Use of Digital Technology Felicity Bearfoot-Fallon

Pre-Production

Next, my group and I did a preliminary task of a simple teacher-pupil conference for our blogs. This allowed us to experiment with different camera shots and angles, lighting, and correct camera settings. It also gave us all a chance to use what we learnt from our 1 minute film and put it into practice, including what we learnt on final cut pro. It also developed our filming and editing skills further.

The first thing we did for our blog was a 1 minute film. We filmed a few short scenes on top of a shopping center, and then later used final cut pro to edit the footage. This task allowed me to learn and understand the cameras and equipment that was used and to also experiment with the different tools on final cut pro and learn about continuity editing. This would prepare me for when we were going to film and edit our thriller opening later on.

Our group used a website called ‘Blogger’ where we posted our work onto our group blog, including our one minute film, preliminary task, and thriller opening, as well as our evaluations and other pieces of research.

I also did a post on The Rule of Thirds for our blog. This help to portray that we were showing how to frame a shot, and what conforms and deliberately breaks the rule of thirds. This allowed us to learn more about the rule of thirds and how to apply it to our own filming.

Pre-ProductionInstitutional Research:I went onto a website called ‘The Art of the Title’ where hundreds of TV/film credits and opening trailers are available to see. I picked the TV show ‘The Walking Dead’ to analyze. With this, I created a timeline of when certain credits, visuals and sounds entered the clip. The opening trailer/clip of a TV show or film is supposed to give the audience an insight to the genre of what they're about to watch, as well as the opening credits of producers, directors, actors etc. This activity helped my to understand the conventions of opening credits and how to use them in my own thriller opening.

Conventions of a Thriller:

I created a blog post on ‘Conventions of a Thriller’. This is where I explained what a typical thriller includes and what elements are found in the thriller genre; for example, tension, cliffhangers, suspense, antagonist, protagonist, etc.

My group and I started to do more research on thrillers. We went on the site IMDB and found out the figures and budget for

certain thrillers. Some of the thrillers we found show that the opening weekend is very large and shows the film will most likely

be successful as a lot of people have seen in it the opening weekend.

Research: IMDB

Pre-Production

A massive part of our research was finding different websites and social networks, and finding out a lot of different information from them. For example, there are the official websites for a film (e.g. thehobbit.com), where the official trailer and merchandise can be found, but there are also fansites/pages as well (e.g. thehobbitfancontests.com).

We also researched into different production and distribution companies of thriller films, so we could have ideas for when we were designing our own logo.

Production