Rough Cut Deadline

Tomorrow is the rough cut deadline so we have to get as much finished as we can ready for tomorrows lesson. What we still need to do is the editing, soundtrack and credits.
We hope to get all of this done in today's lesson and tomorrows lesson. The main thing I would say we need to concentrate on is the editing as the footage we shot last lesson is all mixed up etc.
Once we get that done we will concentrate on the soundtrack as this has a big effect on what the opening is like. The credits are at the bottom of our priority list at the moment as the opening will still work without them, however we are going to try and get it all done by tomorrows lesson which I think we will be able to do without fail.

Filming in the medical room

Today we were able to film the rest of our opening in the medical room. We previously wanted to film 2 weeks ago but we were unable to due to availability. We were also able to use the wheel chair from the Health and Social Care department which was really helpful.
When also borrowed a lab coat from the biology department which Samir wore as he was the so called "doctor".
We managed to get everything filmed by half way through the lesson so we have uploaded and began to edit what we have so far.

My sample music

As I have been put in charge of producing sound for our thriller I decided to make a selection of sounds that i thought would be good to have as sample sounds. It is by no means the finished product and most of these sounds will not be used. It was a useful excercise nonetheless.

Dolly Zoom

We really need to try and get across the suspense in our opening but we as a group were quite stuck on how to do that. Our teacher suggested looking on youtube for Dolly Shots which have been used in a number of films such as Jaws to get across a feeling of shock and distortion . The shot is done by moving the camera out/in while zooming the opposite way.
This is one of the videos we found which shows what a dolly shot is...




We decided to try this out as we could use it in our final scene. Dave got us a dolly that is basically a tripod on wheels. We then position a camera on top of the tripod and started shooting. We found it quite hard as the zoom is quite sensitive so we kept zooming in too quickly and the effect didn't work. After a few tries though we managed to film one that actually worked and it looks really good...

Filming

Yesterday (Wednesday the 24th Feb) myself and Alex started to film the first few scenes of our thriller opening. We went to Addenbrookes and got the park and ride bus to the babraham park and ride. We filmed a series of different shots including, Alex walking onto the bus, Alex sitting at the bus stop and Alex on his phone texting his mum. We had a few problems as some of the bus drivers didn't want us filming on their bus but we found two men who said they didn't mind. One of them even let us film his hands on the money counter. We got about 4minutes worth of footage altogether and later that day in the lesson we started to edit it. We still need to film the medical room scene which myself and Samir are in which we are hoping to do on Wednesday as that is the only time we can use the medical room. Dave our teacher also managed to get us a weelchair which will be really handy as one of the scenes involves Samir wheeling me out of the medical room.

The element of conspiracy in our thriller

Our thriller has elements of conspiracy within the story.

This is clarified by the scenes involving the patient and the person coming to visit her.
Wikipedia defines conspiracy thriller as:

The conspiracy thriller (or paranoid thriller) is a subgenre of thriller fiction.

A common theme in such works is that characters discovering a secretive conspiracy may be unable to tell what is true about the conspiracy, or even what is real: rumors, lies, propaganda, and counter-propaganda build upon one another until what is conspiracy and what is coincidence becomes an undecidable question. The protagonists of conspiracy thrillers are often journalists or amateur investigators who find themselves (often inadvertently) pulling on a small thread which unravels a vast conspiracy that ultimately goes "all the way to the top".^[1]

Conspiracy theory in the US (and echoed in other parts of the world) reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s in the wake of a number of high-profile scandals and controversies, most notably the Vietnam War, the assassination of President Kennedy, the Chappaquiddick incident, and Watergate. These works exposed what many people regarded as the clandestine machinations and conspiracies beneath the orderly fabric of political life.

Because of their dramatic potential, conspiracies are a popular theme in thrillers and science fiction. The subtle shades and complexities of historical fact are recast as a morality play in which bad people cause bad events, and good people identify and defeat them. Conspiracies are often played out as "man-in-peril" (or "woman-in-peril")^[2] stories, or yield quest narratives similar to those found in whodunnits and detective stories. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that the English word "plot" applies to both a story, and the activities of conspirators.

Costumes

We have picked out the costumes we want to use when filming.
Samir is going to wear a white overcoat, to emphasize a doctors white coat like below...





Lois will be wearing a gown, possibly a dressing gown as she is the patient a but like the template below...





Alex is the person visiting Lois in the hospital. His clothes are what he wears everyday as below...