Student questionnaire 2

This time I asked a female of 17, so still fits into our target audience perfectly however she doesn't take media or film, so will be watching our film and not thinking about certain media aspects. I also added a few more questions to this questionnaire.

1. Are there any continuity problems throughout the film?

- No it all runs smoothly.

2. Do you think the title and credits are integrated into the film appropriately, do they fit with the atmosphere?

- yes they fit into the opening smoothly and subtly

3. Could you understand the storyline? Please write a brief explanation of the storyline if possible.

-Yes, dad wakes up to find children missing. Finds a note that briefly explains childrens location and a time by which they have to be found by otherwise they will be killed. The dad rushes off to find the children but when he reaches the location and searches he finds they are not there and runs out of time.

4. Do you think the editing is suitbale - anything that could be improved?

- I think the editing is suitable and not over the top.

5. Do you think the camerawork is conventional of a typical thriller film?

- yes the camerawork is very effective and adds tension to the opening.

6. What kind of atmosphere does our opening create?

- There is a lot of tension, suspense and fear.

7. Would you want to watch the rest of the film? What sort of things do you think would happen?

- Yes to find out what happens to the children.

8. What sort of music do you think would fit our thriller opening?

- Something that helps build the tension in the opening scenes.

9. Do you think the lighting creates a suitable atmosphere?

- Yes particularly in the barn.

10. Do you think the timing and the clock are realistic?

- Yes

Once again I am really happy with the outcome of this questionnaire, it helps us understand what our audience think of our thriller opening and it shows that we have created a suitable atmosphere and overall we have achieved what we wanted from this film.

The Editing process

Hello all :)

So as our film is finished now, thought i'd tell you about the editing process that we've been wrestling with for the last few weeks.

So firstly, we had a lot of footage to organise and sort for our film. There were loads of different shots that we took to see what we wanted to integrate during the editing. We went through it scene by scene and sifted through the shots to decide which ones we liked better. After that was done, we needed to work on continuity and all our match-on-actions. We have quite a few match-on-actions during the piece, (about four in total), and we needed to make sure these were perfect and flowed really nicely together. It took us quite a while to make sure all the match-on-actions were perfect.

After doing this we then put titles in because they were really important. Using titles in the bottom right corner gave us the look of the clock that's counting down. This was important for us because it was a key element in our thriller plot. This took us quite a while because we had to change the time of the clock to fit to the time of our film. We needed the clock in the corner's time to tick down in time with the film so that it reached 00.00 at the end of the opening.

After completing this (this probably took the most time), we decided to edit some of our hostage shots because they didn't look entirely correct. We had some feedback from Miss Hill, who said that the main negative point she had about the opening so far was that the hostage shots were too light and didn't represent danger or peril enough. We decided to edit the shots and made them darker. We experimented with a sepia effect, but it looked better on some shots than it did on others. After deciding that instead of sepia, we should bring down the brightness of the shot, we had completed everything to do with our shots.

The last element that needed completing was the music integration. This had taken us a while because we wanted to take a batman clip's music off youtube and we hadn't had the time or the skills needed to complete the task yet. We listened to our music clip in our last editing lesson and decided that it was too 'epic'. We then experimented with different thriller soundtracks on youtube whilst watching our film at the same time. After using quite a few different soundtracks we fund a less epic track from the Dark Knight that we thought sounded perfect. After taking the music off youtube and putting it on our film we then perfected the sound quality and where it came in.

AND THAT IS HOW WE EDITED AND STUFF.

Thanks, bye! x

Student feedback

So as you can see our first final of our thriller opening is finished and on the web for people to seeee!

I thought it would be helpful if I created a questionnaire, and asked some other media students to watch our opening and then fill in the questionnaire, I firstly asked a male student who's 16 years old - therefore fits right into our target audience.

1. Are there any continuity problems throughout the film?

- no none at all.

2. Do you think the titles and credits are integrated into the film appropriately, do they fit with the atmosphere?

- Yes I think they are appropriate and fit with the atmosphere nicely.

3. Could you understand the storyline? Please write a brief explanation of the storyline if possible.

- Middle aged man awakes to find his kids missing, who have been kidnapped and taken hostage at a secluded location. It centers around a time limit that is ticking down gradually, building suspense and tension.

4. Do you think the editing is suitable - anything that could be improved?

- Yes the editing is suitable.

5. Do you think the camerawork is conventional of a typical thriller film?

- Yes especially the point of view shot when the man walks in the bedroom, very conventional.

6. What kind of atmosphere does our opening create?

- A sinister and concerning atmosphere.

7. Would you want to watch the rest of the film? What sort of things do you think would happen?

- Yes. I think the kids will be rescued.

8. Does the music fit the opening?

- Yes absolutely, adds to the atmosphere and suspense.

These answers are exactly what I would hope for, as you can see he thought the opening was very good and fit the thriller conventions properly. He didn't write any criticisms which could be a good thing but perhaps if he did think anything was bad about it he just didn't write it.

I think this questionnaire helps us to see if our film is appropriate and fits the thriller conventions, I will ask a girl of about the same age the same questions, but I will make sure she is not a media student therefore will not be looking our for the same things as this male, so she will have a different perspective of the film!

FINAL OF OUR VIDEO!!!!

Hello everyone!

This is a group blog is coming from all three of us. You will get to see the final of our media film which is uploaded on youtube! ahhhhhhhhhhh!

Took quite a long time for us to edit our film, longer thn we planned actually.! But now ou film is done and here it is for you to love and accept and cherish. Bit far, but OK HERE WE GO!

Enjoy!! x

Almost finished!

We're in half term now, but before half term Ruby and I tried to spend as much time as possible on editing our film.
We've finalised the continuity and all the shots are together perfectly, we've sorted out any sound problems for example with the car shots you could hear a stop in the sound when the shot changed, to fix this problem we took the sound from the first car shot and lengthened it over to the other car shot!
As you can see in our storyboard, a huge majority of the shots have the ticking countdown clock in the right hand corner - this was the HARDEST part of the editing easily, because the only way we were able to achieve this is by adding text every single second to make it look like it was a clock - this was really monotonous and took a really long time to get perfect but in the end we both agreed it was definitely worth it and added suspense and tension to our film!!
We then added the title and credits to our film and it took us a while to figure out exactly how we wanted them and what font and colours as we felt these were important to set the mood and atmosphere of the opening.

We now need to add the music (we know what music we are going to use we just need to add it where we want in the clip) and that is literally all of the editing we have left to do!!!

We've also started on our evaluation film, we have some fantastic ideas and just need to create the script before we film it! :D

Update :D

So in todays lesson we got on with editing again, both Ruby and I have been sharing the role of editing to enable us to both get a feel of the editing programmes.
I think I have completely got to grips with the editing programmes now, however at points if I need help I usually ask Ruby as she knows how to use it as had the role of editor in GCSE media!!

We're really really pleased with how our film is looking so far - I will add a few screenshots of the editing process onto this post so you can see exactly where we are at. I think we have a brilliant range of shots in the opening and it definitely fits with the conventions and codes of a typical thriller opening so I'm extremely pleased at the moment.

We now need to perfect the editing and add the titles, we also need to figure out a way to add the countdown clock in the corner of the shots as we are unsure of how we can do this. Then we will add the music, and be finished!!! :D