Group - Final Piece + Overall Evaluation

Final Opening Sequence

Our brief for the final task was to create a 2 minute film opening that was typical to that of a genre that we could choose between a choice of thriller, horror and teen drama. Our chosen genre was a psychological thriller.

Similarly to our preliminary task, the genre, costume and props were key parts in producing a creative response. Seeing as we chose psychological thriller as our genre for our opening we had a lot of scope to try interesting shot compositions, costumes and props.

Restrictions?

When filming our footage for our final opening we had very little restrictions, we were allowed to take the camera  equipment anywhere we needed to. However, originally we wanted to film the crowd shot at Tunbridge Wells station as there would be a guarantee of lots of people. Unfortunately we were not given permission to shoot there and decided to use the high street instead with a result of:

We filmed over a period of 4-5 minutes and using Premiere compressed the footage so that the people walking past were sped up. This represented one of our themes of isolation.

Compared to our preliminary task where we cut between different images and effects...

... our final piece was more advanced in the editing techniques that we used.

Planning

• When in the beginning stages of this project we had to firstly research ALL of the genres that we had an option in using to get an idea of the typical conventions for those genres and how a film opening might look. 

• After having completed this thorough background research we decided to choose our main genre as a thriller.

• At this point we already had a few ideas of what our plot might be and what kind of shots and compositions we might wish to use. Watching The Bourne Supremacy opening and the Seven opening we gained inspiration for doing a postmodern and almost a hallucinogenic style of opening.
• Click here to see our research on The Bourne Supremacy

• Once having decided on our storyline we then had to consider what locations we would want to use for our opening to fully communicate our genre. Therefore, we had to go on location recces to places such as High Brooms station (where our murder scene is shot).

Challenges of this project

The main challenges that we faced were that we struggled to find music that would anchor our narrative and some of our footage was insufficient. In addition to this we spent too much time experimenting with effects rather than editing the footage into a final order This proved to be one of the biggest challenges that we faced as it played havoc with the amount of time we spent trying to complete it. However, we are extremely pleased with our final outcome.

Strengths

• Interesting shot sizes and the framing of those shots e.g. 



• The use of blank black shots to help create tension.
• The layering of different tracks of music
• The effects that we used e.g.

• The titles e.g.

Weaknesses

• Some of the sound doesn't anchor the narrative as well as it could
• The cutting rate could also do with improvement to help to create a bigger build up of tension