Feedback for final production

1) Camerawork

Point of view was effective.
Variety of shots was effective.
Close ups added intrigue.

2) Sound

Heartbeat added tension and suspense.
Diegetic sound, running, and a catchy soundtrack.

3) mise-en-scene

Restricted view of characters adds to thriller effect.
Made use of forest, thrillery.
Lighting was dark and tinted

4) Editing

Colour correction
Fade at the beginning
The title screen is very good.

5) Constructive critisism

Shot duration of the red room needs to be longer.
Repetitive use of camera angles.
The last static shot had no text.
Turn down the sound.
A more subtle use of colour correction needed.

6) Most effective element of the project

Sound added atmosphere
Point of view shots.

Final Cut - The Watching

Analysis of opening sequence (Se7en)

Se7en (1995) is a crime drama mystery film, so it is not the same genre as  our film. However, there are many similarities between our psychological thriller and this crime film.

camerawork
the camerawork in this opening sequence helps to develop the genre. the shots are often of a long duration which causes the audience to feel the strangeness of the scenes involved.  when the shots arent slow and long they are very fast paced, which confuses the audience. a very large amount of the camera angles are extreme close-ups, this engages the attention and also makes you feel like you are watching something that you should not be watching.

editing

There are a lot of jump cuts, which add to the tension as they are very sudden changes, it makes the audience feel wary. when the titles appear there are flashes of light in which you can see an unclear picture. the titles also seem to shake which add to the strangeness. as well as this there are repeats of some of the credits which flash across. there is the occasional effect in which the subject of the picture seems to be blurring as it moves, i think this makes it seem as though the subject is moving faster but when you pay attention to it it is going at an ordinar pace. there are also alarming squiggles which appear and disappear very quickly.

mise en scene
the sequence contains scrapbook making, including needles, photographs, a book, the fingers working away creating a scrapbook, the shadow of the person. also when you can see the writing you can read stuff about pregnancy and transsexuals which combined with everything else causes these subjects to seem very creepy, especially as the character involved is crossing out soe words with a marker pen

sound

The sound in the Se7en opening is mostly non-diegetic music. The music is highly distorted, like the camerawork. This adds to the sensew of uncertainty and tension. The music fits the images shown well, with the credits.

What we needed to change.

After getting the feedback from Amar it made us understand that our ending to our project was not succesful and left the ending dead. Rather then leaving it open, so the audience would want to watch the rest of the thriller. So therefore we had to change the overall ideas of our storyboard, that we had originally planned. Maybe in the future we should really think about the ending because from this we have learnt that it plays a big part in the whole project.

In alot of professional thrillers the end of a titale sequence often ends with some kind of text, usually ''based on a true story'' or the production name, also the title of the while thriller. So we decided to add the title name at the end, making it more eye catching and making the audience more aware. Alot of proffesional thriller often put the title over the top of one of the clips however we wanted the title to be really prominant to the audience by making the background completely plain.

Music in Pshycological thrillers.

We looked at other professional pshycologica thriller sounds (within a title seuquence)
and we found that looking at 'Catch me if you can' we realised this is what we wanted our thriller to be most like.
In the title sequence it has running, much like our thriller, this is why we looked into the sounds to try and get an idea of the perfect ''chase'' music.
Its really upbeat, and fast paced, emphasising the fact the character is on a run or in our project running away form ''something'. The sounds are not happy, but non diegetic and fast, making it jumpy but keeping in the mind of a pshycological thriller.

Things we need to do.

• Create a sounds on garage band.
• Add sounds to seuquence
• Create a name for our thriller
• Add name of thriller to the end of our title sequence
• Add more transitions making it flow (continuity)
• Rearrange order of some of the clips
• Maybe add in a logo
• Add movement to the text at the beginning of sequence.
• Lighten some of our clips.
• Upload more feedback, and what we have done.

Editing

Wednesday 9th March
In todays lesson we created a sound track on garage band, we wanted the first part of it to be slow to keep in order with the overall tone of the title sequence, then as the fade begins the pace of the song increases for the running parts of the thriller. using garage band we decided to use dark and intense but also upbeat sounds.

Editing lesson 3

Monday 7th March

In this lesson we gained feedback from Amar leaving us with lots of better ideas, but alot more editing!
We had to rearrange the order of the clips to make it have a better ending, and also adding certain transitions to introduce the different parts of the thriller, also making the production name look more appealing and intresting.

First of all we decided rather then adding a background to the production name, we decided to make the text a typewriter, keeping constant with the rest of the text throughout the thriller, also adding a red shadow to the text making it more appealing.

We also added a fade in fade out making it introduce the thriller, and the narrative.
We cut and paste the clip of the eye to the end, and then made a short clip of total darkness just before it. Then using garage band we created a sound of a door closing and footsteps to create a better and tenser atmosphere.

Next lesson we will carry on to produce the underlying song of the whole thriller.

Feedback from Amar from watching our video

For the production name, add some sort of background to make it less plain, maybe add movement, a transition, perhaps add a logo? Fade in fade out effect.
Using more transitions making the whole thing 2 or 3 times longer.
When introducing the first clip, make the sounds go over the top of the production name, making the audience wanting to find out whats happening.
Underlying song throughout the project, and everytime there is the white noise effect make the sounds higher.
Also add ''based on a true story''.
Cut out the eye clip and move it to the end, so it leave the end, an opening sequence...
Make it fade out to black when the eye closes making it look more real, leave the shot black for a little while with maybe a heartbeat sound, or an footsteps sound, then leaving the ending as the eye opening and being in a dark room, making it more intense and mysterious.
Also ADD A TITLE AT THE END.

More editing.

In our lesson, we continued editing, we had to make even more ajustments to the colour correction as we felt that the ''night vision'' effect was not as effective as we had hoped. When we thought we had finished we checked our minimum amount of time which was meant to be 1:50 but when looking at ours we found it was only 1.20 so therefore we had to try and extend some clips, we first started by making the white noise sections about 3/4 seconds longer leaving more time for the ''typewriter'' to spell each name and for the audience have enough time to read the title sequence.

This made the overall time increase but still not enough for the minumum amount so we had to ajust the clips from the forest, making some of them longer, however we had a problem there were not enough clips we had shot to make each section of the forst location, so we had to copy and paste a part of what we had filmed and put one at the beginning and one at the end, hoping it wouldnt be too obvious to the audeince.

We also had to make the parts we took from the darkroom longer, which we hoped would initially make the entire sequence longer, and perhaps explain more of the narrative to the audeince, we had to also colour correct all the shots from the dark room because they were too dark and the audience wouldnt be able to see exactly what was going on.

FEED BACK

FEEDBACK

Camera work- The shots used were point of view, long shots and a high angle shot. They were effective and put you in the characters shoes.

Mis-en-scene- Dark lightingm which is mysterious, night vision is also used.

Props- photo developing equipment is used which in the thriller genre can be used as evidence.

Location- the dark room was used which has a dark mysertiious atmostphere which contributed to the thriller genre.

Editing- shot durations are quite short and cross cutting between them which keeps the opening faced paced.

Sound- the sounds are mostly diegetic

Improvements- maybe some other shots instead of just point of view, exten length of opening. add credits.

Worked well- the night vision shot is good and stands out.