Thriller opening

During our previous lesson we decided that we finally need to start filming for our thriller opening. Our original idea was to go ally pally which is a funfair in Alexandra palace. Unfortunately, we found out that the funfair will not always be there for us to film so we decided to film in a location that we knew would always be there for us. We also decided that ally pally was too far of a location for us to film just in case we forgot anything at college we would have to go all the way back which would just be a waste of time.

The night before I had been thinking of some ideas for our location. On my way to school with Karel, we saw an alley which was quite near to the college and we decided that we should ask the rest of of our group if they would like to film there. They thought that the location was perfect.
Below are some images of the location:









I also thought of some ideas to add to the thriller. The original ideas a schizophrenic waking up at a funfair and finding someone dead. They then called someone and it turned out to that the dead person was the person they were calling. I thought that there was too much and because we were no longer able to film in the funfair I thought that the idea needed some mending. I thought that we should keep the idea of someone waking up in the middle of a street and to find a friend dead nearby. However I came up with the idea that it should be a flashback rather than the person being schizophrenic. So a young lady wakes up to find herself in the middle of a street. She begins to pass many places and as she passes them she begins to have flash backs of the night before. She comes across her friend who has been killed and then we zoom into her face and it ends there.

We wanted the audience to have mixed responses. Some may have connotations that the girl who just woke up has killed her friend whilst others may think otherwise. This is good because it will make the audience want to watch more which is the point of an opening.  We don't want to start the film with the audience knowing everything about the film, there would be no point in watching the rest of the film then.

My group and I decided to use a lot of non-diegetic sound. We were also going to record some sounds of cars passing to give some effect . We decided that we should make the soundtrack before we made the thriller. This is because the soundtrack may not blend with what is happening in the film if we made it first. As for example there may be a bit in the soundtrack which is trying to scare the audience whilst the film is showing someone just walking past. It would not make sense. We have to know when thrilling bits are going to happen in order to make the soundtrack.

We also made a decision that the credits would be a black background with white text. The program we are using to make the credits is LiveType. I managed to find time to experiment with the program. I came across some fonts that I thought would be useful for the opening of our thriller.

Once we arrived in class decided to do a storyboard. The storyboard helped us to get a visual idea of exactly what our thriller will look like. We did an outline of the opening, describing shots, lighting and length of each shot. We also said where the credits were going to be placed within our opening.

Pitching the movie

A pitch is when someone tries to sell their idea to someone in order to receive funding or equipment in order to continue with their filming.

We had to come up with a pitch in order to convince our teachers to lend us the equipment we required to for our opening.

This is a bad example of a pitch. The people who are pitching the movie are not being serious and are not providing the man with enough detail about the movie. Also the man who is listening wants to know more about the romance of the film but they keep changing topic.

Here is another video of a bad pitch.
The man pitching the movie is not being serious. He is talking too fast and when the directors are asking him questions he does'nt even stop to listen to what they have to say. He does not explain his film in detail. Also he just walks in randomly and obviously has not prepared to pitch hi film.

This video shows a man giving people advice on how to pitch a movie.

The advice he gives is really good, he tells the people that they should make a connection with the director before they start talking about their movie. He says they should speak quite slowly in order for the director to catch what they are saying. They should have eye contact and try to engage the directors.