Production of Digital Storyboard (Photoshop and WACOM tablet)

Here, shows the production of our Storyboard on Photoshop using a Wacom tablet to essentially draw up our digital storyboard. This will later come in handy when it comes to producing our animatic storyboard as all we do is import the scenes and record a voice over describing in more through depth locations, camera movement, etc.

In process of producing Storyboard scene no. 17

Wednesday// Thriller Opening Progress update

Today, I began producing the Storyboards for our movie and we have began to finalise our idea, knowing our tasks over the weekend and our location for filming. Currently we hope to finish the storyboard and shot list by tomorrow (Thursday) so we then have that complete to begin to create a digital storyboard on iMovie and hopefully do a voice-over to explain the camera angle and development in that specific scene. Over the weekend Lee is going to take pictures of the farm in Salle where we are going to film the introduction and so we then have a better viewing of lighting and space we have to use. Next week we will begin scouting a potential actor for the Son character and costumes, props and finalisation. We have agreed to film on the 23rd of November if all goes to plan.

Planning for Thriller Opening - 'brainstorming'

To begin with, we organized a potential date to film on, being Saturday the 23rd of November 2013.

A brief synopsis of the story line is:
The story we are going to base our introduction on is that of a young boy and his mother being entrapped in an enclosed location. They have both been isolated throughout the years and the boy from a young age being entrapped in a dark farmhouse. The introduction then starts as his mother is suffering from Polio and she is whispering her last words to her son. This then motivates the son to escape from the bounds of entrapment from his father, who put him there in the first place. The Son escapes at an age of 17, oblivious to traditions of society. As he escapes by picking the lock with a paper clip and as he escapes out of the door, the sun blinds him as it contrasts with the dark conditions in the shelter. The shelter is on a farm in the middle of no-where. A time-lapse then occurs and he finds himself in the city (Norwich) and he is confused, this will be filmed from a close up view, using a chest mount. Alike seen in JME's music video.

Primary research - Survey for Thriller

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Research - Conducting audience research from BFI Year Book.

Upon visiting the BFI Website to view the YearBook for 2012's movie releases. The BFI website contains numerous statistics about the previous years films that were released. So although it is named for 2013, the movies that are within the yearbook are from 2012. Including audience reception about genres, classification and distribution. Using this will be able to show me the response that Thrillers received last year.

Genre:

Thriller ranked 9th within the chart of 17 genres which is ranked by gross box office. The top performing title of the thriller genre was the movie Jack Reacher. Thriller only had 41 releases which is little compared with Comedy which had 142 releases in 2012, this left comedy at 2nd place. Thriller was fairly popular in 2012 which shows there was clearly an audience for Thriller movies, showing that there is clearly a gap in the market for Thriller genres and with only 41 releases last year it shows that there is space for new releases and people will view them. Thrillers pulled in a gross box office figure of £29.8 million, this reflects it's popularity despite its few number of releases. In terms of Independent movie releases Thriller came 5th out of 14 genres in terms of the number of releases. This tells me that there is a clear audience for Thriller movies due to the lack of them being released. 

Gender:

In terms of Gender the top 20 list is biased toward men because in 2012 they accounted for 52 per cent of 'cinema-goers' in the UK. As we find on an individual basis we see that Men are most centered around the genres of Action including movies such as Dredd and Wrath of the Titans. Where as Women had a much larger variety including Anna Karenina and StreetDance 2. See the list below to view the audience genre split up:

As you can see, there was no Thriller movie that made it into the Top 20 and so therefore the closest link we can make is The Woman in Black which is a horror movie containing a lot of suspense and Thriller genre techniques. The split was 44 Male / 56 Women. This is a fairly even split with a mere 6 per cent difference in it. The split between Thrillers are often very close, and an example for last years Yearbook (2011 releases) shows that the Thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy only had a split of 52% (Male) with a 48% (Women), partially down to the sub genre of Mystery which often appeals more to Males than it does Women but also due to the plot of the movie having a impact on the gender feedback. However this does tell me that I have a very balanced gender split for my movie and it often depends on the sub-genre and also the story line.

Audiences:

Audiences are extremely varied currently. What I immediately learnt from looking at the graph is that the current age distribution of cinema goers is extremely high toward the ages 55+, accounting for a huge 36 per cent of Cinema goers, taking the largest audience field. This tells me that firstly Thrillers aren't often going to succeed in this age group however the graph also shows that between the ages of 15-24 is still fairly high and the second largest audience base, coming in with 25 per cent however this has decreased since previous years, for example in 2010 this age accounted for 38 per cent of cinema goers. This is the age group that Thrillers are often advertised to, therefore this shows that my audience base has been sharply decreasing since 2010 (see graph, colour Yellow.) Therefore this gives me idea to combine and attempt to satisfy a larger audience including 25-34 year olds. This widens my audience to 15-34 year olds and although it is likely to be tricky to do so, together last year (2012) they accounted for a total of 44 per cent of viewers. 

