Evaluation Summary

Our film, 'The Unknown' followed the codes and conventions of a thriller movie by creating suspense and by leaving the audience with the edge of the seat feeling. It also introduces the idea of a character; the detective, relentlessly persuing a single minded goal. We recieved positive feedback from our teachers and our peers about our movie and they recognised the genre of the piece. We then made a video evaluating our movie which you can watch below.

Editing

The editing of our movie took longer than the actual filming. The software we used to edit our movie was final cut express on a apple mac. When we first started editing our movie we did not know how to use the software appropriately therefore our teacher had to assist us a lot whilst editing the movie. We managed to put all our clips onto the software and we ordered them properly and deleted clips we never needed. We then set out to clean up our clips cutting out bits of the clips we never needed and cutting out any sounds and dialogue the camera picked up which we never needed.

We then started to add transitions between our clips to make them look smooth and professional. A couple examples of transitions we used were; fade in, fade out and dissolve. These cuts helped our film to look extremely professional and smooth.

We also used other editing tools such as special effects. We used a special effect on our scene where the killer comes out with a knife to Ali and Henna. The special effect we used was lighting, we used this special effect to shock the audience and give them the little fright whilst they are on the edge of the seat feeling which is one of the main codes and conventions of a thriller film.

We then added sound to our movie using the editing suite. Their was no sounds on the editing suite therefore we had to go on a website to find sounds suitable for our movie ourselves. We went on the website and got a range of sounds which suited our movie such as mysterious and thriller sounds and put them on to final cut express to check which one suited the chosen scenes the most.

The final thing we done was add credits to the ending of the 2 minute introduction to a thriller. Our teacher showed us how to add credits and gave us a picture of what we should be writing for our credits therefore we done this without any problems however the credits looked a bit dull and boring therefore we asked our teacher if we could change it make it look not so boring. He showed us how to change the fonts on the credits and the colour we then changed the font to a more bloody kind of font which suits the film and we changed the writing to red which makes the credits not so boring and more relevant to the actual film.

Filming

When we first started filming our movie we were not that great as this was the first time we had all ever used a video camera however we got use to using the camera soon enough and got confident filming the scenes in our movie. The problems we had come across when we first started recording our movie was that we never used enough shots in our scenes instead we would records a whole scene in just 2 or 3 shots we resolved this problem by showing our teacher the movie and the feedback we received was to include a variety furthermore our teacher showed us an example of a small scene which included 12 different shots therefore we took what we learned and applied it to our movie.

One of the things we achieved in our movie was that we actually stuck to the correct timings for all our scenes and we did not breach the two minutes which we had to film in this was a good achievement as this showed that we stuck to what we originally set out to do however we did change a few things from our original storyboard because of different legitimate reasons. We originally were going to use a real knife and alcohol as our props for the film but we could not use these props because of health and safety reasons and because none of us were at the legitimate age to be able purchase alcohol therefore instead we created a plastic knife ourselves using our schools DT departments facilities and we used water bottles instead of the alcohol bottles we set out to use originally.

Another thing we had to change from our original planning documents was the time of day we were going to record our scenes. We originally set out to record our movie at night (8pm) however we did not have the equipment to record at night and our camera did not pick up anything when it was dark therefore we decided to change our time of day to daytime (2pm) in order to be able to record our scenes properly and to be able to actually see what we are recording.

Se7en Essay

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-lytcM_X8oEDlJvuBUvB0dK0zvnoqhPtmWvTSDFU2ak/edit?hl=en#

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xnd3LxlLR4LAF54sSMIplNqZXu6Xy8czKIx2LOf5VY8/edit?hl=en#

Conventions of a Thriller - PowerPoint Presentation

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B-CD3yTphlBrNWZkZTM2ZWUtZmI3Yi00OTgxLWE2MDEtYTYzYTI2MGQzZjUz&hl=en

Storyboard

This is the storyboard that we used for our final film. This helped us a lot with producing our final film as we were able to draw each of our shots out and next to it include vital information such as; estimated time, added audio and narration. 

Filming schedule

The above is the filming schedule this was very useful as it kept us organised as we could write down what scenes we were filiming, the days we were filming them on, the times we were filiming each of them. This was very useful as it let us know what days we were filiming what scenes on and what times also. In addition the filming schedule also let us write down other important information for each shot such as; the filming location, camera angle/shot, characters/actors needed, weather/lighting and the props needed.