Waiting...

As the holidays go by I am now itching to get back to school, I really want to work on the soundtrack for our film, I have the software but i don't have to MIDI keyboard, that is ever so helpful, or even the final draft of our film. I had intended to export the film and place it onto my laptop so i could work on the soundtrack without the keyboard but making do with what i had, however, a problem arose that i didn't have a working memory stick and so could not transfer the film over from the iMac's at school to my MacBook Pro at home. I do intend to have a little play with the music software we will be using, GarageBand, having a look at how I can use the sounds to create tension and set the pace for the scene.

Making the credit sequence

Credit sequence

Right now George and I are looking making a credit sequence. To be completely honest, George is doing the majority of it, I'm just watching!

We have decided to go slightly against the usual red block writing. We have gone with a blue outline, transparent text, which is quite tall and skinny. The text flickers as it comes into the sequence, and remains flickering until it leaves. This method is quite eerie and makes it seem as though something is wrong.

The background is black and dark. We can see a very faint image of a clock in the background. Throughout the credit sequence, the image is moving around this clock, and the titles are following this. 

The angles of which we see the clocks are very mysterious and fir the convention perfectly. Despite trying to be slightly original with our ideas, we have managed to keep the sequence quite conventional, whilst adding our own little twist.

We have chosen to do clocks in the sequence, as the are very fitting to our story. When we finally get the final scene into the film, we see a pocket watch on the ground. The screen then flicks to this sequence of clocks. This leaves the audience pondering on the relevance of the clocks and if these clocks mean anything to the film. "Does this mean there are more of these killings occurring elsewhere?"

Draft Edit - Opening sequence for 'Clockwork'

Clockwork - First Draft

Please feel free to leave feed back. This is our first edit of the footage we have collected. Due to problems with filming at the early stages of our project we were unable to post a decent first draft. Many problems have already been pointed out and work has gone into correcting them problems. Please leave relevant and constructive criticism - this would be extremely helpful in aiding us to improve our final piece.

**Fair use Notice**

 -Music has been credited within the video description.

Credited music as follows;

Hans Zimmer - Dark Knight Rises Soundtrack - Available on the Itunes store

Tracks used:

On Thin Ice - Hans Zimmer - Dark Knight Rises Soundtrack

Born in Darkness - Hans Zimmer - Dark Knight Rises Soundtrack

Despair - Hans Zimmer - Dark Knight Rises Soundtrack

Soundtrack purchased via the Itunes Store

Music used for educational purposes

**Fair use Notice**

Music used for educational purposes - All music has been credited above.

Video edited on Macintosh - Imovie.

Editor - Ryan J G Curry

Directors - Ryan J G Curry and George Matthews

Actors - Ben Cusworth and Danny Hammond

Cinematographer - Ryan J G Curry

Writers - Ryan J G Curry, George Matthews, Ben Cusworth and Danny Hammond

(Original Screenplay) no adaptations used. 

Produced by: Clockwork Productions  

Filming: The Final Sprint

We are pleased to announce that our filming is just two scenes from completion. Following our filming last Friday we now only have to film the scenes involving the pocket watch that is central to our plot. The filming i am pleased to report went brilliantly save for a few mishaps involving a stray piece of bird feces and someone calling the police on us. We weren't in any trouble and the rest of our filming went perfectly. Main editing may be done by the end of this week with small parts of editing and the soundtrack hopefully by the end of next week. While we may have taken the longest with our filming, we are satisfied with what we have accomplished and have hopes for our final product.

My editing contribution

I have edited the middle scene of our film, in this scene we see Danny our victim running away from a mysterious man. I used a radial blur for Danny's POV shots of him running and of him hiding under the bridge this effect makes him seem fatigued and lets us know the difference between his point of view and normal camera shots, but I would say the best reason to use this effect is so that when we see the killer for the first time he is blurry and hard to see and so this give the character an element of mystery. By not directly showing the character to the audience it makes the audience more interested in what is happening in the scene, this is a technique used commonly in thriller films they always obscure cover or never show the villains face to keep the audience of edge and to create an element of mystery. Then today i helped ben with his editing of the first scene as the scene was almost impossible to recognise as it was too dark and so we worked on that together.

Editing issues

When we began to edit our videos everything was running smoothly, however when the opened our next piece of film it was way more dark than we expected and so we have to now correct it by decreasing the contrast on the video. This does cause an impact on the style of the image but in the grand scheme of our editing the impact is not a burden. The change in contrast makes the image more lively and actually visible.

Update 29/11/12

Movie First draft

Clockwork Soundtrack

After Danny constructed an idea for a soundtrack using pre-made loops i had my own go with my own content.

Danny is a beautiful creature...

Ben Cusworth made this on GarageBand

Parity

I have decided to take a look at another AS thriller opening called Parity.

