Pre-production
When preparing our thriller, the first thing we went to was the internet. We used general websites to research drugs, the subject matter of our thriller.
In order to get a better idea of the kind of film we wanted to make, what elements we wanted to have, how to relate our video to the thriller genre, what kind of characters we wanted, what makes thrillers special about and what kind of effect we wanted to have on the audience, we used websites such as ImdB and Youtube. We used ImdB to look for the types of actors in most thrillers and therefore the types of characters they would have. We wanted characters that were instantly recognisable to audiences and would attract them based on what they would expect from them. We also watched trailers and openings of popular thrillers on Youtube in order to observe the editing techniques and the camera angles in order to try to conform to some of those conventions as well as to try and learn how they create suspense or excitement in thrillers. I watched a few thriller films to gain this same information in more depth. From this I learned that trailers and openings are very different, as trailers generally need to be more fast-moving and exciting while openings were allowed to move at a slower pace so that the rest of the thriller had a journey it could make in terms of energy and tension. As we wanted to make the opening to a thriller, the latter is the choice we made.
We also used a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini phone to film the pilot for our thriller, to investigate what kind of shots we would want in our thriller and for screenplay writing, we found this website which was perfect to make our storyboard with: http://www.storyboardthat.com/.
We interviewed some people to get a bette idea of the audience we wanted to aim the thriller at. We conducted the research by typing a set of questions as a Word Document and filming the interviews on a personal I-Phone and I-Pod 5. We used these because they were easy to get hold of, easy to use and therefore efficient because all we really needed was what the interviewee looked like and what they said. Ultimately, we found that we should have used devices with better sound or placed the devices more conveniently because, while some of the clips were perfectly audible, others were comprehensible but difficult to hear in terms of volume. This is something I would pay more attention to next time.
Production
For filming, we used a Sony NX 5 camera. This was useful as it was relatively light and portable, which was important as we wanted to experiment with a lot of different types of shots so we ended up needing to move it around a lot. Most of the video was filmed outside so we did not need artificial lighting for the majority of the filming. For the interior of the container we used 2 point lighting simply from the sunlight and a desk lamp over the table. We wanted to the container to look naturalistic and to have some form of darkness in our thriller.
Post-production
For editing, we used the software 'Final Cut Pro' on an AppleMac. We sometimes experienced difficulties as the computer would often crash and we would sometimes need to wait a considerable amount of time before being able to continue. We would also have to remember saving the project after every vital change, which luckily we did, in case we lost it for good. However, we were glad we were able to use 'Final Cut Pro' as it was easy to learn to use and very effective.
We then uploaded the video on to Youtube in order to make it public.
Here is our thriller annotated with further detail on the different technologies used.
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