SANCTUM
Somebody walks among us, somebody with a dark secret, a secret that he will kill for to make sure it stays hidden. No one is safe from him. Frank Terconni a lone police detective has found a trail and is now on the hunt. His life has revolved round him for 3 year, he will never let this lead run cold even if it means becoming him to find him.
"The lucky ones die first"
SWEET DREAMS
Sophie Freeman has recently divorced her husband and has moved away with her daughter Angelica in search for a new life. What lies round the corner will give them their new life... but is it what they dreamed of?
ONE TWO HE'S WATCHING YOU
THREE FOUR THREE KNOCKS AT THE DOOR
FIVE SIX HE'S GOT PLENTY OF TRICKS
SEVEN EIGHT DON'T STAY UP TOO LATE
NINE TEN SWEET DREAMSAMEN...
Friday, 27 March 2009
FINAL EVALUATION :)
The task that I was given was to create an opening of a thriller movie. We had to name our film and give it the real feeling of an actual opening to a movie. The name we gave our movie was sanctum. Sanctum is somewhere, which is safe, which was ironic in the sense that thrillers normally aren’t based on a safe and happy story line. The way I would define the meaning of the thriller film genre would be a film that involves crime that leads to an atmosphere of suspense and something that can have you on the edge of your seats.
In the first 2 minutes of a thriller opening, you need it to be quite fast paced, yet slow enough for people to be able to understand what is happening. You need the opening to be interesting and something that is going to make a great first impression, so that people will want to carry on watching it. However, you do not want to give away too much of the story, as you want to keep people guessing throughout the rest of the film.
The narrative of an opening is also very important, this can be achieved in many ways; dialogue, editing, camera angles and sound.
We don’t have much dialogue in our thriller opening, so we focused on the editing, camera angles and sounds to help create the narrative. The editing we used helped flick between the prior events and events that are happening in the present. We also used sound effects to help create an atmosphere, which meant there was less need for dialogue. The camera angles we used also helped with creating narrative, when you use a camera angle that adds effect, it can sometimes do the talking for you. You can show a lot through a camera, such as how someone is feeling by doing a close up of there face showing an expression, you can also use the camera angles to help build a setting and an atmosphere.
Before we went into creating our own opening, we looked at others, such as Physco and the strangers. This helped us in the task of creating our own. When you look at other openings, you take ideas. Good points and bad points, what you think works and what you think you should avoid when constructing your own opening. If you yourself don’t like something in a opening, I feel that you shouldn’t use it in your own film, however, you still have to be open minded, because just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean other people don’t like it. To help us find out what others wanted to see in a thriller, we constructed and gathered answers from a questionnaire.
We had to make some changes as we went along with our opening. During the planning we decided we were going to have shots of a wedding, however, this would mean finding costumes and many props that we probably wouldn’t be able to find. So the way we got around this was by going to Peterborough Cathedral and taking shots that would give the feel of a wedding sermon, we then took wedding photos, framed them and flicked between the shots of the pictures, and the church scenes. This helped us show our original idea of a wedding, in a different way.
The other thing we had to change was some of the shots we were planning on shooting outside, because when our shooting dates arrived it happened to be the when we got a big snow fall. However, eventually we only had to remove one shot that took place outside; we were able to shoot the other needed shots outside, despite their being snow on the ground. Characters are a big part of a thriller opening, and people often have very typical stereotyping of characters that they feel are often in thrillers.
The characters in our thriller opening represent a middle class newly married couple, we used costume, to show their class, the male being in a suit and the female being smartly dressed, but not over dressed. We also had them holding hands, to convince people that they were a couple.
The media institution that I have chosen to help us to distribute our media product is Universal Pictures. Universal pictures has been running since 1905 and was founded by a Carl Laemmle, they have produced films such as wild child and Shaun of the dead. We decided that our film would be certificate 15. It sticks to the criteria needed to fit in with the universal age 15 age band. They produce a wide variety of films with very different genres, which means universal appeals to many different audiences, therefore is sure to help us attract our audience.
