Question 1 of evaluation for two minute opening of a film

At a micro, technical level, how well did you observe the conventions of continuity, the language of the film and the grammar of the edit?

When we found that we had to create an opening title of two minute for a film, already me, Whitney Mckerenan and Lauren Kirby instantly had similar ideas. We wanted to create a thriller/horror based in the woods including:

a victim-Karly-Whitney Mckernan,

a stalker-Simon-Kevin Smibert

a boyfriend of the victim-Sam-Nik Jones

and the friend of both boyfriend and victim-Dannii-Lauren Kirby.

With the micro aspect, to show the representation of our film about a girl being attacked by a stalker we decided that the perfect genre for this would be a horror/thriller.  So for the macro to work, we needed those vital micro elements. First being camera angles and movement.

The original idea for the first scene was for Karly to get drugged by the Simon at a house party, but this idea wasnt idealy possible to create so we ended up with the stalker sitting outside the pub away from both Karly and Dannii while they were having a chat and drinking. When both left for a short period of time, Simon grabbed the opportunity to spike her drink.  We used a few different camera angles, for example for this scene we used a close up to show the focus of the drug being placed in the drink, and then he leaves. So when Karly returns we see that she has an effect from this drug after she has the drink because we used a crane camera angle, then a close up of her face with the camera tilting from each side. This then follows up to both Karly and Simon running through the woods. This was an up-side as it was filmed in the woods because it gave us the opportunity to create even stronger camera angles through shrubery, and above/crane shots from the advantage of hills.

The next aspect for our opening to work was the song choice. We didn’t exactly want a typical tension music, where it starts quite and gets louder, and not to be classical. So ours was an up to date song which was Spitfire by The Prodigy. This song gave an eerie feel to it at the start and when it kicked in we went to a sudden scene change from the pub which was filmed in colour, to the woods which we edited into a black and white contrast. we done this so there was a greater impact, drama and tension between characters and the audience.

On our final edited film opening, we didn’t realise till it was too late that we did not include the title of the film, unless a member of the group added it, but the title of our piece was called Obsession. But the font of our writing i found to be more western, but we had to stick to it as it was the closest one to a horror opening title. We included all the names of the actors used and who done what in our group.

When it came to using dialogue we did not want much as we thought this would create more tension for when there is dialougue.The main speech was at the beginning scene between Karly and Dannii about Sam. We used Me and Lauren mainly shouting “KARLY!” and towards the end we had Simon almost shouting why he is doing this to her, and how long he has wanted her. But over-all not much dialogue, we also covered the heavy breathing whilst running with the backing music.

The setting was easy for us, but it was finding the right spot within Mousehold Woods to film. First we started at the outside of a pub where the pace was slow and naturalistic, but as said before the pace we went along with was because of the music, when the music kicked in the pace got faster and the camera shots were sharper and faster. Once again this was to create the genre of a horror/thriller film.

Over-all these aspects created the macro of our film, and how we represented a possible modern day situation of teenagers lives within a horror/thriller based film opening.