Shot by Shot

Shot by shot breakdown[1]

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My thriller ideas

My thriller idea

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My Horror/ Thriller Idea.

We open on an establishing shot of a club in a busy town centre focusing on the cue to get into the club, we then go into a close up of one girl in the crowd clearly underage and out alone. We then see that the girl starts taking to an older man in the cue and getting very friendly, we cut to the P.O.V of the man talking to the girl doing this hand held to make the audience feel like they are in the shoes of the man, all the sounds up until now have been diagetic, the music coming from the club and conversations between people.  Staying in the point of view of the man we make our way into the club where the night starts to speed up until we see the man give the girl a pill of some sort staying in P.O.V handheld we see the girl swallow the pill. It is at the point we go to a fast tracking shot backwards to see her reaction to the pill we then have a static wide shot where the girl is moving slowly around the club and dancing really badly as if she is overly drunk the crowd starts moving really fast to show us as the audience what she is feeling. When the girl finally leaves the club it is light outside we see cleaning crews and shots of empty streets and the sun rising. The girl who is now standing on the curd outside the club still a little tripped out from the pill she was given in the club. Several black cabs go past her as she tries to flag one down until finally an unlicensed cab pulls up and she gets in and tells him where she wants to go we have cutaways of the taxi leaving with the girl and some other shots inside the cab of the girl sleeping and the driver looking nervous and sweating a little bit it is at this point that the car swerves off the road quickly and the girl wakes up we then cut to black where we hear diagetic sounds of the car skidding to a halt, the door opening and finally the girl screaming and crying. Finally after all this we have the title come up on screen and some sort of slogan both of which I have not decided on yet.

Analysis of a scene from the 6th sense

In one of our lessons last week we looked at the scene in the 6th sense where the boy goes into the dead girls room, we learned that different means are used to build fear and suspense such as the non diagetic music as the boy slowly reaches for the door handle. By him reaching slowly this builds suspense and as we see his reflection in the door handle this is all used to scare us.

We are then inside the room and we see lots of dolls and a hospital bed, the slow moving child and the dark lighting is also used to build suspense and fear. This whole scene lasts around 3 minutes which is a long time in media terms, when the girl finally jumps out from under the bed we have been waiting for this moment for a while therefore scaring us a lot more.

Denotation & Connotation of Horror Film Images





Gothika
-Denotation
Woman in front of wall with red writing on it. Saying 'Not Alone'.

-Connotation
'Not Alone' symbolises how she may not actually physically be alone or mentally. Showing us that she may be mentally unstable, her clothing (tracksuit) highlights the she may be at home or in a place of comfort as she has not made an effort dress wise. The red writing could be blood, therefore showing us she is some sort of trouble.



Halloween
-DenotationMan with a white face possibly a mask, looking over a banister holding a large knife

-Connotation
Low angle shot to show that he is a strong character and his hierarchy, holding a knife signifying that hen is about to do something wrong.



Scream
-Denotation
Person in white mask and black hooded cloak holding a knife looking through window at a blond woman on a phone.

Connotation
Knife symbolises danger, woman may be on phone to someone asking for help i.e the police, Mask covers the mans face building fear as we don't know who this man is. the murderer may be breaking into the woman's home.

Conventions of the Horror/ Thriller Genre

In class last week we where asked to make a list of all the thins we expect to see in a Horror/ Thriller film, Here is the list we came up with:

• Death
• Blood
• Knives
• Axes
• Torture
• Dark
• Isolation
• Paranormal
• Supernatural
• Villans
• Victims
• Abandonment
• Ghosts
• Footsteps
• Screaming
• Kidnap
• Fire
• Puppets
• Mutation
• Creaking doors
• Trees
• Wind
• Clowns
• Storms
• Bad Omens
• Shouting
• Guns
• Psychos
• Dolls
• Hooded Figures
• Rats
• Owls
• Church Bells
• Grave Yards
• Candles
• Pain
• Murder
• Fear

Our Prelim Task

Editing our Prelim task.

I took a directorial role during the editing process suggesting where clips had to go and what it should look like whilst I was helping the rest of my group and giving them pointers on how to edit as I have done the editing stage before and taken courses in it, I think the rest of my group did really well and are getting really good at editing. I really enjoyed taking a back seat during this stage as my input was valid and got listened to quite a lot. I found it difficult not being in control at first but soon got used to it and ended up really liking doing that.

I learned that sometimes it is good to take a step back and let other people take the lead as they will learn what I already know and will benefit more from this than I will.

Prelim task Evaluation

When we did our Prelim task we shot in the studio as there was already a set in there set up, this location worked really well as the idea behind our preliminary task was set in an office. We decided as a group that we would change roles every camera move so we all ended up doing everything at some point Directing, Camera and First AD.

