Hurt Locker - Tom Peacock

Evaluation of thriller openings. 

Tom Peacock

Hurt Locker

Sound is also very important in thrillers and here we can see some great examples.The director here has used great examples of non diegetic sounds to create mood and atmosphere.

For example in the clip above we hear the sudden introduction of some drum beats gently getting faster and faster. The sudden increase in the beats would suggest that they've been added to create a mood of suspense. It makes the viewer feel as though this scene is the quiet before the storm and that a big event in the story line is about to happen, which it does. 

An example of how the beat increases can be found below: 

As the action in the scene reaches the tipping point, the beats and music is at the top right of the diagram below - Creating suspense and atmosphere as mentioned above.

The above scene is the opening to Hurt locker, a thriller film which is set in Baghdad. In the opening scene we see the director use very Disorientating camera shots. We see shots such as the low angle shot and we also are the viewing what we later see as the robot, in first person. Using first person here furthermore expands on the point that the scene is very chaotic it doesn't really give much away to the viewer in the first few scenes, which creates a sense of mystery.

The director has also used Iconography here. After this scene we see the bomb disposal robot driving itself to where its going. This is a good example of Iconography because it symbolizes danger because most people will associate a bomb disposal robot with bombs, which are dangerous and threatening. This furthermore will entice the viewer to pay more attention to what's happening as there is an element of danger there.

The theme of distortion carries onto the following scenes, the camera angle here is a medium shot however the camera is not on a tripod while filming, it's freehand which makes it very shaky. This was most likely done on purpose to create the theme of confusion, which is used cleverly because the scenes show people running around, soldiers, which makes the viewer think about what's going on.

Mise en Scene also is used here to good effect. The costumes, which the characters are wearing give us yet more feel of confusion. There's two distinctive sorts of people here, the soldiers and then people who live there, both wearing very stereotypical clothes. Yet again the viewer will question why there are soldiers and civilians running around frantically and also because of the costumes they are wearing, why there are soldiers in Baghdad.

Gravity Opening - Daniel Wright

Gravity Opening

Daniel Wright

The film Gravity is set at a space station up in space, the end of the opening scene is where the main action unfolds. During this 1 minute and 10 seconds there is not one single cut, the whole duration it one continuous take where the camera fixates around the main character as she try's to break free from her harness.

During the time she is attached to the "arm" in the frame she is Put to the left hand side of the frame, by doing this the audience can see all the chaos which is unfolding in the background. The music which is accompanied with the Scene is parallel to what is happening within it. 

The music is very fast paced and dramatic. Still on the subject of sound, no sound is heard from the destruction behind the main character. This is to simulate what you would really hear up in space. The only things diegetic sound can be heard for the character are the voices of all radio transmissions. This is to put the viewer into thinking this is more of a real life situation than just a film.

In terms of Iconography, there is not really anything that would represent this to being a thriller film before the chaos happens. The characters are all suited up in astronaut suits this does not denote to us on what the film will be about and can't make judgments on what it will be on if you had never heard of the film before.

Tom, Dan, Harry

Garage band prelim

Here is our sound prelim.

Final Film

Final Film

Tom Peacock, Dan Wright

 

Here is the final of our film. It has also been placed in the completed folder.

Health and Safety

Health and safety risks

Tom Peacock

Health and saftey risks while filming are crucial to take notice of. Failure to take notice of risks while filming could lead to accidents or serious injury.

While filming our footage, this was something we'd have to consider as well. We didn't encounter many health and safety risks however while filming one of our shots we had to get a high angle shot.

This involved Dan standing on table top whilst filming to get the angle needed. This was risky because the table could of easily fallen to one side and collapsed, which would of seriously hurt Dan.

To make sure we considered health and safety we made sure the table was firm and secure before Dan go on top of it. To take extra precautions we also made sure that the area around the table was clear, so that if Dan did fall, he wouldn't hit anything on the way down like other tables or chairs.

Post Production

Post Production

Tom Peacock

Below are some screen grabs of our group editing during the prelim task. 

Editing our timeline of clips in final cut.

Final rendering of our film.

Editing Decisions 

Throughout our editing we had to make decisions as a group on which way we thought was the best to put together our final piece of film.

The first decision we had to make was how much of a gap we needed to leave at the start of the shot reverse shots. We firstly decided to leave a small section of the footage at the start, which we thought would create some suspense between each character exchanging convosation. We then decided after seeing what this looked like that it was too slow and that the correct way to go about it would be to make the conversations cut quickly from each other to keep it flowing well and as well as this, increase the flow and make it suite the thriller genre. 

We also had quite a few decisions to make at the early stages of editing our film. We had to make sure that the shots where the interviewer is showing the interviewee the picture flow correctly and we used match on action. We had to make sure that when the paper was being turned around, that Harry's arm was in the same position, which we didn't consider whilst filming. This we then had to correct in the editing, by making each clip shorter so that the audience wouldn't see the mistake that we made and in the end you couldn't notice the difference.

Editing techniques used

We didn't really use that many editing techniques apart from cutting the clips short or making them longer.

The only major effect we used was a fade out transition in final cut. The transition was easy enough to apply and with the help of one of the technicians we were able to use it effectively in our film.

We did use one other technique where we overlayed certain clips to increase the smoothness of the film. We did this because on some occasions there was a small gap between each scene and instead of cutting it we overlayed it onto the previous clip so that it flowed better and also looked better too.

The techniques we used were very basic and had we had the need to use a few more techniques we definatley would've done.

Sound Editing 

This was quite similar to Editing techniques used, we didn't use that many but where we did they were used to good effect where they needed to be.

The main bit of sound editing we did was to alter the volume levels of the characters speaking. This was mainly because in the final cut version, the audio was very low and quite hard to pick up, so we exported it to garageband and then simply increased the volume of those particular sounds, to make our dialogue more clear. 

Not only this but we added in sounds at various points in the film. For instance when Harry goes to open the door, we couldn't hear the noises very well at all in final cut. We then decided to look into alternative noises. We had the choice to either add our own sound in, which we would have to record or find one of garageband. Luckily after looking, we found one on garageband, which sounded exactly the same. We then boosted the volume of that too so that it was clear and everyone would be able to hear it. 

StoryBoard Animatic

Animatic

Dan Tom

Above is our animatic for our prelim task. The clips are longer than our final film and this is because when filming we realized that we wouldn't use all the time up that we had previously planned in the animatic.