Second Final Edit to 'An Eye for an Eye'

An Eye for an Eye - Final Edit

G321 Assessment Mark Sheet - Self Evaluated

G321 assessment mark sheet - Self Evaluated from fsantosallan

Rough Edit of 'An Eye for an Eye'

Starting on the Soundtrack

Soundtrack Production

GarageBand

Above you can see my current progress on the production of the soundtrack for my thriller opening sequence. I am using GarageBand for the time being as I do not own Logic at home, the first thing I began to do is create a piano loop, similar to the one seen on 'In the House, In a Heartbeat'. Read other inspirations here. In order to do so I created a new instrument on Garageband and selected the a software instrument being the Grand Piano. From there I went on to play with the Piano effects including echo and then I brought up the musical typing keyboard using the shortcut SHIFT + CMD + K. This brought up the screen below:

Onscreen 'Musical Typing' Keyboard

This then allowed me to play around with different keys and pitches, once I had got the right octave and knew what I was going to play, I pressed the record button. This created the basis for my opening sequence. I then corrected all the little nags to make them all equal in length and size using the Track Editor as seen below:

Track Editor

The last thing I did to create just the piano opening was create a fade in to the master track. In order to do so I went to Track then selected Fade Out:

This brought up a volume level on the bottom of my track and so I therefore adjusted it to fade in using the two dots to adjust the length of the fade in. You can see below how it looks:

Finally, after all this, I end up with my piano loop but nothing more unfortunately, you can listen to a small sample below:

Inspiration from other soundtracks

I was very inspired when I set out today to begin making our soundtrack by the Horror Thriller movie, 28 Days Later, the composer was John Murphy and the track was named 'In the House, In a Heartbeat', although the song was composed for a Zombie movie, I still thought that it would work well in our opening sequence, especially the build up of tension in the opening 30 seconds. You can hear the song below:




Once I realised that a Zombie themed soundtrack would work well as inspiration I looked over other similar movies sharing the same genre, I also found that the theme for World War Z was something that I could take some ideas from, again the opening solitary piano works really well with a build up of instruments and this is what I hope to achieve. I found that only up to the minute mark was useful. See below:


I began to look further and I found that one other soundtrack gave me inspiration, however it does not come from a film, rather though a game designed by Naughty Dog. The game is called The Last of Us and it was a huge hit, again this is a zombie based sub genre of a Thriller/Horror. Having played the game, I know that it consists of a lot of cut scenes and it more based around a story telling rather than just shooting zombies. You can hear the main theme to the game below, composed by Gustavo Santaolalla:

What I liked most about this one was that it was more calm and did not build up to a huge collection of instruments just being loud, rather it expressed it with acoustic ones instead and is still very effective at building tension.

Animatic Storyboard

Above you can see the Animatic Storyboard that I produced for our thriller opening sequence of 'An eye for an eye'. The whole animation was created using a WACOM tablet and Photoshop, you can see below for a screen capture of the set-up.

I created a Prezi presentation on how I managed to create the animatic storyboard using Photoshop CS5 which is embedded below:

Updated Schedule

This was our previous Schedule that we had posted:

4/12/13	Finalised planning
9/12/13	Film in our lessons
11/12/13	Get footage off camera. Import into final cut
16/12/13	Review footage and begin editing rough draft and create soundtrack
18/12/13	Continue editing and finish soundtrack.

However this schedule was very weak and did not show our individual contributions or what we achieved.

Date	Plans	Cesco  (me)	Tom	Lee	Completed
4th of December	Finalise Planning Documents	PLANNING	PLANNING	PLANNING	YES
9th of December	Film over Periods 3 to 4 (including break and lunch) – a total of 3 hours filming	FILMING	ACTOR	ACTOR / FILMING ASSISTANT	We all managed to complete the task of filming during our lessons.
11th of December	Importing into Final Cut	I had already completed importing the video into video files at home therefore I began the import into Final Cut and putting the videos in sequence.	Helped and watched put videos in sequence.	Again, helped and watched the footage being put in sequence in final cut express.	Completed what we had set out as our target, allowed for next lesson to begin editing
16th of December	Begin editing the rough edit and creation of soundtrack	I completed the cropping of our clips and put together the ‘pre’ rough edit. From here I began to add required effect such as transitions, slow motion, etc.	Together Tom and Lee began to do their research, check their blogs for updates however they did not begin to use Logic at this stage.		I completed my task and began doing next weeks however Tom and Lee did not even begin creating the soundtrack.
18th of December	Prepare Rough Edit and finish the soundtrack	I have 90% completed the rough edit, with minor fixes to go adding the black and white filters to the clips and perfecting sound, awaiting the soundtrack to really advance.	Tom and Lee again did not create or again begin the soundtrack, they looked online for royalty free music, however I did not agree with this. They still did not manage to find a suitable soundtrack.		I completed what was required of myself however the others in my group did not and I will now attempt to do their work for them.
HOLIDAY	Perfect planning	Finalise and perfect planning for marking. Due Wednesday 8th of January 2014. Rough edit due after Christmas Holiday.

