Thriller analysis: The Woman in Black

Our Ethos:

Mr Sheriff's Advice

Prelim

Preliminary storyboard sheets

Storyboards like this one, help producers to visually understand and plan films shot by shot. The animation described on these sheets should match our final intentions for our preliminary piece.

Initial Ideas

This is our mind map of our original ideas. We like the name 'Awoke' for our thriller because we imagine it being set at night after a bed time story, and will include a little girl being possessed. 

Do's and Dont's

The Do's and Dont's of our Year 12 AS Level Media Coursework

During todays lesson a Year 13 Media Class came in to share any advice they had for us beginning the coursework.

The guidence given includes:

• A strong emphasis on our work being very 'Media rich'.
• Encouragement to use different softwares and to play around with a variation of content.
• To stop our work being lost, save it on several devices to assure we don't lose it.
• A lot of the students mentioned it really helps to stay on top timing during the project,  highlighting that we need to get as much of the blogging done (especially the evaluation) as quickly as possible, not leaving it until the end. This means we have to work a lot outside of school, not just in lessons.
• To show evidence of our progress, we should continuely take photos and update our blog and other social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram.
• We need to make sure that when filming we allow at least two or three days to make the shots. Additionally, on these days we need to insure the weather is roughly the same, if filming outside or using natural lighting. This links with another point made by Year 13, planning is essential.
• Referring to the mise en scene aspects of the filming, the clothing and the style (pointing out hair and nair vanish) of the actors needs to be the same throughout the days on set.
• When actually filming the opening of our thriller, through experience, the Year 13's told us to use just one type of device to record the film on. This is due to different devices such as mobile phones having different quality cameras, which could cause the clip to look un-professional. 
• Further advice given around filming was to establish a good amount of footage to work with. You don't want to end up being forced to work with material that you don't like just to fit the time requirement.

The Production Process

When initially considering a location in the school to create out preliminary task we decided on an aerial shot up a high angle showing Sophie ( the main character in the sequence) walking up the stairs. We decided that this would be effective as it would expose the location quickly and create a sense of space for the audience; we also decided to use a tracking shot to reinforce this point. We also decided to film on the stairs as to create a moving shot and mirror the realistic movement of the character. The choice of mise en scene for the production was altered slightly. We decided to turn the lights on in the room where we were filming to help create a more accurate setting that seems more natural for the situation. We chose to use minimal sound in this piece; we used dialogue to effectively show a conversation between the two protagonist characters that seemed more genuine. Finally we decided to use the editing through the use of the app ‘Splice’ as our peers suggested this would be a simple and quick way of cutting out clips together.  The audience for this piece would be teenagers our age; therefore we wanted to create a recognisable piece and location. The purpose was to reflect our editing, cinematography, sound and mise en scene skills. During the production of this video we decided that we would film each section of this piece multiple times, this ensured that the post production editing would be easier and the transitions would run smoothly. It was quick and easy to create the piece as it followed a simple story line and simple dialogue.  The problems that we did face concerned the actors; there were small issues with the idea of looking away from the camera and making it looks natural and believable.  The only other problem that had to be resolved was the way that the camera had to stay certain lengths away from each character, to resolve this situation we marked the floor to ensure that certain actors stayed in the correct position and sat at the correct angle that could be easily exposed to by the teacher.
The post-production was relatively easy, due to downloading the app Splice. This allowed us to edit, cut and make the shots into a full video. We added each shot into the app and it gave us transitions between. However, we took these out because it looks unrealistic and we were advised not to. I had to edit some of the clips we took so that they represented the match-on action.We filmed an aerial shot at the start of the film, but the cameraman filmed it using the wrong orientation (portrait instead of landscape). This meant we had to leave it out as when we realised, we didn't have the same clothes on and so it wouldn't look realistic. This meant we had to leave this shot out and use the others instead. 

GPM

Hi we're GPM! We are a new production company and we welcome you to our blog supporting our progress as we start to create an opening for a new thriller film :) enjoy!
From James, Lydia and Sophie