Police and emergency servies telephone calls (Thea)

Looking at emergency service calls on the internet a lot of the ones that are on youtube are unfortunately hoax calls or joke ones. However the greater remains the same. As you can see below, the operator answers the phone with; "Greater Manchester Police, How can I help?" Currently, in our opening, the operator says Hello, emergency services how can I help, although this is very similar. Perhaps our operator may need to say, they are the police as the call would probably have been directed to either 'Police, Ambulance or Fire' before being asked to give details of the incident so that their call could be advised clearer. We may need to re-record the telephone call depending on how much this authenticity will affect our opening.

Effective use of editing and sound that also reflects mise en scene (Thea)

Having look into our two minute film opening, we feel that the first 30 seconds is going to have a much bigger impact that then next two minutes. Due to this, we are keen to make sure that our editing is really effective and adds to the suspense and tension of the opening.




I have looked at The silence of the lambs trailer as it is a infamous psychological thriller. Although, it is a trailer and not an opening, the editing techniques are still incredibly effective. the quick shots of the Protagonist at the very beginning as 'Orion' pictures are displayed along with the intense burst of sound that sounds like a door or a metal frame is being closed? (not too sure), is very effective and definitely puts the audience on edge. This may be very effective for use within our opening perhaps especially as our protagonist is looking at his hands with the blood to reflect his unstable frame of mind.





I have looked at the opening of the psychological thriller se7en. The editing is very quick between shots and the music is distorted as is the mise en scene as it is unclear to see what the person is doing. However, it is clear that they are mentally unstable and the fast editing is a excellent reflection of this. Perhaps, the quick cutting from one object or scene to another is being used to reflect how indecisive and confused the main person is. the music is also distorded and although it clearly has a beat it does not seem to make clear logical sense and other than the undertone of the bass there appears to be no real sense of rhythm or structure with the other sounds. This is also reflects the insanity and lack of structure that the person feels within thei brain.
This may be useful within our opening as we want to reflect how our protagonist is very confused as he is not sure whether or not he has killed the girl. Also, the tempo/beat of the music increases as the tension of the opening does. We have used this affect within the first 30 seconds (where the photographs are being shown), although we may want to consider this with perhaps having an undertone of music running throughout the opening as our protagonist is running through the station and the tempo could build up as his unhinged state becomes clearer as the blood becomes more and more on his hands and eventually onto his face.

Name Ideas (Thea)

Having decided we wanted a name to be relevant to the film yet not give too much away (from audience research). We decided to look up the mains themes of our film in a thesarus to open some new ideas.
The themes are;
-Insanity/Insane
-Murder
-Blood
-Clensing
-Psychopathic

Insane;
Unhinged Deranged
Senseless Infested
Absurdity Criminality
Remorse Contribution
Blame Uncontrollable

Murder;
Slaughter Butchery
Shed the blood Slay
Massacre Kill
Mullitate Thrash

Blood;
Gore Extraction
Disposition

Clean/Clense;
Purify Purge
Absolve lustrate

Psychopathic;
Disturbed Insane
Maniac Deranged



Other ideas;
Sceptic, she (will add more after group discussion)


Lots of these are very simple and are one word which is good as one word/short titels are a code and convention of psychological thrillers. We will have a group discussion and then vote on the title for our film. We will also ask members outside of our group for their opinion on the name as we want to make sure it has the correct effect on our target audience.

Running POV shot

We researched ways in which we could get a POV shot of our protagonist whilst he was running, so we should also get shots of his hands. This would used as an insight into the mind of the protagonist and it let's the audience see what he is seeing himself. The main idea we had of using a POV shot while running is that the audience can see the blood on the hands of the protagonist which would create confusion as the opening focuses on the the question whether the blood is really there or not.

However after trying several methods of holding the camera to the eye level of our actor, this came with great difficulty as whoever was holding the camera's footsteps would be picking up on the sound and therefore two sets of footsteps could be heard when the footage was played back. Also if the person holding the camera was runnig at a different pace to the protagonist, the camera would not correspond the protagonist's running.Therefore, in order to tackle these issues we would actually strap the camera securely to the side of our protagonists head. Before hand we held the camera to see whether it looked like a POV shot, in which it did.

Firstly Thea and Jakob experimented running along side each other, whilst holding the camera to Jakobs head, however the camera was a bit shakey, and it was hard to keep in sync with one another.Therefore this method of creating a POV shot would be ineffective

We then used a method of attatching the actual camera to jakob's head using duck tape and a swimming cap to protect his hair. This worked very well as it got the exact height and angle of the protagonists eyes. However as Jakob could not see through the camera himself, we had to direct his hands to the right place where they could be seen. This was also difficult to create a 'looking down' affect because of the directioning.




We finally decided that the use of a POV of shot is not necessary when our protagonist is running as we realsied that you do not actually look at your hands when running. Therefore we have deicded as a group that we shall still use the POV of shot to show the blood on the protagonists's hand, however this will be done he is still.