The change of actors

Although we had originally planned for two of our friends Tom and Ali to be in this film, we were informed by them, days before we planned to have our first filming session, that they were both unable to make the session due to various requirements outside of school such as clubs. This was not ideal and was not what we wanted. The dilemma was that the film session still had to go ahead so that we could have enough time to have several film sessions before the deadline.

Thankfully, we were unable to contact another of our friends, Greg Smith(left), and he generously agreed to help us film our opening with us after we made sure that he was free on the correct days. We made Tom and Ali aware of our change of actor to avoid any future confusion.

Although we did originally plan for there to be two friends with Xiangyu when he walks up to the door, we discussed this issue and came to the conclusion that excluding this one role from the opening (changing from two actors to one) was not really a problem, as it would not affect any of our planning regarding the plot, shots etc.

Script

Xiangyu and I have decided that regarding the factor of our script, the amount of speech that we include in the opening of our film will be minimal as we feel it would take away the sense of tension and surrealism in the opening. We felt that finding out a background on the characters through the use of dialogue was unnecessary and that the plot was self-explanatory to an extent.

In addition, we didn't want to use a lot of speech due to the fact that our film is of the mystery/thriller genre and so therefore giving away too much information to the audience would take away the mystery behind the plot and the location.

We have already discussed the idea that we want our film to be a film which effects our audience mentally rather than make them jump. This is why we decided to not lots of props that are traditionally used in horror films such as fake blood, knives etc. We intend for our film opening to not be too revealing but to have suspense, and we think that having a reduced amount of speech will help us achieve this aim.

Ideas for Title of our film

After researching some famous thriller titles on the websites, I came across a list of famous thriller films and studied their titles to see if there were any patterns. As the film opening we are doing could certainly be classed as a thriller, I thought that it would be interesting to look at famous titles to get an idea of names for our film.

We thought that it would be important to do this so that the title of our film fitted the genre and did not mislead our audience. The titles listed on the left, of the some of the most famous ever thrillers, tend to have several patterns. For example, a lot of the titles begin with 'the' - for example, 'The usual suspects' and 'the silence of the lambs'. This connotes the thrillers conventionally revolve around 'something', whether it be human, or something we can't touch like an emotion. The titles listed beginning with 'the' seem to have a sense of mystery to them - a sense of not revealing much.With other titles such as 'M' there is almost nothing told to the audience about the film's plot, characters or even themes, unlike other genres.

As a result, I and Xiangyu have decided to go along with this convention that thrillers seem to have and decided to stick our audience's expectations of our genre in this way.

First Filming Session

Our first filming session was one of mixed results. We filmed the basic shots and made sure that we left time off at the end of shots so that we could edit at a later stage. We were happy with the lighting of some of the shots. These shots were generally filmed upstairs as the light from the bathroom made the shots of a higher quality. The position of some of the shots, particular the ones so from round the corners (panning shots) was as intended and so therefore we will definitely be using these shots in our final film.

However, despite us making progress with this session, we did encounter some problems. Our main problem with the shots overall was with the lighting. When we filmed the shots and checked them on the camera during our session, the shots appeared far better than when we uploaded them and tried to edit them. Therefore, we decided that it would be much better to re-film some of the shots before we tried to edit the shots as a whole. The issue with the lighting was that it was too dark on the shots particularly outside and downstairs in some cases. We now know what we must improve at with the shots when we film again, with the lighting and the position of some of the shots being our main problems.

Actors

Me and Xiangyu have decided on the actors that we are going to use for our film opening. We have decided that Two of our friends Alastair and Thomas. We chose these actors as they lived near where we had planned to film the opening as then they would be easily accessible to filming when we wanted. Our plan is to swap cameramen between the shots so that every actor is part of the film. The different cameramen will allow us to have the camera always to be stable when filming.

Ideas for Titles fonts

Recently, when discussing the possible fonts we could use for the opening of our film, I came across a useful website, which I thought might be useful for us choosing a font for the titles that would suit the genre and the intended audience of our film.

I thought that the da font website was very useful as it showed a range of fonts that were categorised into different genres, and therefore made it much more acessible for us to decide on a suitable font for our film. We also thought that it would be good to look at different genres of fonts that were displayed such as sci-fi as we were aware that there may be fonts from other genres that were shown on the website.

After discussing with Xiangyu, we decided that the font another typewriter was one of our favourites as it suited the intended style of our film. We thought that the simple nature of the font was very effective as it was also very clear for the audience to read.