We used a questionnaire to help gather information to who our audience is more likely to be, in our questionnaire we asked questions such as “how old are you?” “what is your gender?”. From our results we found that our main audience gender would be male’s ages between 15 and 25. The main things they expect from a thriller film are suspense, fighting and murder. And the main place they expect a thriller to be set is in an empty house. We took these answers and made it a main part of planning our opening. We then decided we wanted to give the audience what they wanted, without making the film predictable.
We attracted our audience by giving them aspects in our opening of what they wanted, a house, suspense and murder. We also attracted them by keeping a lot of things hidden, so they had to figure things out for themselves, this can sometimes be a bad thing to do, as people start thinking too much about the film, but sometimes it can be a good thing as it keeps people enthralled by the storyline. This also helps them feel as if they have a part to play in the movie, that they are expected to help guess what is going on.
We wanted our audience to start off with the feeling of a really happy go lucky couple that feel safe in their lovely home, which comes back to the irony of the title sanctum. We also wanted them to feel intrigued and inquisitive by our opening. We also used a cliffhanger towards the end to help keep them interested. The BBFC states that their may be frequent use of strong language used, their also may be violence, but this must not dwell on the pain or injury. When looking at the horror, or thriller side of it the BBFC state that Strong threat and menace are permitted. The strongest gory images are unlikely to be acceptable.
Becoming a media studies student has helped me learn a lot about technology. I have learnt that technology isn’t always as reliable as you think it would be, for example. I saved some film to my camera, that did not save properly. However, you can’t always blame technology, as you have to have someone to give instructions to the technology that you are using. I have also learnt a great range of skills. I feel that my skills have developed greatly between the prelim task and our main thriller-opening task. When doing the prelim task, I didn’t feel confident to carry out a great range of shots, but when doing our opening, I suggested shots and filmed shots that I thought would be very effective for our media piece. My editing knowledge and skills have also improved greatly; I now understand completely how to edit a piece of footage using Adobe Premier Pro. I can cut and overlap shots. I can join and shorten shots and I can change the colour of the original footage. By improving my skills, it means I improve the quality of my work, and know that I am using all I can to make the work the best of my ability.
When doing my prelim task, I learnt a lot of things that effected what I did with my thriller task. When producing the prelim task, we realised that we didn’t have enough takes of each scene, to put together a good piece of final footage, so when filming our thriller task we made sure we shot 3 of each scene, so when it comes to editing, we have a choice and can choose the best shot to make our opening the best that it could be. Another thing we learnt while doing our prelim task was that you have to be careful who you choose to star in the production you are doing, when doing our prelim task we asked two people who at the time we though were going to be dedicated and reliable, yet turned out not to be when it came to shooting, this meant that we had to search around for last minute actors, this was a mixture of organisation skills going wrong and misjudging people. So when it came to film our thriller, we gave the actors plenty of notice, set a place to meet, walked to our filming destination and sorted everything out weeks in advance, which actually took a lot of pressure off when it came to the shooting day. There were 3 people in my group, Harriette, James and myself. I chose to work with Harriette and James as they are people I get along well with, find easy to speak openly with and I know are hard working people. My own opinion is that we worked extremely well as a group. All decisions were made together, and all decisions were made for what was going to be better for the media product on a whole. If the group had a problem, we would over come It by discussing our problems, and creating a list of solutions, if we had an idea we would create pro’s and con’s lists to help us decide what to keep and what to get rid of. I think it is important that when you work in a group, you support each others ideas, and try them out before completely dismissing them; I think this is one of the main reasons why our group worked pretty well together. We all worked on all aspects of the production. We all filmed, we all edited and we all planned, we felt that this was the best way to share out responsibility and made sure everyone felt involved. We helped each other if we struggled, and we found out who was best at what, and used that to help put our thriller opening together.
Overall I am extremely happy with the piece of media production me and my group created, I feel that we have improved massively since the start of the year when doing our prelim task.
We worked hard together to create the best piece of film that we possibly could. If I had to go and do my thriller opening all over again, the things that I would change would be; to get better shots of the Cathedral right at the start of the opening, to help give a clearer feel of a wedding taking place.
