The document discusses the filmmaker's thriller film opening they created for a class project. They aimed to attract their target audience of young people by including unusual elements and an unexpected storyline. The opening establishes a young girl doing disturbing things while her ordinary sister watches. Special effects and editing techniques like quick cuts were used to build tension. Costumes and locations were chosen to appear realistic and keep the audience engaged throughout the short film opening.

1. How did you attract address your audience? <br />According to my questionnaire results and in dept interviews my target audience really wanted something unusual with attention-grabbing moments and an out of the ordinary storyline well my group and I attempted to create just that. The use of a young girl doing menacing and evil things really interest the audience the fact that the other sister seems ordinary makes the audience want to understand the whole back story which results in them watching the whole film, reaching that climax and then the conclusion. <br />My audience will find the protagonist in this opening exciting, and the way we used the codes and conventions of the thriller genre. Such as the stairs, quick cuts, different camera angles, the use of black and white and the tension building soundtrack.<br />My generation are very technology orientated and when watching movies today really do appreciate special effects and in fact look out for them. We only had final cut pro to achieve this and i think we did a very good job. We used natural lighting to help produce shadows and special effects on final cut pro and the use of camera work to help us make the little girl disappear then appear again which helped create the jumpy, unforeseen moments. <br />We used elliptical editing to help with the manipulation of time to keep the audience engaged as we only had two minute s but even they would have been inpatient as with thrillers it really is about getting to the thrills and terrifying moments.<br />The main actress the woman adopting the young girl is very young looking wearing a fashionable jacket she looks very ordinary. Miss en scene is very important the clothes which she is wearing appeals to the audience as that’s what is currently in fashion and they will probably be aware of this. <br />Overall my audience was looking for a twist which I believed my group and I delivered. Another essential element of our thriller opening was that we filmed allot of the unforeseen moments in the house which the audience like to see as that’s were they would feel their most safe so putting filming the most thrilling elements in the house was a sensible decision. <br />Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in progression from it to your full product? <br />The editing process for the preliminary task was so much easier, there were less mistakes and retakes which made the editing process so simple, it was even unnecessary for us to go through logging and capture the footage in parts so when it came to editing our final piece we were quite surprised at how much work was going to go into this. However the practice in the editing suite really did do us justice.<br />Organisation <br />When we were given our preliminary exercise task we never anticipated the amount of organisation and planning that goes into it producing the final piece. After producing our preliminary exercise I found out how essential planning using storyboards, a lot of research on location actors, etc and script work was going to be, all of this was truly significant and the p exercise really helped us discover this. <br />Continuity editing <br />After conducting the pre exercise I found that location was also one of the most important factors (Miss en scene) after conducting my questionnaires and in depth interviews with the prior knowledge from the p exercise I found that most of the best shots would come from an in closed location such as a house. As when I shot my p exercise we did it in a class room. I noticed that you could get a lot of different camera angles and unusual shots in the smallest environments <br />When shooting our Preliminary exercise we were slightly disorganised and didn’t plan what our actors and actresses were wearing. One of our characters were representing a teacher and instead of wearing formal clothes was wearing what seemed to be a baseball hoodie similar to the student he was acting with. We noticed the costume was essential at the point as the audience would need to distinguish each character and the status. Although in the end we only used three females’ one adult two children we made sure they were all dressed suitable for their roles For example the ‘evil’ girl may have been wearing a black jacket throughout but she was also wearing bright coloured tights to connotate her age. <br />Practice makes perfect and without the help of the preliminary task we would not follow certain filming rules and techniques such as the 180 degree rule. <br />The 180 degree is a significant rule to help the audience avoid. When 2 subjects are situated opposite each other for example two people in a meeting the 180 degree rule states that the camera should stay one side of an imaginary line like in the diagram below<br />180340-387350<br />The main thing my whole group agreed on was that we were not going to use dialogue or, this decision came when we were editing our preliminary exercise, I was one of the actors the preliminary exercise and found it hard to memorise the script put on the voice of the ‘rowdy’ character that I was playing. This even with professional actors would have been an issue that we just wouldn’t be able to solve in the limited times we had so we knew that we were going to rely on voice over’s or soundtracks. <br />How does your opening represent particular social groups?<br />In our thriller opening we have three main actresses throughout, two of them being only 7 and 8 years of age. This was really the main social representation; they represented children and presented childlike behaviours throughout. We also had the representation of females, showing women as needy and in need of a child going to extremities such as adoption.<br />We had childlike behaviour represented right from the start, in our fourth shot we see Joanna and Lucy playing and hugging which also relates to how sisters would be stereotyped as playful and competitive. <br />Once again using miss en scene we showed Eleanor the women adopting the young girl with some status through her clothing, the fact that she is able to adopt a child shows that she must be well off. We put a blue jacket on her that had sharp corners which was very army like showing her as young however strong and dominate. <br />There’s no men shown in our opening which is very unusual as mostly they are the antagonist or protagonist and tend to be the dominate character in the whole thriller however part of the twist in our opening was that it was the females dominating with the antagonist being the little girl so we subverted almost all the typical roles to create something a little more interesting.<br />