MS: Question 6 - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of making your film opening?

In the process of developing and filming the thriller film opening, I learnt how to use the Google “blogger” website. On this blog you can write and upload documents and notes of recent tasks and assignments. On the Blogger system you can upload photos and videos directly from internet sites such as Google images, and Youtube.

The Blog. We made independent, and group posts.

The technology on the schools computers that we used is called “Adobe Elements Première 9.0” it is professional editing software and was ideal for editing and producing our product. The software provided many effects such as using a “Tinting”, “Adjusting Contrast and Brightness”, “Sharpening the Image” and many more!

We attempted to stay to stick to the rule of thirds and keep the protagonists in their own third, whilst framing the characters properly. We achieved this by filming from different angles, most of which were from the tripod; however some were from the dolly & track. When we filmed the characters walking the first time, we decided that standing next to each other was ideal, however it made it harder to keep “lead and head room” so on all of the angles from the side of the protagonists, one is always a step or two ahead.

An example of a high angle, to make sure our characters were in shot.

The dark night worked to our advantage, strongly coinciding with our natural blurry, and our of focus scenes inside the church, with the natural candle light. The camcorder naturally blurred at a certain darkness, which we happened to intercept during the time of filming, nevertheless we used it to our advantage. Our white balance had minimal adjustments, which saved time and saved the over complications of editing on “Première”.

We had a shallow depth of field for the majority of our filming, up until the church scene where we used candles. The natural glow of the candles had a sinister glowing effect when we zoomed in and out, we preferred to zoom out for these scenes and let the depth of field increase, as it added to the enigma, and mystery, of the scene.

Natural Deep Focus, making a blur when close up.

It also allows one to add a soundtrack and increase the pace of the film and it also helped us by allowing the process of cropping and cutting unwanted scenes. It was a difficult process to learn, and was stressful after the soundtrack had been made, due to the long process of adapting the music to the film. 

We liked the idea of a slow start, so our pace of editing begins quite slowly and increases over the course of the opening up until the death. Using fast fades between numerous scene we gently segued between them, it made it look more professional and similar to most thriller films that we had watch such as "Scream".

We included a montage to show all of the weird objects and sculptures inside the church in a montage style to allow the audience to know what is there without have to see the full church. This is  quite prolific in such famous openings as "Se7en" and "Saw".

Finally after all the editing was complete we exported it to our D-Drive in a folder related to our horror opening. In order to export we changed the export quality to 1080p, and changed the frames per second to 25. Once the export was complete we uploaded it to YouTube, it helped our audience see our opening.

In comparison to a real film production, ours lack the funding and equipment as well as the time, preparation and actors on hand, the software was fun, and quite easy to use, however I can imagine a real film production may use CGI and other Adobe softwares that we do not possess. I believe that ours differs from a real film production because of the idea and atmosphere of amateur filming, skeleton cast, time and commitment involved.