There are also a few continuity issues that arise, as a member of the public audience; I don’t think they are so clear that you could pick them out as a major problem. But when you become the person creating, editing and shooting the piece of footage, you find it easier to criticise your work.
In the first 2 minutes of a thriller opening, you need it to be quite fast paced, yet slow enough for people to be able to understand what is happening. You need the opening to be interesting and something that is going to make a great first impression, so that people will want to carry on watching it. However, you do not want to give away too much of the story, as you want to keep people guessing throughout the rest of the film.
The narrative of an opening is also very important, this can be achieved in many ways; dialogue, editing, camera angles and sound.
We don’t have much dialogue in our thriller opening, so we focused on the editing, camera angles and sounds to help create the narrative. The editing we used helped flick between the prior events and events that are happening in the present. We also used sound effects to help create an atmosphere, which meant there was less need for dialogue. The camera angles we used also helped with creating narrative, when you use a camera angle that adds effect, it can sometimes do the talking for you. You can show a lot through a camera, such as how someone is feeling by doing a close up of there face showing an expression, you can also use the camera angles to help build a setting and an atmosphere.
Before we went into creating our own opening, we looked at others, such as Physco and the strangers. This helped us in the task of creating our own. When you look at other openings, you take ideas. Good points and bad points, what you think works and what you think you should avoid when constructing your own opening. If you yourself don’t like something in a opening, I feel that you shouldn’t use it in your own film, however, you still have to be open minded, because just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean other people don’t like it. To help us find out what others wanted to see in a thriller, we constructed and gathered answers from a questionnaire.
We had to make some changes as we went along with our opening. During the planning we decided we were going to have shots of a wedding, however, this would mean finding costumes and many props that we probably wouldn’t be able to find. So the way we got around this was by going to Peterborough Cathedral and taking shots that would give the feel of a wedding sermon, we then took wedding photos, framed them and flicked between the shots of the pictures, and the church scenes. This helped us show our original idea of a wedding, in a different way.
The other thing we had to change was some of the shots we were planning on shooting outside, because when our shooting dates arrived it happened to be the when we got a big snow fall. However, eventually we only had to remove one shot that took place outside; we were able to shoot the other needed shots outside, despite their being snow on the ground. Characters are a big part of a thriller opening, and people often have very typical stereotyping of characters that they feel are often in thrillers.
The characters in our thriller opening represent a middle class newly married couple, we used costume, to show their class, the male being in a suit and the female being smartly dressed, but not over dressed. We also had them holding hands, to convince people that they were a couple.
The media institution that I have chosen to help us to distribute our media product is Universal Pictures. Universal pictures has been running since 1905 and was founded by a Carl Laemmle, they have produced films such as wild child and Shaun of the dead. We decided that our film would be certificate 15. It sticks to the criteria needed to fit in with the universal age 15 age band. They produce a wide variety of films with very different genres, which means universal appeals to many different audiences, therefore is sure to help us attract our audience.
We used a questionnaire to help gather information to who our audience is more likely to be, in our questionnaire we asked questions such as “how old are you?” “what is your gender?”. From our results we found that our main audience gender would be male’s ages between 15 and 25. The main things they expect from a thriller film are suspense, fighting and murder. And the main place they expect a thriller to be set is in an empty house. We took these answers and made it a main part of planning our opening. We then decided we wanted to give the audience what they wanted, without making the film predictable.
We attracted our audience by giving them aspects in our opening of what they wanted, a house, suspense and murder. We also attracted them by keeping a lot of things hidden, so they had to figure things out for themselves, this can sometimes be a bad thing to do, as people start thinking too much about the film, but sometimes it can be a good thing as it keeps people enthralled by the storyline. This also helps them feel as if they have a part to play in the movie, that they are expected to help guess what is going on.
