Opening Of Thriller Complete

My Group finally finished our Thriller Opening after some panic due to some members of the group thinking we would not be finished in time. However, we pulled through and worked together as a group to complete and perfect our clip. After uploading our separate clips to Final Cut pro, we began to analyse and find a starting point; luckily we had many clips so this gave us a variety to choose from. After a good two hours of hard work, all the necessary clips were put into sequence. This was our rough sequence, after watching it over and over; many clips were cut out due to the sequence being well over two minutes. However, we continued to cut and produce match cuts and we completed the full clip. Nevertheless, although we had a completed sequence, it had no sound and no effects. This is where we started analysing other thriller clips with similar story lines in order to try and follow the conventions. Considering our opening was mainly a dream and filmed in a forest we wanted to give it a dark gloomy effect; to achieve this we went to effects and after experimenting with many of the blurry effects, we agreed a 'blurry zoom' best suited our thriller, this gave it the gloomy effect, yet, we still needed to give it a dark effect so we put a dark grey mast over the clips in the sequence that were filmed outside. We had now achieved a dark gloomy look but there was still more to do. Many of the bed scenes contained a lot of movement and irritation due to the nightmare the person in the bed was having, we wanted the audience to feel as if they were having this nightmare, we wanted them to sympathise so, for each bed clip we modified the speed to below a hundred, this slowed everything down and made every movement in slow motion look more painful as if the dream was effecting the person mentally and physically, we believed this would add to the thrill.
Towards the end of the thriller, before the hanging, we decided to put in a little recap of four or five of the main clips leading up to the main clip, when editing we modified the speed to make it quick and the clip after slowed down the whole pace as the shots forthcoming would cause the audience to jump out of their seats and scream. After watching the more or less completed version of our opening repeatedly we felt it lacked the certain thrill factor at the end, so we were left with a slight dilemma. After the fast clips, then the pace was slowed down it cut directly to a girl hanging off a tree. However when watching it over and over it jus did not affect us in anyway, it seemed like a let down. We discussed this with three of the media teachers who all had different views, one teacher believed the affect needed will come with the sound, we agreed. However, after two teachers reviewed the work we came to a conclusion that after the pace is slowed down we should re start the fastness using twenty similar shots all at “0.3 seconds”. I decided to begin cutting the shots, it was looking better already and I was feeling the thrill. But still it lacked the finishing effect. So we decided to put a white mast over the shot just before the pace is sped up and the over all twenty shots put two different effects, one after another. The first effect would be very bright after the white mast was used, then a blur, then the bright light, then the blur and so on.
It worked perfectly; the opening of our thriller was now complete apart from one factor, sound. We uploaded our clip in sound clip pro to begin the sound, due to the environment we filmed in which was the woods, we decided to use some natural sound to give it the natural effect and make it realistic. Our thriller is very sequential and the thrill relies on the lead up which is quite slow so therefore we all came to an understanding that we shouldn’t use fast, up beat music but the complete opposite, and we also agree we didn’t want to do too much. Hence we used two main instruments for the whole thing “xylophone” and “bass”. We made it slow and suspenseful in order to keep the audience guessing as the music was also slow with the effect that it didn’t know which note to play next. When doing sound the main part we were focussing on was the end, this took most concentration and work as we had the correct shots to give the affect we needed but this all depended on the sound now. When reaching the twenty fast shots, we wanted fast drums, however when searching, none of the sounds on offer had what we needed. We left this and decided to come back to it at the end. At the beginning we put in a morning/ dawn effect with birds chirping while our actress walked through the gate. Towards the end we gave a weary wind blowing sound to lead us through with a swoosh sound the twenty fast shots, which in the end we decided to used thunder claps as they gave us the best affect and we finally had what we needed to give us that final thrill to leave the audience gasping off their seats. We had finally finished, we watched it repeatedly making final edits where necessary e.g. out of place sounds, bad cuts etc
After showing our teachers they were all proud and we all agreed it was finally over, we had finished, and all we need to do was export it using QuickTime. After exporting it we still continued watching it over and over and we had achieved our main aim…to thrill.