Lighting: The lighting we used in the studio was fairly hard so we had to dim it using the barn doors the lights we used where two red heads lighting from two different angles to try and get rid of shadows on the back wall, we wanted to create light in certain part of the room plus it was a dark day and we had to make the studio brighter. We started with only one light and found that it was not effective and it made quite a few nasty shadows so we set up another light and found that the shadows where less present and it looked a lot better.

Filming: We started off well we set up the tripod and put the camera on it when in position we bubbled it (made sure it was level), we then white balanced, adjusted exposure, checked our shutter speed, framed and finally focused the camera on our acts. We made sure there was no equipment in our frame whenever changing position and then we bubbled again. We chose our angles and shots carefully making sure we could see what needed to be seen by our audience. We had a mixture of low angle and high angle portraying who was dominant in our scene, we had close ups of the passing of the telephone and also close ups of the faces and the expressions on our actors faces. We did all of our shots in order to make sure we did not miss anything and also to save time, we did Wide shot first then Mid then over the shoulder followed by our close ups running through the whole scene ever time. We did not step over the 180 degree rule at any point in our Prelim task. We had a script we followed and when we had finished shooting all the shots we had to shoot we added some like a taking shot through the door, panning and some other close ups, we also made sure we where using the right terminology :

- STAND BY

- standing by

- ROLE CAMERA

- camera rolling/ camera speed

- ACTION !!

I have used the camera before and already knew how to story board and all ready knew about the 180 degree rule, the things I learned about where different types of shots such as- Wide (a shot showing a wide area- sometimes used as an establishing shot), Mid ( a medium shot, if shooting a person this will be from the waist up), Low ( camera is low down looking up at the characters making them dominant or strong)and High angle ( camera is high up looking down on a character making them vulnerable or less important in the scene)and so on.

The story board we used is shown below:

Introduction to Video Camera.

A few weeks ago we were taken into the media suite in school to be taught how to use the video cameras our school has to offer. We were taught how to set up the Tripods, Bubble the tripods, White balance the camera, how to focus and much much more.

The first thing we had to do is set up the tripod, when setting up the tripod you have to start by loosening the nuts to let the three legs be adjusted, once you have reached the height on the tripod you want you need to re-tighten the nuts you previously undid. After you have got your tripod to the hieght you want it at you will need to bubble the tripod which means that you need to make sure your camera is level on the tripod, you do this by unscrewing the bolt underneath the tripod head and then moving the head around until the bubble on the spirit level is in the middle. Remember whenever you move the tripod to a different location you need to re bubble the tripod even if you have just moved the tripod to a differtent position in the room. Once your tripod bubbling is done you can put the camera on the tripod and then you are ready to start on white balancing. The benefits of using a tripod is that the shots will be steady and there will be a difference between your hand held shots and your tripod shots which is a good thing because you will be able to create different feeling using the camera in different ways.

So now you should have your camera on the tripod, you will now turn on the camera and get on with white balancing, expossing and the rest of it. First, white balance. The white balance button is situated on the left of our sony cameras (if you are stood behind them) to adjust the white balance, first press the white balance button, then make sure the switch underneath the white balance button is set to A and then hold down the button next to the switch. Before you press all those buttons you need to make sure your camera is pointed at something white and the only things filling the frame is something white such as a piece of paper, a white t-shirt, a white wall, anything white really. You may zoom in if you need to to fill the frame.

Timecode, the timecode is situated on the LCD of your camera and can also be seen through the view finder. It is situated in the top right hand corner of your LCD or viewfinder and it is the numbers that when you press record changes. This indicates the ammount of time you have recorded for.

Expossure- The expossure ring works in conjunction with aperture and is used to adjust the ammount of light let into the camera, the expossure ring is situated on the lense of the camera, it is the third ring in.

Focusing, when focusing a shot you need to zoom in using the second ring right into your subject as far as it will go then you need to focus the shot by using the first ring on the lens once your subject is in focus meaning oonce you can see your subject clearly you should zoom out to where you want the shot to be.

Using the Camera

When shooting a video of any type you need to rmember a few key points such as, framing, composition, what kind of shot you want, if you want to track in the shot you are doing, the rule of thirds and most importantly the 180 degree rule.

Framing and Composition - is the design of your shot, this is where you will decide where you want your 

                                          subject, where you will place your camera and so on.

