RESEARCH - Film Openings - Four Walls (Student Work)

Four Walls

SOUND
The non diagetic sound used was very disjointed and very chopped makes you feel uncomfortable. It had a slow pace.
Foley sound was used, for example, the scream and banging on the wall and when the character was cutting their fingers. This made me pay more attention to what was happening in the shot and showed it may have been important scenes. The scream made me think there was something wrong with the character, that she may be crazy or unstable.

EDITING
This opening is highly edited. There is use of a lot of transitions, for example,fade from black and the shot where her face was made blurry and went in and out of focus makes the character seem freaky and a bit mad. There were cross cuts to old papers with writing, a bracelet in her hand and photos. There was one part in fast motion contrasting with the sound which was at a slow pace.

MISE EN SCENE
The lighting in this opening was very low-keyand the only two shots that were outside it was still dark. The costume was ripped and bloody and this made me think maybe something bad has happened or there's something wrong with the character. The space were it was filmed looked like a confined space or maybe it was portrayed as one. It made me think, why she's in that space? Is she trapped?
The facial expressions made me feel uncomfortable and uneasy as it was weird and she also showed emotions of anger and frustration which scared me a little. The makeup also set the character up as weird and unstable.
The characters body language when she was on the floor made her seem scared and timid as it was drawn towards her and not away from her.

CAMERA
There was heavy use of close-up's and medium close-you'd which have us an idea of who the main character in the film may be. It made me feel uncomfortable and weird. The camera tilted up and showed she had minimal clothing and this made me think again about the idea of her being trapped. Some high angle shots were used, maybe to show that this character might be a subordinate character.

Overall, the best thing about this opening is that the editing is really good and this sets the unease into the audience and also the choice of sound also creates an uneasy atmosphere. The mise en scene is quite in your face and makes you feel uncomfortable.

Prelim Evaluation

The success full things overall was that we were able to produce the final products with all the shots we needed and following the brief. We included the shot reverse shot and the match cut and we did it in the type of a thriller (psychological).

Overall there are many things that we could have done better with this preliminary exercise. One is the narrative we chose to go with. We had to make a decision quite quickly so we could go on and take the shots for our storyboard and blog and be ready for the next lesson as we were behind. Our story was about a man who had previously taken some tests to see if he had a mental illness and he went to the doctor to find out the results. The brief said we had to shoot someone walking into a room, sitting down and having a conversation and the video had to include a match cut and shot reverse shot edits. The narrative we chose was quite broad and open to interpretation unless you know beforehand what is going on in the shots and I think if someone who didn't know the story they wouldn't easily figure out the scenario.
Also where we filmed was a problem. We used a media classroom which was quite disorganized and had bad lighting so we struggled to frame the shots properly and made it look like it was bad quality. In addtion
there were interference's with people walking and talking by so the quality of our shots would've been reduced as we had to rush them and try to get them over and done with before others walked by or in order to film when there wasn't speech in the background. Time is also an issue and hopefully with practice we will learn to manage our time properly

As well as other experiences of filming during lesson , this preliminary exercise helped us to get used to using the cameras even more and get better at editing and directing each other. This will help us when it comes to our own thriller opening as the shots will be better, thus, our final product will be better. Also, we'll be able to think more creatively in terms of narrative and make our thriller opening more interesting and appealing to our audience.

Photos of Alan editing the Prelim

These images shows our main editor (Alan) editing our prelim video. As it shows here, he is sorting out the match cuts and linking all the videos together,

Key Characteristics of Thrillers & Psychological Thrillers

To gain greater understanding of the Thriller genre and the general conventions of thriller films and Psychological Thrillers as that's our chosen genre for our film opening.

