Final Opening

Evaluation - Use of Technology

Hardware - Mac, camera, microphone, tripod, lights

Software - Final cut pro

Research - I did some research by watching lots of film openings/opening sequence, to get ideas on how much a opening should include and the opening that gave me the idea of the last scene in our opening is Resident Evil - Afterlife opening scene. I also looked at the making of Dexter to see what they used and the process of it, so that we can tried to take their idea and adapt it into our opening. The researches were put up into blogger to be shown as evidence for our research.

Planning -  I think that we that our planning was quite well put, even though we adjust the plot quite a few times, the storyboard came out as what we wanted. However it may didn't go exactly as planned, as there were some shot that I had to cut off as it didn't came out as we thought. The plan for the filming day went very well, because we had a storyboard which help us a lot in giving direction and to keep us on track. We were very productive and happy with the footage, and there were only little problem in filming.

Filming - We used a camera to film all of our footage, in some scene that the lighting is too dark, we had to used the flashlight on our phone to make it brighter, because we didn't have a proper light. Nearly all of the scene were took by using a tripod, as we don't wanted the camera to be shaky. The two scene that we took without using the tripod is the scene when the protagonist is putting on her slippers, and the blood dripping scene.

Post Production - During the editing process, I only used Final cut pro, The sound were mainly from YouTube which is then converted into mp3, the music were from sound cloud which is mostly license free.

Evaluation - Skill Development

Before After

Codes and Conventions - At the start of the project, I only knew a bit about the codes and conventions of a psychological and film noir thriller film, so I did some research about what to expect in a these type of films and what they had in common. Therefore we used dark lighting and silhouette to gives a dark atmosphere.Because it is a film opening, we did not want to give too much information away,

Planning and Organisation - I think our planning and organisation is quite well, it has improved a lot  as we planned the exact date for the filming day and booked the hotel. On the filming day, we worked together very effectively and used our time efficiently, we managed to to film all of the footage in about 7 hours, which was very impressive because we only booked the hotel for 1 night, we had to work fast.

Camera Work - We didn't think much about the shot that we wanted, the only idea we had is that we are going to focus on doing close-up shots that is inspired by Dexter, as close-up shot gives a feeling of tension and suspense. On the filming day, we tried to played with the camera angles and take lots of different shot and angle, the shot that I really liked is the shot that we accidentally took which is the panning shot from the shower to the protagonist, it came out unexpectedly well.

Visual Effects - I didn't use any visual effect, even though I have learnt to do some of it in class, I don't feel as confident to do it and we thought that our opening wouldn't need visual effects as much. Therefore I only adjust the colour, saturation and contrast in some of the scene, to make each footage similar in colour, as the lighting in each place that we film had different lighting, I had to adjust the colour, so that the story goes smoothly. The contrast were adjust intensity the shadows and to make to the footage more dark and gives it a thriller film vibes.

Editing - I only had little knowledge about editing at first, but throughout the process of editing, I improve a lot, because I used final cut pro it is easier for me to edit, as I find Premier Pro to be a lot more complicated and confusing. The scene are mostly quick and only showed little bits of the daily routine, jump cut were used as well in some of the longer scene to make it more interesting.  As I had to edit the sound when there is a jump cut as well I noticed that editing is something very precise and is not something you could roughly do, The part that I found to be the most difficult is the finding sound and editing it, because the sound had to be in-sync with the footage, I also spent lots of time in finding the sound that is suited with our shot, Eyes also helped me in finding those sound, which helped me a lot.

Creative Confidence - I think that we did really well in creative confidence, as we managed to follow the storyboard and the ideas that we came up together,Even though we changed the plot quite a fews time, we managed to get a final plot and making it happen.

Evaluation - Distribution

The film would be distributed as a real media text by focusing on the teenagers and young adults, as vampire themed movie and series are mostly liked by these range of ages, according to Twilight and The Vampire Diaries. The movie would be release around November to December, because it is the time that most teenager and young adults will have holiday. Also from the research, most of the big film that is attracted to our targeted audience is released on these date such as Twilight and Hunger games.