Shots- there are many different types of shot when using film that can be used, here are some:

EWS (Extreme Wide Shot)

VWS (Very Wide Shot)

WS (Wide Shot)

MS (Mid Shot)

MCU (Medium Close Up)

CU (Close Up)

ECU (Extreme Close Up)

CA (Cutaway)

Cut-In

Two-Shot

(OSS) Over-the-Shoulder Shot

Point-of-View Shot (POV)

Tracking- tracking is used to follow the subject or character through a scene or sequence, this can be done using hand held, Stedicam or Dolly and track. This is a great effect to make the audiance feel like 

they are in the scene folowing the character. 


The rule of thirds- this ditermines looking space, head space, movement within a frame. The rule of thirds breaks up the frame into nine squares these squares are where we are going to put things in our frame.

180 degree rule- determines where you place your camera in conjuction with your acts. Say you are shooting a conversation between two characters who are sitting oposite eachother and you decide

your first shot is going to be a wide from the left side of your characters you then can not jump to the right side of your characters.

The mistakes we made during our first task where mainley head room, lead room and looking space but i feel we covered all these mistakes in the new video we made last week.

Industry terminology

STAND BY / STANDING BY - ready everyone into position for the take. The AD calls STAND BY and the response tells them that everyone is prepped

TURN OVER / TURNING OVER (Roll film/Rolling etc) The director tells the camera operator to start filming - a few seconds of film is then run as the camera gets up to speed - this is often referred to as LEAD IN

ACTION! - Cue for the actors to perform the take, and the crew to do their jobs. It is good practice for the Director to let the film run on a further few seconds after the take is completed before cutting - this is referred to as LEAD OUT

CUT! - Cue for the camera to stop running film. Industry practice expects that the camera operator does not CUT before being told

I thought the change between stills photography and moving images or photographs to films was pretty easy and I didn't find that many differences. I think the biggest thing to watch it if people are looking into the camera because in stills it is a cool effect for people to look into the camera but in film it is rarely used. I really enjoyed the experience and loved the first stage of editing we did today as well.

Dr who editing task

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/trailermaker/view/7iasqn

What is a Thriller ?

A “thriller” is a film that contains terror, suspense and action. A Thriller usually contains the majority if not all of these elements: Death, blood, suspenseful music, darkness, mystery and crime. We used the film " The Usual Suspects "- Shown in the poster below.

We analysed this movie, we discussed how the Genre is represented. We talked about camera shots, editing, diagetic and non diagetic sound as well as mise-en-scene. We picked apart the poster above and this is what we came up with:

- The man in the middle should be the man character as he is the tallest and centre stage and should be the enemy/ evil character as he is in a red shirt.

- The man far right looks uncomfortable with the situation as he is holding his arm.

- The man second in from the right should be the hero as he is wearing a creme suit apposed to a black one.

- The man far left looks out of place as does the guy on the far right. 

- Last but not least the man second in from the left looks comfortable like this is routine, he is the other man in black this tells us he might be in business with the middle man or his right hand man.

This was one of our first lessons we did upon arrival at Hurtwood House and I really enjoyed it.

Photography Composition and Image manipulation

Composition:

Photography brings a visual language that is universal in understanding. We must then understand its vocabulary which consists of shapes, textures, patterns, lines, colours, shade of light to dark and sharp to blurry images. Just as we must learn to arrange words in a coherent order in order to make sense when we write or speak, so too must we put visual elements together in an organized manner if our photographs are to convey their meaning clearly and vividly.

Composition means arrangement: the orderly putting together of parts to make a unified whole; composition through a personal, intuitive act. However, there are basic principles that govern the way visual elements behave and interact when you combine them inside the four borders of a photograph. Once we have sharpened our vision and grasped these basic ideas of principles, then we will have the potential for making our photographs more exciting and effective than ever before.

In Photoshop:

I had to manipulate an image for a practical lesson, I had to take a poster from a film and put a man on the water of the poster and make his reflection in the water. We where then asked to remove some text from the bottom of the page. After colour correction and a few minutes playing with the image this is what I came up with. Above is the image before we had to change it and below is the image after all the changes where made.

About Myself.

Hello, my name is Niall.
I recently moved back to London after living on the Costa Del Sol, Spain for 10 years.
I went to school in a fairly un academic college called St. Anthony's.
I am currently studying Media in Hurtwood House, I chose to do media because film is a passion of mine,
My parents are both in the film business and I have grown up around it.

My favorite movies are Pulp Fiction, Good Fellas and This is England.

MODS: I am a mod I guess I love my parka and my jeans and I am looking to buy my second scooter a classic 1970's Lambretta, its lovely !

My favorite music genres are SKA, Old school hip hop and Reggae.
My favorite bands and artists are Denis Brown, Bob Marley, Collie Buddz, Notorious BIG and Tu Pac but I listen to anything.