Photoshop

Some gore may be used for one of the effects in the title-sequence- for this we need photoshop.
There is some problems with this, however:

Positive points:

• If done correctly, can look very professional
• Is a very useful program, and can be done individually whilst another groupmember works.
• Can be done with relatively no experience prior

Negative points:

• Can be extremely time absorbing
• Can be very hard to acheive professional look
• Could be difficult to mesh neatly with the rest of the title-sequence as it would be the only static frame in the peice.
• should something go wrong, it may end up becoming less useful than it was in the first place

Even though there are very heavy arguments as to why one should not add a freeze-frame photoshop image to the opening, it seems only too appropriate to do one anyway. Even though this problem could be navigated around, i believe that the peice could benifit from having more work done to it in that way.

This will be tried for about 5 minutes whilst my partner is working on editing the peice, should the task prove unsuccessful or unpromising, it shall be abandoned.

Daniel Swanton--

Revelation.

After some thought on the day of the rough-cut feedback, i have decided to completely revise my project in order to make the work more understandable and more interesting:

Instead of using the shots I have taken in order to portray a linear story I have chosen to mix the story into the title-sequence so as to make both sides seem more active.
This way, characters and concepts (such as murder and detection) can be gotten out of the way early so that there is little need for explaination when the movie begins.
This course of action was also advised by our teacher, so I believe that it is a good step to take.

It is a shame that we have been forced to wander so far from the animatic we had so previously heralded as infallable, but it seems as though time and mark is on the line, so appropriate measures must be taken.

Daniel Swanton--

Rough cut feedback

On the day we reviewed eachother's rough cuts, it gave me quite an insight into how much work I had done in relation to other groups.
From what was gathered after that activity, we have discovered that some of our work is in need of shortening, or indeed adding some variation to- some work will need to be mixed to make the scene more interesting for the audience, as some themes and shots perhaps continue for too long, and seems perhaps too static.
Fortunately, we have recieved much praise for the music and the camera work, however, there is much editing to do, as it appears to be our weakest attribute.
However, things such these were all expected from the beginning and will be dealt with and will be finished indefinately in the next four lessons.
However, there is one thing that was not expected, and that was the degree to which the change of scenery was taken- it appears as though whilst the first half of the peice was acceptable, there was a heavy contrast present in relation to the second half, which seemed to be "an entirely different movie altogether".
This is troubling, as it may lead to some kind of delay to the date at which this peice must be done by.

I have chosen to ignore some criticism because the comments made did not reflect on what my envisioning of the final peice to be, comments such as "the plot is confusing" and "the diagetic sound is poor" is irrelavant to me, as i do not intend for there to be any diagetic sound that was recorded at the shooting day, and not all of the shots were shown on the rough-cut quicktime file.

More work shall follow.

Daniel Swanton--

Rough cut

We have finally managed to complete more than half of our piece in the form of our rough cut.
I believe that with some hard work we could be done very soon, perhaps even in three lessons.
However, with this work comes a problem; in accordance with our feedback, some aspects must be changed (or it is at least advisable to do so) in order to make our piece more effective.
This may somewhat make our time lessen as we will need to improve that which is already there, rather than progressing with new material.

rough cut

Overcoming obstacles.

In the past few weeks I have been forced to work upon my media project alone; my partner has not been present in lessons for around four lessons. However, in that time, i believe i have accomplished much.
I have already finished the title sequence of the project and i am now endeavoring to finish the rest of the cutting.

Tom will also be needed later for work on some more filming should the need arise. (as some shots are unusable.)


Daniel Swanton--

THRILLER ROUGH CUT

Here is a rough cut of what has been done.
Some of the clips have not been added yet, but unfortunately i have had a larger workload than i had anticipated- (my partner has been away for a few lessons prior).


Daniel Swanton--

music

Whilst my partner Tom was away, I have been given the opportunity to concentrate upon the title-sequence musically for two days.
I feel as though I have reached a breakthrough and have set about going through the sequence with a fine tooth comb- without the need to check what I'm doing with Tom so that it is a joint effort.

Shooting Day

On the 5th of February, we began to film our thriller peice, we met in a cafe and finalised the planning of our characters and got the fine details on what dialogue we would have during shots.
This took around two and a half hours and when three oclock came, we drove to Haslingfield where we immediately got to work and got a friend to help us be an extra (in this case a victim).
Time was not on our side as the sun was rapidly setting, we managed fifteen minutes of filming before we were forced inside due to heavy rain (we decided to try some rain shots too, but they did not work as well as it should).

Spending around half an hour in the comfort of the derilict room, we recorded the opening scene using the rest of the time we had and the paper left in the printer, We had to work around some points such as the blind over the window did not quite cover all, there was a rug in the corner of the room that we were not allowed to remove and there were issues of space where we were going to place all of the excess equipment.

At around five oclock we were forced to stop filming and Tom went home, The extra and I waited for nightfall until continuing the rest of the shooting for the victim scenes.

thriller update

today we are going to upload the footage that we filmed yesterday of the opening sequence, we did three different shots of all the scenes and we are going to see which ones look best and use them.
we have not finished all of the filming for the murder scene as it began to rain, so we are going to postpone that scene until we are both free to finish it off, we got about half way through so it should only take about another 20 minutes to finish it off.

with the rest of the footage that we have, which includes;
- the very opening scene of the killer in his place of work,
- half of the murder scene where the detective and his assistant are examining the body of the victim,
- the killer murdering his victim showing how she dies.

to edit all of these scenes we shall be using final cut. We also need to find a suitable sound track that will go with the whole scenes.