in order to create our thriller, a lot of hard work and organization was needed. This we have in abundance. Our first thought was to get our chosen location sorted so a member of the team was scouted out to ask fo a travelodge room. Luckily this was easy enough and we were lent a room for a few hours around the time where less people are in the building, also around the same time our group like to have subways so this was also lucky.
while inside the travel lodge room, we had to make sure the lighting was perfect, which was a problem because shooting near a window always either has too much light that you cant see anything or too little light that we cant see anything...great.so Chris managed to grab some extra lighting just in case, we wanted the lighting to be very two tone, almost like a film noir like 'Chinatown'(Roman Polanski, 1974) where the lighting plays a key element in the creepy mood it gives off. how we managed this was by only having one real beam of light that engulfs the characters face and camera. This worked well and as a result made the room seem smaller and more claustrophobic for the audience.
The mise en scene is created through the particular use of certain elements used to create the film. to help the audience realise the main character is not necessarily
a hero, we dressed him in black clothing to symbolize that he is dark. this costume also worked well with the lighting as the background was always dark and often pitch black, so he seemed to blend with the scenery and seem more mysterious as a result, sort of like the darkness has shrouded him. meaning we can only see hs face, which through the majority of the film piece, is covered by a camera of the same colour as his top.
The camera angles we chose to use were crucial to the character development. we never had any shots where the actor seemed heroic or even that manly. we used a low angle shot which, in some cases makes a character look big and intimidating, but we shot it so low, it looks unbalanced and awkward, so he seems unhinged and weird..possibly psychotic.
all the way through this piece we have an errie piano twinkle with low bass and violins..all these instruments are commonly used to instilled tension in a scene and add an element of spookiness. when the character rose from his seat, we added a strong drum beat into the music to replicate a heart beat, adding to the suspense of the thriller, while increasing the pace of the scene at the same time, another convention commonly used in film making. The diogetic sounds we used in this feature were a camera shutter sound which relates to the theme of the thriller and also acts as a transition from a title credit to a scene, along with a flash of light..which looks nice. we also ued an ear piercing static television snow sound. this sound is so different and out of place compared to the other sounds we used, that it makes people feel awkward and unnerved, an impression we wanted to harness.
For the titles we had two different methods to add them to the production, the first was to have them in a corner or slightly off centre of the shot, mostly on the darkest place in the shot to allow them to stand out as much as possible. The other method was to have the titles come in on there own on a separate black screen where they were centered, by having these two methods it allowed us to have more credits and for the black screened credits we were enabled to use the camera flash and sound as previously discussed. For the main title of the film we took a slightly different tact to make the main title stand out as the most important. The method we used was to put the title, 'Focus' over top of the TV snow which we had not done anywhere else in the masterpiece, this made it stand out as it was over top of this shot and not in anyway included to make it look as if it was part of the film like the other credits were whether they were on shot or with the camera flashes.
We edited the film, with input from every person, Chris and Ryan did all the technical stuff. We wanted the scenes to go well with the soundtrack. so we added transitions and clip ending at the parts we wanted to. we used the musics strong parts to set a pace for a the film. The camera flash at one point was deliberatly crafted in order to act as a sound transition for the change in pace and sound in our peice as the title developed into a different scenario. the fade in and outs were very handy to make the speed of our piece seem alot slower. The televisions snow (fuzzy static) that was put into the screen at various points in the film was an effective way to show that the character was becoming increasingly unsettled and unhinged, for this to work we made each time the TV snow came on, stay on for different lengths of time, which differenciated according to the length of time that was supposed to pass between the previoous scene and the next. yeah.