We wanted our audience to start off with the feeling of a really happy go lucky couple that feel safe in their lovely home, which comes back to the irony of the title sanctum. We also wanted them to feel intrigued and inquisitive by our opening. We also used a cliffhanger towards the end to help keep them interested. The BBFC states that their may be frequent use of strong language used, their also may be violence, but this must not dwell on the pain or injury. When looking at the horror, or thriller side of it the BBFC state that Strong threat and menace are permitted. The strongest gory images are unlikely to be acceptable.
Becoming a media studies student has helped me learn a lot about technology. I have learnt that technology isn’t always as reliable as you think it would be, for example. I saved some film to my camera, that did not save properly. However, you can’t always blame technology, as you have to have someone to give instructions to the technology that you are using. I have also learnt a great range of skills. I feel that my skills have developed greatly between the prelim task and our main thriller-opening task. When doing the prelim task, I didn’t feel confident to carry out a great range of shots, but when doing our opening, I suggested shots and filmed shots that I thought would be very effective for our media piece. My editing knowledge and skills have also improved greatly; I now understand completely how to edit a piece of footage using Adobe Premier Pro. I can cut and overlap shots. I can join and shorten shots and I can change the colour of the original footage. By improving my skills, it means I improve the quality of my work, and know that I am using all I can to make the work the best of my ability.
When doing my prelim task, I learnt a lot of things that effected what I did with my thriller task. When producing the prelim task, we realised that we didn’t have enough takes of each scene, to put together a good piece of final footage, so when filming our thriller task we made sure we shot 3 of each scene, so when it comes to editing, we have a choice and can choose the best shot to make our opening the best that it could be. Another thing we learnt while doing our prelim task was that you have to be careful who you choose to star in the production you are doing, when doing our prelim task we asked two people who at the time we though were going to be dedicated and reliable, yet turned out not to be when it came to shooting, this meant that we had to search around for last minute actors, this was a mixture of organisation skills going wrong and misjudging people. So when it came to film our thriller, we gave the actors plenty of notice, set a place to meet, walked to our filming destination and sorted everything out weeks in advance, which actually took a lot of pressure off when it came to the shooting day. There were 3 people in my group, Harriette, James and myself. I chose to work with Harriette and James as they are people I get along well with, find easy to speak openly with and I know are hard working people. My own opinion is that we worked extremely well as a group. All decisions were made together, and all decisions were made for what was going to be better for the media product on a whole. If the group had a problem, we would over come It by discussing our problems, and creating a list of solutions, if we had an idea we would create pro’s and con’s lists to help us decide what to keep and what to get rid of. I think it is important that when you work in a group, you support each others ideas, and try them out before completely dismissing them; I think this is one of the main reasons why our group worked pretty well together. We all worked on all aspects of the production. We all filmed, we all edited and we all planned, we felt that this was the best way to share out responsibility and made sure everyone felt involved. We helped each other if we struggled, and we found out who was best at what, and used that to help put our thriller opening together.
Overall I am extremely happy with the piece of media production me and my group created, I feel that we have improved massively since the start of the year when doing our prelim task.
We worked hard together to create the best piece of film that we possibly could. If I had to go and do my thriller opening all over again, the things that I would change would be; to get better shots of the Cathedral right at the start of the opening, to help give a clearer feel of a wedding taking place.
There are also a few continuity issues that arise, as a member of the public audience; I don’t think they are so clear that you could pick them out as a major problem. But when you become the person creating, editing and shooting the piece of footage, you find it easier to criticise your work.
Thursday, 26 February 2009
shooting script.
Open with shots of wedding photos, a newspaper, and a telephone - to set the scene, and mistery?
we then follow to the couple walking towards the house, use mid shots and long shots, and also point of view shots.
the couple will then split up. - man going upstairs, lady staying downstairs.
lady sees figure in mirror.
turns round - noithing there.
lady goes upstairs to tell husband to hurry up in the shower.
the murder happens - very fast.
titles & screaming.
we then follow to the couple walking towards the house, use mid shots and long shots, and also point of view shots.
the couple will then split up. - man going upstairs, lady staying downstairs.
lady sees figure in mirror.
turns round - noithing there.
lady goes upstairs to tell husband to hurry up in the shower.
the murder happens - very fast.
titles & screaming.
our thriller opening.