Again, there was no Thriller in 2012 that ranked very highly therefore I cannot see view Thrillers ranking within age groups in 2012, however alike I compared earlier, we see that The Woman in Black was ranked 5th in the audience range of 15-24, coming with 42 per cent of the audience accounting for this age group, this therefore shows that there is an audience for the closely related Thriller and Horror genres in this audience range. Showing that this is my primary audience and my secondary audience will be 25-34 year olds. 

My age bracket that I am aiming to target with my Thriller is young and so therefore they are likely to be the audience who is technology oriented and therefore the more likely bracket of audience who are using the VoD market, using services such as Netflix and LOVEFiLM Instant. This market has increased by 123 per cent since the previous year, from an estimated £55 million (in 2011) to £122 million (in 2012.) Therefore this proves a good basis to publish my Thriller on to, i.e. services such as Vimeo or YouTube for my audience to view upon.

Thriller Ideas

Idea 1:
My first idea is for a setting in which a young girl is left standing in a forrest filled with a mist, the camera tracks into the forrest, moving in to her, the young girl will have her eyes closed as the camera is moving in. This is going to be the middle of the story plot as the girl in the beginning is being born and shows her bringing up with her family. As she grows the bitterness get the better of her and demons take over her and posses her. She remains a missing child through the movie and from the moment when she leaves her family once she has burnt the house down with them asleep in the house. Going back to the movie introduction we turn to an extreme close up when the camera is on the little girls face and she opens her eyes on a heavy drum beat. It then turns to a sudden black screen. This then fades in with a faint piano riff in the background showing previous family photos alike that of The Conjuring (View here) and was effective at building up suspense and worked well at giving an insight into the context of the movie was being set in. These photos will run until the opening when one picture will match cut into film and begin the narrative.

Idea 2:
Another idea would be a setting near dusk when the audience can just about see a corn field maze in the distance from an establishing shot. The camera then turns to a viewpoint from a lower angle near the cornfield, a man can then be seen running into shot, as he runs the camera switches to a mid shot of the man running and panting, the camera then pivots to follow the character running into the opening of the corn-field. The camera then moves to a shot from above the runner head and is almost like you can find on a go-pro type sports camera. This should be effective as it is a close up of the character allowing the audience to view the characters emotions and sincerity in his face, along with the fear he has. Not only this but it also works because it will allow the audience to view the protagonist in a clear light, exposing their gender and age group. The plot behind this story is that the man has been feared by a group of young teenagers who in an attempt to change his life through social media and scare him to get money from him so they confront him in real life by tracking him through his computer use and go to his house and begin to harass him. This is when he begins to run off into the cornfield that is behind his house as the is being chased by the hackers. This has taken inspiration from the movie Disconnect. 

Continuity Errors - Line of Action video ("Fed Wars")

Continuity Errors within our 180 Degree Rule video

Watch the video here:

Throughout most of our ‘Fed-Wars’ video it was fairly continuous however we did encounter a few troubles. This was partially down to the fact that we had planned to film throughout just one day however this ended up having to be two days due to the fire alarm going off in school and this interrupted our filming and on that day we did not manage to finish filming therefore the main character (Myself, the burglar) did not have the same shirt on. We also encountered a larger problem which was that we lost a student from our group due to leaving College therefore we had to use someone else therefore our finale was rushed.

Around 20 seconds there was a large jump between the meeting of the two characters to the exchanging of the parcel, this is due to a lack of length on the exchanging of the parcel, however it is not that noticeable and just about works. Our use of subtitles here is simply because the wind was too loud in our film and the voices could not be heard clearly therefore we substituted the speech for subtitles instead.

Another continuity error can be spotted at 32 seconds where we had left our props in view of the camera, bit of a spoiler to say the least however next time I will scan the area we are going to film for errors alike this one, preventing it from happening again.

The biggest error in our video was when I was entering the main entrance to the college; with thanks to editing we just about corrected this mistake, as I had been carrying the box in different hands from the shot from outside when I entered to when it switches to the inside shot. This is still a slight continuity error because the bin is now on the wrong side, this is because we switched the video around and ‘flopped’ (Final Cut effect for flipped) it to make the box on the correct side to conform to the shot from inside.

Not only once I have entered the college can you see me wearing a slightly different t-shirt but also at 1 minute 17 seconds you can see people hanging around in the corridor when a few seconds back there was no-one, however we were stuck for time so did not get the chance to re-record despite acknowledging the error.

The Fade to Black effect was used at 1 minute 44 seconds so that the transition between the two separate shots would be more sleek because the camera was positioned in two slightly different places when filming.