Once we had chosen our final groups for our thriller videos, we had a priliminary film and sound project to complete.
This involved looking at the soundtrack of Tony’s theme, from the movie Scarface, and seeing how it is effectively used, then using the theme in our own short clip.
We had three rules which were:
1) We have to use Tony’s Theme
2) We must convey atmosphere from the use of the Song
3) We must have an area of silence with effective use.
The first thing we did was watch a clip where tony’s theme was used, and then discuss as a class how effective we thought it was and what kind of atmosphere we felt it gave off.
We then went back to our groups to decide how we could incorporate the theme into our own idea’s, drawing up a rought storyboard of our ideas.
My groups idea was to have one boy, Joel, walking down an allyway, when two other boys, Barney and Joe, try to attack him. We chose the parts based ont he fact that Joel is significantly smaller than Joe and Barney (No offence!) As we thought the audience would assume him toget beaten up. However, Joel suprises us all by stopping the attack and dodging the blows. It is then a blackout, leaving the audience in suspence. Did he beat them up?
We chose to film ours down an allyway near school. It had a bridge over it, which i think worked well for the lighting, because it meant at certain points, when the light was behind the characters, it was mainly a sillouhette, with only certain detail being able to be seen. I think this gave a really good effect, as it gave a sense of enigma. Debra and I did the filming, and we learnt to make sure we press the right button at the right time, there were times when i was filming, then pressed pause when the action started!
Joel then took away the footage, and edited it, and i think he did a really good job with it. He edited the timing of it to give the video a staggered effect and put in the theme and silences to create effect, all parts of our three rules!
I feel that this was a very eye opening experience to working in such a large group (there are five of us) as we had a lot of difficulty keeping our time organised and ended up missing the deadline. It has showed us that we need to plan out everything we’re doing, and keep to a proper schedual in order to get everything finished on time. We also need to make sure not just one person has the things we need, incase of abscences. There were few occasions that someone had the footage on tape we needed to edit, but due to illness, we couldn’t get anything done.
We need to make sure we compromise as a group, and come up with decisions together, being prepared to give in when our individual ideas are not liked as a majority, instead of arguing all the time. I think this preliminary task has helped us to see what changed we need to make when we do our actual project, in all aspects like the preparation, the filming and the editing processes.
This is out final piece, i hope you enjoy it!