We decided to call our film sanctum .
The opening is looking at a newlywedded couple who have just got back off their honeymoon. but do they have someone unwanted to welcome them back?.
Problems we had when filming
During the time we were due to film our opening. we had the biggest fall of snow we had ever seen. this cause some problems as we were planning to film outside for some scenes.
however, we managed to work through this and filmed the inside shots before waiting for the weather to settle.
things that went well
James, Harriette & I all worked very well together, sharing idea's and giving adivce to make our film to the best of our abilaty.
Our actors we're very flexiable with what they would do and very patient with us.
we made sure we got enough shots, so we wouldn't get to editing and it not fall together right.
The opening is looking at a newlywedded couple who have just got back off their honeymoon. but do they have someone unwanted to welcome them back?.
Problems we had when filming
During the time we were due to film our opening. we had the biggest fall of snow we had ever seen. this cause some problems as we were planning to film outside for some scenes.
however, we managed to work through this and filmed the inside shots before waiting for the weather to settle.
things that went well
James, Harriette & I all worked very well together, sharing idea's and giving adivce to make our film to the best of our abilaty.
Our actors we're very flexiable with what they would do and very patient with us.
we made sure we got enough shots, so we wouldn't get to editing and it not fall together right.
Wednesday, 10 December 2008
Questionnaire results.
Ages asked.
one 8 year old.
one 10 year old
eight 16 year olds.
three 17 year olds.
two 19 year olds
one 38 year old.
one 43 year old.
two 45 year old.
one 57 year old.
8 males.
12 females.
Martial status :
7 in a relationship
8 single.
5 married.
Occuputation :
student-10
office work- 4
comunity- 2
other - 4
Favourite type of film :
Thriller :3
romance:6
musical:5
disaster:1
fantasy:0
horror :7
animated:4
action:5
drama:2
sci fi: 1
Comedy: 6
Do they:
Buy dvds:13
Go to the cinema: 12
Watch online: 7
Have sky movies: 8
how many films do you watch a week?
0-2 : 7
3-5:7
6-8:3
more than 8 : 3
who do you watch your films with?
Friends : 16
Family :14
Alone :11
Partner :9
what do you expect from a thriller?
murder :10
Chase: 10
Stalking: 8
Fighting: 12
Suspence:13
Cliff Hanger: 7
What do you expect to hear?
Screams : 10
wind/storm: 9
Footsteps : 11
Heavy breathing : 9
Silence : 11
Creepy Music : 10
Setting.
woods: 10
empty house:11
church:10
field:10
campsite: 9
dark place: 10
Characters.
Murders :14.
Teenagers : 14
Zombies: 4
Halloween characters : 4
victims : 14
Villans : 10
one 8 year old.
one 10 year old
eight 16 year olds.
three 17 year olds.
two 19 year olds
one 38 year old.
one 43 year old.
two 45 year old.
one 57 year old.
8 males.
12 females.
Martial status :
7 in a relationship
8 single.
5 married.
Occuputation :
student-10
office work- 4
comunity- 2
other - 4
Favourite type of film :
Thriller :3
romance:6
musical:5
disaster:1
fantasy:0
horror :7
animated:4
action:5
drama:2
sci fi: 1
Comedy: 6
Do they:
Buy dvds:13
Go to the cinema: 12
Watch online: 7
Have sky movies: 8
how many films do you watch a week?
0-2 : 7
3-5:7
6-8:3
more than 8 : 3
who do you watch your films with?
Friends : 16
Family :14
Alone :11
Partner :9
what do you expect from a thriller?
murder :10
Chase: 10
Stalking: 8
Fighting: 12
Suspence:13
Cliff Hanger: 7
What do you expect to hear?
Screams : 10
wind/storm: 9
Footsteps : 11
Heavy breathing : 9
Silence : 11
Creepy Music : 10
Setting.
woods: 10
empty house:11
church:10
field:10
campsite: 9
dark place: 10
Characters.
Murders :14.
Teenagers : 14
Zombies: 4
Halloween characters : 4
victims : 14
Villans : 10
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