Website screenshot...

To create more realism to my product, I created a mock up of a website homepage which people go and look at. I created this file in photoshop from scratch, looking at website elements to make it look authentic. I thought that these were the most important elements of a movie website, and the other pages go off to explain about the movie.

The Downloads and Gallery pages offer screenshots and sneak peaks of the film with downloadable things like screensavers and website buttons.

The About page does what it says, it tells you about the film. On this website it would talk a lot about the people involved in the making of the film, and not so much about the plot as we want to keep the mount known about the film minimal, to create more hype and promise or the audience.

The Buy page would not come into use until the film had stopped being shown at the cinema, and the BluRay/DVD/Digital download became available. Until that point the page would just says approximately say when the BluRay/DVD/Digital download would be available, perhaps have promises of special features and bonus material to keep interest.

Thriller Poster...

I decided to create a poster in conjunction with my thriller opening sequence. I would say that it falls under the category of a teaser poster as it gives no information as to what the film is about or even very much information as to what the film is called.
If this poster was released it would probably need to be around half a year or more before the films actual release date, so it would build up hype and excitement waiting for the film to come out.

I am pleased with the outcome of this poster and I think the phrase 'what if yesterday changed everything' works really well. As the girl is waking up in the morning, she is experiencing the change today, but in reality the events that took place probably happened in the middle of yesterday night.

Shooting our thriller...

The shoot day started at 9 am. We set of in 2 cars, with our kit in the back, to our first location for the interior nursery scene. It took us a while to settle into the process and this first shot was a small lesson on lighting and angling the camera to manipulate the room to our advantage. We discussed light temperature and getting lighting right for it to look natural. It took us about 30 minutes to do this shot before we got back into the cars and moved onto our next location, for the exterior house shots.

These shots involved using a track to create a smooth pan shot which followed our actress out of her house and swung round the corner behind her to reveal the final shot. This was a bit of a challenge to do successfully, as we were pushing the camera on the dolly ourselves, and it was hard to keep the pace consistent with Emma walking. However I think we did manage to get this shot in the end.

We then took a break for lunch and moved on to our final location for the rest of the interior house shots. We chose to do them in chronological order, which we discovered by the end of the day was not such a good idea. We worked our way down from the bedroom to the kitchen; a shot in which we needed to burn some toast. It was a little bit tricky to get the toast to burn and the right time and as we had a limited amount of slices we had to be quite careful. As the toast started burning the right amount we were not fully ready and all had to scramble into position before it set on fire. Fortunately I think this shot worked though.

We were quite lax about speed in the morning, so as 3pm came around we realised how much we still had left to do. We ploughed through the rest of the shots to try and stay within daylight hours, but the sky grew dark and we had to use lights to try and recreate daylight, since we have not gone through the shots yet I don’t know if it has worked but I’m really hoping it has.
Our second to final shot was of the girl going to her front door and discovering it is open, however by this time it was 6pm and pitch black outside, again we had to use a series of lights to create a morning light look and I think we did this quite well. I am looking forwards to editing and seeing how all our footage turns out.

Planning the Thriller...

Actors-

In our opening title sequence we only needed one actress. We were looking for a girl around our age, who doesn't conform to any specific trends, but who represented the average teenage girl. We decided on Emma Dalton as we think she fits these specifications.

Location-

This is 1 of the 3 loctations we will be filming at, we will be using this house for all our external shots as we think it accurately portrays the kind of average family house we were looking for.

Here are a list of the 3 locations which we will be shooting at: 

• Lieth Hill, Surrey (Nursery room)
• Brookside, Cranleigh, Surrey (exterior/desserted street scenes)
• Cranleigh home (Ineterior shots)

Props List-

• Vehicles x3 (with fitted radio)
• Digital alarm clock
• Children's toys
• Toaster
• Pyjamas
• TV
• Landline phone
• Baby monitor

Narrative Action-

• Girl sleeping in bed, alarm clock states time (6.58am)
• Girl hears an alarm and hits the snooze button, but the alarm still goes on.
• Girl sits up in bed and stands to walk towards the door.
• Goes down stairs to find burning toast.
• Runs into kitchen and removes burning toast, turns off fire alarm.
• Hears the sound of baby music from baby monitor on a table.
• Picks up monitor T.V screen fuzzing in background.
• Goes upstairs and discovers the shower is on.
• Goes to babies room, Baby not there, only child's toy playing.
• Goes into street, it's abandoned, cars empty with engines on and radios going fuzzy.
• Blackout to the end.

Thriller Storyboards...

 

Group Sequence Idea..

Our final group sequence idea is based around the idea of isolation.

A girl wakes up in her house, disturbed by her alarm going off and hits the snooze button. She hits it a couple of times before she realises that it isn't actually her alarm going off, but the fire alarm downstairs. So in a sleepy daze she walks downstairs and goes into the kitchen to find some food burning. Panicking slightly she puts the food in the sink and turns off the fire alarm. This reveals the sound of a baby monitor coming from the living room. She picks it up and quickly walks back upstairs towards her baby sister's bedroom. Walking past the bathroom she hears the shower running, and pushing the door open she discovers the room to be empty. Going into the babies room she looks into the crib and sees that the music was coming from a toy, but that the baby is nowhere to be seen.

She runs downstairs and picks up the phone only to hear a crackling noise. She runs towards the front door and finds that it is open. Running outside she finds that the street is deserted, and there are cars strewn across the street with their engines on and radios making a fuzzy noise. It ends with this pan shot following her outside.

My thriller ideas...

For my thriller sequence I have come up with 2 ideas...

1. 'Hide and Seek'

The basic idea of this story is of kidnap and dissapearing. It opens with a mother and toddler playing hide and seek in a local park, the mother is filming the child on a handheld camcorder so we do not see her face, and everything is from her point of view. It seems harmless enough and everything is normal. The child runs off around an object/corner, and when the mum follows them around it, she finds that the child has vanished. The mum starts to call the childs name and starts to run, possibly dropping the camera down by her side or onto the floor, so that we can only hear her panicked screams. The screen then blacks out to the title of the film.

There is an alternative ending opportunity to this which I came up with. The child runs round the corner and when the mother turns the child is missing. She doesn't panick but thinks her child has turned the next corner. She stands still and calls for the child, beginning to panic slightly. Mostly out of view of the camera, the child appears from nowhere and jumps on the mother growling and clawing at her as if possessed. We hear the mother's screams of horror and the camera drop to the ground. The screen backs out and the title appears.

      2.   'Night Out'

This story relies on the use of close ups and match cuts. It opens with CU shots of a girl getting ready for a night out in her bedroom. She is doing normal things like applying makeup, pulling up tights, putting on shoes and putting things in her bag. These shots are interjected with shots of the same girl wiping blood off her face, picking her phone up off the pavement and taking off her shoes. She has ended up in a side alley and we don't know how or why. I want the sound to have an underlying track of heavy breathing and a heartbeat on the shots in the alley, with it still all filmed in CUs. These shots cut to black and the title.