Grace Suiter - AS Media Studies
Filming
January 21st 2015.
Today was the day we decided to do our filming and we came to our decision through process of elimination. We discovered that trying to find a day where all of our actors and actresses were all available was extremely difficult because they all have different work and school commitments and this meant that we had to change some of our cast. However this wasn't a major difficulty because as long as we had a blonde main character, it would be fine. Josh Obisanya who was our clown was really easy to work with and was available whenever we needed him. Emily Owen who was our main female character was also available when we needed her and in order to meet our filming deadline, we had to film in the week beginning 19th January. Wednesday 21st was the day which we could all commit to and so we all made our way to Shouldham Warren at around 4 o'clock and this left us with around one hour's worth of natural lighting and any time after this would involve using extremely powerful spotlights. This strategy did work and we decided that any shots which were too dark would have to be re-shot. The spotlights were extremely powerful and created a spotlight on the key parts which we wanted to film. For example, when we were filming Emily on the floor, it was towards the end of our filming period, around 5:30 and it was quite dark and the trees added to this ambience. However, we used the spotlight and travelled along with the camera and so it focused on the main part. The filming went really successfully and we were extremely pleased with the footage which we captured. We captured plenty and this allowed us to pick and choose the best footage to include and this allowed us to be critical with the shots which we did capture.
Editing
27th January 2015
Katie and I began editing our thriller opening and our first step was to download all of the footage and select which clips would and would not be suitable. This would allow us to invision how we expect our thriller opening to look and see if we needed to film any extra shots. We decided that the clips we had shot were all suitable and the next step was to order them into a sequence which was close to our storyboard and was something like what we expected. This took us a lot of time because we had to order them in a way which we thought would appeal to our target audience. We tried it in all different ways and if we thought it looked more like a trailer, then we were quick to change it. We used Sony Vegas Pro 11 and we tried cutting different clips and overlapping them to create the fade effect. We really liked the fade effect because it looks very professional and looks like a smooth transition from two different clips. Once we had put the clips in a sequence, we inserted the credits. This involved inserting a blank screen where the text would then appear over the top of the clip. They appeared wherever there was a blank space and wherever the characters were not and this then didn't take the focus off one thing or another. I also found a way to insert a blank screen before any of the footage appeared and it then slowly faded into the establishing shot of the forest, which goes in a vertical direction. That is my favourite shot in the thriller opening because it looks really professional and is a great beginning to our opening. Finding the soundtrack was the most difficult task because we did not really like many of the sounds which we searched for; especially royalty free. We searched on YouTube and there were quite a few users who put in their description that we could use it for any projects as long as we credited them properly. We therefore discovered a really good soundtrack which is the soundtrack in our rough cut and it sounds really suspenseful and adds a lot of tension.