Thrillers
Thriller films usually involve:

• A protagonist:c The character is usually curious, searching for greater good, faced with death at one point, on a quest and the film is usually from their point of view. The 'good guy' or the person we side with the most in the film.
• Antagonist: The 'bad guy'. Must be stronger than the protagonist.
• Protagonist and Antagonist  must come into conflict at one point
• Mystery that must be solved
• Desire for justice and the morality of individuals
• A Thriller must promote intense excitement, suspense, high level of anticipation, uncertainty, anxiety, nerve wracking tension

Psychological Thriller
A psychological usually involves all those of a normal thriller plus:
Characters have to rely on their mind rather than their physical strength. The suspense created by psychological thrillers often comes from two or more characters preying upon one another's minds, either by playing deceptive games with the other or by merely trying to demolish the other's mental state.

• Stream of Consciousness – Written equivalent of the character's thought processes. In psychological thrillers,through word usage, descriptions, or visuals we are invited into the characters mind.
• First Person Narrative – In the opinion of the character and thus able to understand the mechanics of the characters' minds. 
• Back Story – what has happened before hand. This deepens the psychological aspect of the story since the audience is able to more fully understand the character; more specifically, what the character's motivations are and how his/her past has shaped their current way of thinking.

Gaining a good understanding of these characteristics we allow us to be able to use some of these features in our film and narrative, for example for a first person narrative we could have a one of our characters doing a voice over, a stream of consciousness could also be done in this way.

Re-editing a film opening

We re-edited the film "Arlington Road". The scene of the film openings were split into different parts which we needed to put them back together in the order we wanted to which would look correct.

Firstly we decided to start off with the with the company idents, we were given two company indents and decided to place both in as it seems like both companies are working together to make this film. We then placed the title of the film as we thought it was most important for the audiences to know what the film is called so they know a little hint of what the movie is about.






After the title of the film, we decided to put who the music was by ,casting directors and editors. We didn't want to place in the Actors as we didn't think it was as important. But i believe we made a mistake. In future we should always put in the Actors so they could have more credit.





The font and colour of the text were all the same throughout the opening. This is because if we had different sizes and colour text, it would make it very confusing for the audiences to read. Also we made it one colour so it could be simple and clearer to read.

Planning - First Ideas

My idea is to create a psychological thriller. I have watched thriller before but I had never watched a psychological thriller and when looking into it to see what it was about, I became really interested in it and thought this would be great to do and I would have loads of ideas of what to create. Original and unique.

What I had in mind to do was to have two people involved. A boyfriend and a girlfriend. It's always girls being obsessed but in this one, it the other way round, the boy being obsessed with the girl. The couple would both go to the park and all things to seem romantic but then all of a sudden, the girl breaks off their relationship and  the boy acts as if he doesn't care but then when he gets home and into his bedroom, you will see a collage of his girlfriends pictures. There's a big one in the middle and little ones surrounding it. When he takes a red pen and circles the big main picture, something will happen to the girl.

This will be very hard to create as we will need a lot of pictures of the girlfriend and it will take a lot of time to make and it could be long, but I would love to do this and try and capture all these elements in a short time.

Student film opening analysis

The student film opening that I will be analysing is called the Paper Trail

Location
The location of this film opening is in a room which looks like it has been abandoned and also a place near a lake . The first half of the opening scene is inside this abandoned room and what this creates is tension because you now want to know what is going to happen inside of this room and then when you see the boy playing with the paper it then makes wonder what will happen next. The second half is near the lake where there is a boy who is dead is laying there while the killer walks away.

Sound
The music that has been used is very scary like and what this sound does is build tension as to what will happen next. There is a bit where the boy drops the paper swan on the floor. As it hits the floor, you hear a thud sound and this makes you scared but then anxious to know what will/has happened.

Editing
I really liked the editing because it moved swiftly when changing scenes and overall, everything moved smoothly. Very clean editing. They used a lot of fades which I think helped them get this clean editing but the fading had an effect which was it always kept you asking "what is going to happen now?"

Camera
There are a lot of close ups that have been used and this is to show the audience what exactly the boy is doing. for example, there are a lot of close up when he is dealing with the paper to make the paper swan. There are also a mid shot in the beginning to show us where we are which was the room and who was in it which was the boy.