The movie will be distributed by a big distributor and lots of marketing will have to be made, by releasing a trailer 6 months to 1 year ahead  of the actual release date, over the time, a trailer 2 may come out and screenshots of the movie will be leaked on the internet. By doing this, it will keeps our targeted audience to be excited and looks forward to our movie. After it has been screen in the cinema, the DVD will be released 2 months later , and will be released online in Netflix. As we wanted to get profit from the DVD as much as possible this is why we release it on DVD first.
The movie would also be advertised on big billboards and online mostly on social media, the trailers will be shown in social media sites such as, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram. To make the customers memorized the movie.

Evaluation - Audience

Our targeted audience are teenagers and young adults mostly girls (15 - 23 years old), the film may features, violence and sexuality, this is why the film might be rated 15+ , the story may be confusing for the younger teens as well, as it is a psychological thriller, it needed lots of thinking. As the protagonist is a vampire in a young adult form, trying to fit in the human society, it can be linked with teenagers and young adult life nowadays, where it is the time when they may struggles through changes and trying to adapt into society ,therefore it would be mostly attracted to these range of age.

We use YouGov to help identify our target audience by searching similar TV shows and films

The Vampire Diaries

Twilight 

From the result, both of the result are females.The similarities is that they seems to like to relax and watch movies and enjoy staying at home to play video games, doing things at home. They are bighearted and a telly addict.

Feedback from someone who fits our target audience.

Praew - "The music fits well with the atmosphere that the protagonist is in, it is mysterious and dark. However the diegetic sound of the surrounding is light and peaceful which makes me feels like the two elements is fighting for dominance."

George - "I really love the camera work, the contrast between closeups and other shots really make it interesting and encapturing. I really like how you used blood on her hands, and the blood draining away. The connection between luxury and wealth, sexuality, and murder, made it all very dark, and made me hooked, wanting to know what really happened to the girl."

Evaluation - Representation

Created with Padlet

Evaluation - Conventions

  

Editing - putting in the credits

I chose the font by looking through the front list and looking through Fontsinuse.com and see which font would be the best for our opening, we were trying to find a font that is simple and modern.

This is the font that we liked the most(LL Brown), but we didn't know where to download it, so I tried to find similar fonts through the internet and found Tex Gyre Adventor.

While putting in the credits, I looked at The girl with the dragon tattoo opening sequence, which I really liked, so I decided to put in the credit in the same order and tried to make it similar to the opening sequence.

Editing - Sound

Most of the sound in the this opening credit came from youtube, and some were recorded by ourselves, because there were loads of sound that we needed, Eyes helped me with finding the sound. A few of them were quite hard to find, for example, when the robe is dropped, the sound that we got was from a youtube video Motion-driven Concatenative Synthesis of Cloth Sounds.

The sound that we couldn't find was the robe tying sound, we recorded this sound by ourselves using a necktie and a scarf.

Because there's some white noise in the footstep scene, I decided to put in a white noise to not make it too quiet.

Editing - Rough cut

After filming, we came together and watch through all of the video that we took and chose the best shot and angle of each scene. Then I put all of the video that we think is the best into order, and realised that some of the scene we shot were a bit weird. The curtain scene didn't work out, when putting it with the other scene, we thought that it didn't flow. So we decided to cut this scene out.

Another scene that we also cut off is scene 7 (Click for SB) it didn't turned out as expected, so we decided not to use it.

Expectation

Reality

Rough cut

Filming Day

Friday January 15th, On this day we went to the hotel that we booked to film which is Inn residence aka The Raddison hotel. We booked the hotel for 1 night, so we had to finish filming before Saturday afternoon, when we arrived at the hotel, we started filming straight away.

      

      
             

         

             

The first scene that we filmed is the slipper scene (scene 2), its the scene when the main character is putting on the slipper after entering the room.These are the angles that we tried. 