The opening title shot i think was filmed in much more of a horror style, the font is red and black which is very much a convention of horror films the words are over a very dingy wall with a green filter but this is once again more of a thriller setting a place with dingy walls 

We then cut to a man in a bathroom standing over a dead body whilst holding a knife this makes it more of a thriller as they have not made it a really gory murder they just show that he has killed the other guy.  The soundtrack for this part is very fitting with the piece and uses the same conventions as many thriller film soundtracks.

The next few seconds consist of him washing his face and then there is about half a second of footage that is flashed in I managed to pause the film and screenshot what is in this half a second it is the murderer about to stab his victim, this is a very good technique as it makes the audience question what they have seen however I think the film could have done with a few more of these as unless i paused it i could not tell what i picture was.

He then continues to search around the toilets and begin to get rid of any evidence, at this point he kicks a knife away and drags a body into a stall. At this point I had so many questions such as why has he killed him, why has he killed someone in a toilet and why does he think by placing a body in a toilet stall that he will not be found out as the murderer, however, through this major plot holes we still see some good use of camera work and editing. One shot i particularly liked was when he kicked the knife away, he begins to pick up the body and in doing so he realises he also needs to hide his weapon so he drops the legs of the body kicks away the knife and then continues to move the victim, although you cannot see his face, therefore making it tough to read his emotions, they have used this shot very well to convey he is not used murder, from his body language you could see he almost forgot to get rid of incriminating evidence and so he clearly isn't very careful and so we assume he hasn't done this before.

He then continues to clean the toilets and go back to pick up the knife he earlier kicked now i have a real problem with this because why would he kick the knife under a toilet stall to only return seconds later to pick it up and place it in his pocket, he then continues out of the toilet and we watch as the door slowly brings itself to a close.

Problems

We have recently been out to film our actual thriller opening and in this time we have had continuity and audio errors, we found some people didn't come in in the same costumes as before so we have had to go back and re-film some parts already. We have also had the issue that people were not projecting there voices very well so in an attempted to fix this we re-filmed the audio and then i detached the audio and added it to the video, however, the original filming is outdoors and the re-filmed audio was done indoors, there is a very noticeable difference in the echo of the voices so therefore I plan to once again re-film the audio for the shot outdoors tomorrow along with filming a new scene.

Scene From Pulp Fiction

I have chosen to analyse the scene where Jules and Vince go to see some clients whilst they are eating there breakfast. The scene begins with a few seconds of silence as the dialogue continues there are long pauses between sentences, this is a way of creating tension in the scene making in very suspenseful. Jules says that the people are business partners of "Marcellas Wallace." We have heard previously that he is not a very nice man but we have yet to meet him in the film this give him an element of mystery and an intriguing backstory. Then Jules begins to intimidate one of the people in the apartment called Brett he uses his loud booming voice as a way of making Brett feel small, he keeps asking to have some of his food although he is asking him Brett knows it is best not to refuse as he clearly knows Jules is the type of man who would kill over something that small.

 At the 3 minute mark they use the lighting very well when Jules is asking the other man a question he is in the light however when he is interrupted he turns into the darkness to shout "I don't remember asking you a goddamn thing." This shows that if you get on the wrong dark side of him he will turn on you. The next key point is when Brett begins to try and talk his way out of the situation and all of a sudden Jules takes his pistol and fires it next to the man laying on the couch, then there is a long silence the tension at this point of the scene is at it's climax we have no idea what Jules is going to do next he have recognised he is very unpredictable and makes decisions on impulse he then circles Brett making very nervous he asks him a question and when Brett says "what" Jules flips over the table and explodes into a fit of shouting, shooting and swearing he then reads his bible passage that has now become iconic and then him and his partner vince kill Brett and the man on the couch.

The costumes used in the scene are very interesting, the costumes worn by Brett and his friends are casual showing that they weren't expecting a call from Jules and Vince, however, the costumes worn by Jules and Vince are very formal this shows that not only were they very well prepared for what was to happen but that also they are not petty criminals they clearly do this for a living as they have a proper outfit for there 'job.'

The camera work is mostly close-ups and medium shots, the medium shots show what the characters are doing but aren't too far away we can't tell what is happening, the close-ups are used to show the emotions of the characters especially the anger on Jules' face and how afraid Brett is.

The scene:

Interview

We asked a few people to watch a clip from Taken (link below) we then filmed there reaction and interviewed them about the scene. From the interviews I have noticed A strong actor and heavy tension are the best recipe for thriller success and so i will try and incorporate these heavily in our films by using actor casting to get the best actors and using thriller codes and conventions to create suspense and tension.