Updated Equipment & Prop List

Updated equipment list:
This was the equipment we used on Saturday to film.
We will be using the same equipment on Wednesday, along with an external light, rope and lighter as two extra props. We wont be using a photo, padlock or paperclip from the original prop list.

Zippo

The above pictured Zippo is the lighter that we used during the second shoot after the change of storyboard. The Zippo s use throughout the opening was short but it was essential as it guided the character to be able to switch on the light. The black colour was used over my other silver coloured one because it blended into the shadows more and so was more subtle in that the audience spectates at this objects entrance to the opening sequence, creating a short moment of curiosity to what it is, creating slight tension. Thriller movies have often used fire to light situations, however I found a couple of Thrillers included a zippo in their opening sequence, such as Buried, pictured below. This prop goes into thriller conventions. 

Buried, Zippo used by Protagonist

Rope

Although this is not the same rope that we used in our opening sequence it is very similar however the one we featured was green. In the context of our story, I think the rope was appropriately used for the torture/prisoner character we used in the opening. Thrillers often use Torture scenes, however ours did not show any torture but Thriller such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Prisoners do show it. Below you can see the film Prisoners portraying their character who has been a prisoner and gone through torture.

Prisoners film

 Canon 600D DSLR:

This was simply the camera we filmed on, it allowed us to shoot a slow-motion part at a reasonable resolution of 1280 x 720 (720p). I captured the footage as .mov files because often it keeps a better video quality than others such as AVI. Slow-motion footage can be seen below and this was heavily influenced by the slow-motion scene that I had analysed in my section 3 of G321, read it here along with the clip on YouTube here.

 Ross Tripod

The tripod was required to be used to capture the steady opening shots, although less than half of our clips actually used a tripod because it broke up the fluidity of the video and therefore we shot by hand which also allowed us to have more control over the focus and zoom on the lens. 

External Light

As above you can see the light we used in our shoot, the purpose of which was to patch up our previous mistake of lack of lighting which produces the film to become grainy therefore my new storyboard that I created incorporated this light to create reason for light to be in the room and to remove any possible grain to the film.

Casting - Updated

This is Tom Seago he is going to be playing the son character in our Thriller because we all felt he would play the role better because he fits into the characteristics better. We removed the Mother character as we found that when we filmed on Saturday it did not work well at all and over complicated the scene.

Updated: 12/12/13;

With Tom as the actor it allows us to get the outcome we want more fluidly because he of course is very familiar with the storyboard and the plot but also he suits the role well because of his age and appearance of a young guy, he was one of the only actors we found that was willing to do it for us too therefore we had little choice about who to choose. In his chosen outfit (see here) it will work well in creating the abandoned look and as if he's been left there and this is what we were looking for to create in our Plot. In terms of thriller traditions we are looking to create a psychological thriller and an example of which would be Momento which was just featured with adult actors and most psychological thrillers are this way however there were a few that featured teenagers such as Donnie Darko and Disconnect.

Jake Gyllenhaal acting as Donnie Darko

Shooting Location

This is an updated and better version of this post. However I compiled this post together myself but some material from previous post is still relevant such as maps, but we had a change of plans since that original post was post, see here.

This is the farm on which we shot our thriller (exterior view)

The exterior as you can see of the building is a mess and it gives the abandoned look to it which is what we were striving to create in our initial planning stages. Other Thriller movies such as 'The Abandoned' have featured a similar feel to their location as it was set in an abandoned house, see below for a capture of the setting:

The Abandoned, featuring the abandoned house

Other thrillers and some horror films have featured this theme of setting, example include Blair Witch Project, 28 Days Later and I am Legend. However most of these have generally captured a larger area for example in 28 Days Later the whole of London (pictured below) was abandoned due to a virus. 

28 Days Later, abandoned London

The feeling that the abandonment gives it, really emphasises the single characters isolation in the fairly compact area and this is often a good thriller techniques as they like to use the theme of isolation throughout movies such as the psychological thriller, Frozen (pictured below) and you can see that this also shows the poor use of light also a very often used technique in Thrillers.

Frozen, 3 main characters isolated and alone on ski resort

This is what had a lot of influence on me to shoot in a location such as we did and luckily after the second shoot it worked out well for us and I am pleased with where we shot it and although it doesn't really challenge thriller conventions apart from the fact it's on a farm, it does however as I have shown, conform to them.

Interior View of our shooting location in the barn

The interior was the place where we shot the majority of the video and as you can see from the picture above, it wasn't quite abandoned but it gave the feeling of poor up-keeping and lack of use and this was perfect for us because a lot of the camera angles we used whilst shooting attempted to not show the areas that hinted at obvious use, but apart from this, I don't think that we could have picked a better location for our storyboard.

The barn was full of cobwebs and it was very filthy which allowed me to capture opening footage such as:

which is featured at the very opening of the title sequence. The mess that was inside added to the overall final effect of the video and it looked really great with the rough feel to it which Thriller films of the kind often feature, i.e. Blair Witch Project.