On Friday we managed to film about 6 scene, in every scene we use various angles, so that we can get lots of option to choose from.The lighting in the room was also quite dark, so we had to find position that has good lighting and not too dark, we also tried using the flash on our phone to use as an additional lighting, but it doesn't quite work, therefore we had to stick with what we had, but its not that big of a deal as we can edit the lighting and use filters.Moreover having the storyboard made it a lot easier to film, as it gives us direction to follow and keep us on track. We suppose to shot a close up of a digital clock, unfortunately there wasn't any digital clock at the hotel,so we skip this scene.

On the next day, we continue filming the others scene, which is mostly the shower scene and the blood scene. In the shower scene, at first we quite didn't know what kind of shot we are going to use, but after playing with the shot and angle, we decided to go with panning from the shower to the main character, which came out really good. 

In this scene we used red food colouring to represent the blood, we had quite a challenge filming this, as the bathtub was quite small and Eyes who shot didn't want to get food colouring on her clothes and we also have to be careful on not getting the camera wet. So we only had 2 angle for this scene.

Research

We did some research on vampire movies, and looked at trailers that our teachers recommended.

   

The first trailer that we look at is Martin, we thought it was quite weird since its an old movie so all the edit and effect were a bit odd. However the plot is quite good, our teacher told us that the plot of this movie is about showing that vampires are not scary, the only thing that made them different from human is that they drink blood.




Another trailer that we watched is Twilight, the appearance of the vampires in Twilight is quite mainstream, they usually are good looking,pale skin and powerful.

We also looked at the process of making Dexter CLICK :)
to get some ideas on how we should write our blog.

Finding the location

We first went into booking.com to find the hotel that we would liked, the hotels in booking.com are quite expensive so we went into agoda.com to find something cheaper.We looked through the website and found this hotel as shown below. It was on a 80% discount from 8000 baht to 3000 baht per night, so we decided to booked this hotel for 2 days 1 night. The reason why we chose this hotel is because of the bathroom, we wanted a bathroom that had a bath tub and a shower area with windows door, and this hotel had it all.

Planning day 2

In one of the lessons, we got to talk to other groups and gives opinion to each others story.When we were telling about the mirror scene(the scene wheres there is no reflection of main character)one of the guy in the other group asked us if we were doing about vampires,and told us that vampire doesn't see their reflection in the mirror as well(we had no idea about it).

So we instantly thought of making the main character a vampire.The new plot starts.. as you can see in the storyboard below, we are still doing the night routine but changing the main character into a vampire, by giving hints to the audience showing that there is something wrong with this character.We don't want the audiences to know that this character is a vampire, we just want them to know that something is not right, therefore we tried to not make it too obvious. After scene 12 which is the last scene, it is a scene wheres the main character squeezes her hair and blood starts dripping from her hair.

Both scene 7 & 8 were inspired by Dexter opening credits, scene 7 is when the character is taking off her shirt and the shirt is stuck on her face, showing the eyes,nose and mouth through the shirt, scene 8 is when the character is tying the robe tightly which is to suggest that someone is being suffocated.

The hints that we gave to the audience that our main character is a vampire is the scene wheres there is no reflection of the character in the mirror and the last scene where there is blood drippings into the drain pipe.

Planning

Our group have 3 people which includes me,Mint and Eyes. We are all very close so it was easy to discuss ideas and communicate, I think that there isn't a problem with our group at all.

We were thinking in doing a psychological thriller opening sequence with extreme close-up shot inspired by Dexter. In this opening credits you can see that it is a normal morning routine of a man but with extreme close up it gives a tense feeling to the audience,which is what we wanted to do.



Our first thought on the plot was a night routine of a working woman, the story starts with the journey of the main character walking back home from the train station with long shot and parallel shot .When the character reaches home the normal night routine started.The first thing that our character will do is to brush their teeth in this scene we want the audience to see that there is no reflection of the character in the mirror.We got this idea by watching Black Swan.

In the next scene the character will get into the bath,shaves her legs and accidentally cut herself, in this scene we will use extreme close-up to gives that tense feeling.The opening ends with a blanket covering the character in 1st person view.

However, in the next day we decided to change to plot (nearly) completely.

We thought that the walking back home scene might be too long and boring for the audience and there is not enough elements to tells the audience that this is a psychological thriller.So we decided to start over but sticking to the night routine theme.