we has edited together, to see where we wanted to put it. We made a practice edit so we could mess around with the editing and transitions. We placed the credits in front of Shaun, when he was walking up to the house. We chose the transition, 'crawl'. This made the title lead in front of Shaun and not overlap him. It looked as good as we wanted it too and so we placed this onto the final edit. We then showed Mr Mitchell our work; he gave us some feedback to act on. He gave us the feedback to make the font larger on the credits otherwise it is quite hard to read them when you are watching it on a large screen. We made these changes and also made the name of the thriller a lot larger so that it is easier to read.

We then had a lot of extra time in the lesson, so we decided to go through our blogs and update what we had done. We looked back through our photos and cropped some of them down. We made colour changes to some of the posts and made writing larger. This made our blogs look neater.

Friday 12th March

In todays lesson, Charlotte, Shaun and I, again carried on editing.We looked back over out work to see what we had done in the previous lesson. We look at the credits we had already done and decided they were suitable for the effect we wanted to create. We then decided to look at music. We looked on various different websites to see what music was available to us. We found many different ones but decided on five to choose from. We then put each piece of music into the thriller, and listened to each one after another. We narrowed it down to two and it took us all quite a while to figure out which one worked best. We finally decided on the piece of music called, ‘shunned’. This piece of music was really good for the effect we wanted. It is not too horror like, but builds up suspense as Shaun is walking making the audience wonder where he is going and why he is going there. Next lesson we are planning to put the main title into the thriller. We will use the same font as we have used for the rest of the credits so that it does not look disjointed and all looks similar.

Monday 8th March - capturing and editing

In this lesson we began by looking back over our work that we captured in the last lesson. We still thought that it looked good and felt that we did not have to change anything. We then started to insert effects and transitions. We saved a separate file so that we could play around with them without having the risk of messing it all up. We tried a lot of different transitions, as we wanted to create quite a disturbed, glitch effect. We could not find one that we wanted but found one similar. We inserted this in one part of it and showed sir to see what he thought of it. His feedback helped and we began to insert this into the proper one. We then had a look at the effects. We were looking at these for a long while but finally decided we did not need any. We saved this again and looked at it from start to finish. We then realised we needed to insert the name of the thriller. We remembered the font that we had previously used for our opening credits and used it again for this one. We inserted it and it looked good. We then decided that the font was too small on all of the writing, so we made all of them bigger.

Friday 5th March - capturing and editing

Today, Shaun, Charlotte and I captured the rest of the thriller that we shot on Wednesday, onto the Premier programme. We looked at all the scenes we had done and re-named them according to which ones were good and which ones were useless. We then imported them into the sequence that we had already put together on premier so that we could cut and edit them into it. We did this really quickly and had finished before everyone else. This gave us time to figure out how we were going to put the name of the film into it and also did we have time to re-shoot if we needed to. We then analysed what we had done so that we knew what to improve on or if we needed to change anything. We found that we did not need to change anything.

Wednesday 3rd March - filming

Today we booked out the cameras so we could take them out of school. We travelled to my house, where we had planned to film this part of the thriller. We took the storyboard with us so that we knew which scenes we needed to shoot and how we were going to shoot them. Charlotte then started to film. We began filming on the street that lead up to the house, this went well and I as we had the right lighting and Shaun worked well with us as sometimes cars went by and it was hard for me and Charlotte to film it. We then moved up the drive to film Shaun coming up the other way. This was really good as the setting was perfect and we used the camera well to get the right parts of the trees in like it is shown on our storyboard. I then filmed Shaun going into the house; this was quite simple as the lighting was good as it had changed as we moved up the drive, making it look darker as we went inside. We then filmed inside. Charlotte then positioned the camera inside the house, on the stairs; this was a bit tricky as the tripod did not fit on the stairs. However, she managed to film Shaun walking in the door well by holding the camera still.

We then travelled to another house, where we had planned to film Natasha, as the old woman. This went well. We set up the large light in the correct place and began to film. I shot Tasha in a long shot from the end of the room, rocking in a rocking chair. The camera panned upwards slowly viewing the character from the feet upwards. This gave the audience the feel of the character. Shaun then filmed Tasha close up. We tried to create the effect of a hand held, unsteady atmosphere. This would make the audience feel as though there was a sense of worry and tension.

Monday 1st March - Filming and capturing

In this lesson I feel as though we made alot of progress. We had already captured our beginning to our thriller lat the end of last lesson so we could view it straight away next lesson. We then looked at what we had shot and deleted the scenes that were not useful to us. We then had a look at the shots that were left and found that many of them were useful. The named some of them as useful so that we could go back and use them with ease instead of having to search through them all again. We looked at our story board and Charlotte placed the certain shots into the movie maker programme after we all decided where about each section needed to be cut. I then had a go at putting in the credits. We all decided on a font and placed it on the screen where we wanted it to go. We wrote everyone’s names and the production company but then realised we did not have a name for our thriller. We then had a look at the few names we had put together and did a survey to ask people which one they preferred. We ended up choosing the associate. We felt this was relevant to what we the storyline we created.