We planned to make a short clip of a thriller film, we thought this would give us a wide selection of music, camerawork and storyline choices. Our film was about the life of a serial killer who had been killing undetected for a number of years. Our clip was one of his last killings, but more importantly, the one that brings him to the police's attention leading to his arrest.
My role for this film was the cinematographer. I took some of the shots in the last parts of our clip, in the opening scenes I play an acting part as one of the victims. When we were filming in the dark i helped create the lighting which involved holding a torch to find an appropriate angle.
When it came to the day of filming one of the cast members couldn't come with us to film, she did come with us look for locations with us though. This did mean that we had to change roles. I was no longer the cinematographer for the whole thing, instead i had to play an acting part in the film. This also meant that for the first two or three shots we had to get someone else to do the camerawork. This meant that filming took much longer than we intended as we had to explain to the new cameraman what needed to be done.
Our clip was filmed outside in the dark which we knew would be hard. Our main problem whilst filming, other then being short of one person, was the lighting. For the first part of the clip this wasn't  too much of a problem as there were streetlamps and the area was much more open.
When it came to the much darker scenes we spent a long time trying to balance our light in the trees at a good angle so you could see the characters, but so there wasn't a bright spotlight shining on them. This was very hard as only one person could do it at a time and got tiresome after so many attempts.
Our original plan was to start off on a bus, with the three girls getting on the bus, being brought to the audience's and killer's attention. We then realised at the time we were filming the bus would be far too busy, so we got rid of the idea and just started with them already being followed. This meant that we didn't really get an introduction to the girls or any idea of why they're there.
Our first idea was to film some from the perspective of the killer and some from a still camera over-looking . For this we looked at clips from The Blair Witch Projeect and the TV series Jeapordy as they are both good examples of filming from a point of view perspective. However we didn't have enough people to film and play all the parts so we kept it all through his viewpoint.    I thought it would be quite hard to make look good with it being so dark. But some parts it's quite effective, especially during the chase, the shaky camera makes it feel more real and you can tell what's going on as the streetlamps on either side of the path are bright.
Another aspect we had to consider was costumes. The girls in the film are supposed to be going home from a party late at night, so we had to dress up a little bit. But because we were in the dark we couldn't dress too similarly, that would make it harder to distinguish characters in the darker scenes. We had to have diferent silhouttes so we all wore different styles of clothes. The dark surroundings also meant we had to wear bright clothes, or atleast one bright item to see us properly.
The easiest part of the whole project was probably editing our film. We didn't have too much unwanted footage and we had a good idea of what we wanted so cutting it was quite straigthforward. We only had a problem when it came to making the film lighter so you could see clearly what was going on. We decided the best solution for this was to change the contrast and brightness on the darker scenes. This worked well, but when you watched it within the film the picture quality changed dramatically, we changed all our clips to the same settings so they all matched. This gave the film a much grainier quality, which it makes it seem seedy and sordid.
We had some trouble with our soundtrack on Garageband which resulted in our finished project without any music. Music is essential in a number of films, especially thrillers, so i thought the film wouldn't be able to create the scary effect we were after. However when we got feedback from our class people commented on how the lack of a soundtrack created tension and was very effective.Labels: alice, evaluation |