Taken clip:

Interview:

Preliminary task

The video below is our preliminary task, we have has issues with continuity, editing, acting and lack of group members. The continuity was an issue with the 'Masked Man' as we filmed his bits on two different days but because we haven't specified times this isn't such an issue. When it came to editing we had issues that the 'Masked Man' turned his head before the dialog had finished but then in the next shot he was facing forwards again. Unfortunately for this film we did not have any actors leading to some bad acting. Also one of the members of our group has gone on holiday in florida and so has entirely missed the preliminary task.

Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan is creating some great and interesting ideas in the thriller film world, with his backwards filmmaking he uses revolutionary ideas to keep his audience in suspense and shock.

One of his most famous films is Memento is in non-chonological order, the entire film has been cut up into it's scenes and then plays the scenes one by one in reverse order. The story follows a man with amnesia trying to find who raped and murdered his wife, to remember important information he leaves himself mementos such as tattoos, notes and photographs. It is a good thriller because although it releases key information about the film at the beginning because it is the end in chronological order it still manages to create more mystery's.

He has also directed a trilogy of films known as 'The Dark Knight trilogy' these films follow the superhero Batman. The second film (The Dark Knight) and the third film (The Dark Knight Rises) have been very widely received. The Dark Knight is 8th on the IMDB top 250 films. Nolan has taken a new, darker approach to the Batman series with Heath Ledger playing a psychotic portrayal of The Joker in the dark knight and Tom Hardy playing Bane in The Dark Knight Rises these villains are know known as some of the greatest villains in movie history.

Slideshow

Slideshow

This is a slideshow of the work i did and then presented last week in media, the slideshow presentation shows many features of our thriller film opening such as in depth character studies, narrative outlines with storyboards, the themes and messages for our opening, the practical details and the codes and conventions of thriller films that we will use

Dirty Harry (1971) Opening Titles

Dirty Harry (1971) — Art of the Title

This title i think is the perfect way to open a thriller film, the first bit of the opening is a wall of tributes to police officers of San Francisco who have died, this shows us that it is a crime thriller and the setting is San Francisco. The next thing we see is a close up of the end of a gun silencer with some intense music, the next camera shot is from the scope of a gun watching a woman, they use a woman because they are supposed to be seen as the helpless victim. They then switch between shots of the man holding the gun and what is down the scope until he shoots her. We then see our protagonist Harry Callahan walk as the name of the actor that play him, Clint Eastwood, appears at the bottom of the screen he then walks over to other police officers investigating the crime scene of the murder seen previously, we then see him walking up lots of stairs and across a rooftop until we see him at the location of the killer we saw he sees a note from the killer and a shell casing these are the catalysts for the rest of the story.

Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino has re-invented the thriller genre, he has received an academy award, a golden globe award and a BAFTA for his work, his work has been described as revolutionary, groundbreaking and that it brings a new meaning to the thriller genre.

His first movie Reservoir Dogs had an enigmatic story with plot twists, stunning acting and is full of red herring. Quentin Tarantino wrote the script in three and half weeks and armed with $30,000 and a 16mm camera he intended to make the film with a group of friends, however with an input from Harvey Keital they raised the budget to $1.5 million.

His next film was Pulp Fiction this re-invented the genre as it's non-chronological story confuses and entertains watch after watch. His use of the non-chronologic order creates an enigmatic story eventually connecting the story. The film won countless awards and is considered a great example of Tarantino's revolutionary filming. With a cast of award winning actors and actresses Pulp Fiction is a thriller fan's dream

Mask Ideas

In our thriller film we want our main character to wear a mask we believe this is important to the mystery of the character. In this post i will review 3 different masks using pros and cons to each mask.

Pros: Very mysterious, From a thriller film, Well known, Guy Fawkes mask so associated with death, Covers entire face, Easy to get.
Cons: Not very scary, Not very serious, Not our own idea.

Pros: From a thriller film, Well known, Very serious mask, Creates a mystery of why he has the mask, Portrays our character as venerable.
Cons: Does not cover entire face, Not our own idea, Not an easy mask to get hold of.

Pros: Easy to get, Covers entire face, Well known.
Cons: Not A serious mask, Mask from a horror not a thriller, Not our own idea.

Location Pictures

This was our first idea for a location, as our film is called clockwork this old clock tower would work perfectly for an opening shot. I am thinking with ticking in the background getting louder to then cut to a shot of the pocket watch.

This shot shows a distinct contrast between light, and the darkness of the shadows within the tunnel. The over grown leaves also is very conventional of a thriller film. It creates an eerie effect, and adds great tension.

This is the clock tower which shall appear many times. The camera angle used in this picture will not be used in the film, as it is out of boundaries  but as we were researching, we decided to take pictures from all kinds of different angels.

This shot really portrays the potential camera angels, which could be used. We could either do a shot from where we are standing, in the picture, or go up to that spot, and use a low angle. Both would create a great thriller effect.

This shot is a key shot for our film. Our film is called clockwork, and this clock would feature several times. It is a very creepy clock, and the shadows from the trees create such a good effect.