Thursday 26 March 2015

Planning: initial editing of final edit




Editing our filming

After having found some difficulties arranging when my group would be able to film the main body of our thriller task, we began to film the opening sections of our film. We also began putting together our film company 'adverts'. 

We created the name 'Firewalk Entertainment' for the first film company, and then began editing a short sequence together featuring this name, as like an advert for this film company. We animated a fire stream bursting onto the stream and faded in the title before fading out the whole image. We found this to be very effective and also realistic, as I found through research that often, trailers and small clips introducing a thriller often featured short adverts for film companies who have worked on or produced the thriller.                                   After the 'Firewalk Entertainment' clip we also added in the 'Black Cat Production' title that we had created and designed previously and faded the two clips together, so that after the first title had closed the first one would appear straight away. 

We then began working on editing our first piece of footage that we filmed in the wooded area, our first location. The 'Firewalk Entertainment' fades out very quickly and straight away cuts to the opening sequence of the 'man' running through the wood, with shaky, jolty camera movements to convey this. Whilst editing this, myself and the other members of the group decided to have this sequence in slow motion, with eery suspense building music that we found when played over the movements of the camera, worked really well with the flow of the footage. However, we found that the quality of the footage was very blurry and not of a very high quality, but we had very little time to plan the rest of our final edit so we decided to focus on editing what footage we had together as best we could. For filming, we used a Nikon camera, which we found was very easy to work with and produced good quality footage, if the footage was well lit or the camera was steady, an issue we came across when we started to edit the footage was that we found that the quality of the footage was not as clear on screen as it had been on the camera. Also, we found that if the camera was moved or in the case of our filming, ran with, the footage was very blurry and poor quality. 




Planning the filming process



Planning the filming process

Costume
The costume we used was normal, modern day clothing fitting in with the time period. We featured only one character in our final edit, a young girl aged eleven and she was dressed in casual clothing, a grey jumper, jeans and boots, with her hair tied back in plaits. We chose to have our actress dressed simply as we wanted the main focus of our final edit more on what was happening on screen and not so much on what the young girl is wearing. Also, we felt that the normality of the clothing she was wearing contrasted with the abnormality of what happen later on in the clip.

Actress: Millie Fennell. We chose to use Millie for the actress in our final edit as we felt that as she was a young girl, she would easily portray the role of innocence and vulnerability, but also we noticed that horror films often have young girls involved in the story lines in some way and we felt that Millie would be perfect for portraying this role. 


 Locations
 We used three different locations in our final edit, the first location was a small wooded area near our college, where we filmed the opening section where the 'man' is running through the wood, his destination is unknown. We filmed this section in the late afternoon as we felt that the dark, gloomy light fitted the theme of our piece and also that the limited light coming through the branches added to the sinister feel of the clip. The second location we used was my dinning room. We felt that the warm, homely setting of this room contrasted with the dark of the wood and creates the sense that the young girl is at least safe, for now. We also felt that the shape of the room suited that types of camera angles and movements that we wanted to use in this section. The third location (is not actually noticeable from the clip) we used was in my back garden, which was pitch black and at the time of filming was very windy, which added to the uneasy feeling building in the clip and also the dark of the night highlighted the girls illuminated face even more.


Props 
 We used very minimal props, items that would have been found in the locations that we filmed in, such as a book that the actress is shown reading in our clip, and also a plant pot on the table, making the location seem more realistic. We also chose to use a torch whilst filming outside in order to cast a ghostly light onto our actresses face during the extreme close up at the end of the clip. 

Filming Schedule
Our filming schedule was very simple, we planned the filming when we were all available and filmed a week later, after having brain stormed our ideas and planned out everything we wanted to do and did some short filming practice before filming the final edit all in one go, having filmed the opening section prior to filming the final scenes.