Shooting the Thriller

As director in the group, i had the final say on what shot should be taken, however, i was always open to suggestions and allowing others in my group to take 'lead' when they wanted to try something. Due to the fact that we were recording the actress as if she was talking to a web cam, it had to be natural. That's why, i sometimes pressed record when the actress wasn't ready to get her unconscious actions. For example, during the break of filming, many girls came into the room and we filmed in a boarding house, so i decided to secretly record it as, to me, it looked like a slumber party.

Shots used:

Angel 3323: a fixed front on angle giving the impression of a webcam. The angle never changed, the only thing that did was it turning on and off.

Killer: Here we used a variety of angles, i wanted to shoot a very flat angle of his hands on the keyboard so when his hands come into frame, they give the impression of being powerful and in controle. As director, i decided to shoot a couple of P.O.V shots and over the shoulder, putting the viewer in the position of the killer. I aslo decided to do a couple of extra shots such as a close up of him pressing the enter key.

Filming on the day was extremely successful, however, there was still scene's that needed doing. We needed to create the 'ArtBox' website and 'Facespace'. We started both of these using photo shop. I worked on the ArtBox website. In order for this to be realistic, i did research which involved me looking at other blog websites and even 'www.skcentral.com' - a real life serial killer blog. This gave me loads of ideas, including layouts, for our page.Here's pictures of the shoot day.This is a bag of 'pcp'/ angel dust which is made up of flour and sugar. We took shots of Lester727 holding this, to show his intentions, but we may not be using that to help keep it mysterious.

These are the lights we used when shooting/ The white light for Angel3323 as it gave out a soft light and matched to mood we were giving. The blue light was used when shooting Lester727. This gave off a mysterious blue light which helped portray him in a mysterious way.

Here is an example of Angel3323 being lit by both white and blue light- creating a warm, webcam effect.

Shooting our thriller

On the day of our thriller, we had a quick brain storm session which ended up changing our whole idea. We are still incorporating the whole 'Facespace' idea however, there's more to the opening sequence now. We now have our actress talking into the camera as if it was a web cam. After a couple of normal posts about her life, we started to include little hints about the 'stalker'. Such as his 'website' called Artbox. This story line still sticks to the 'dangers of social networks' theme but just makes it more accessible to the viewers.

When filming the 'Killer', we decided to never show the whole figure, to keep him mysterious. As director, i decided to have extreme closeups and close ups of the mans hands on the keyboard and mouse creating a awkward, creepy feel. I also came up with many other shots such a a close up on his jaw and chin. I then dropped water down his head, creating a 'sweating' effect, which fits in perfectly with his 'image'.

Throughout the shoot we focused a lot on lighting. Lighting gives key hints and moulds the characters behaviour. Because of Angel 3323 being a sweet, pretty girl, we decided to use bright like, making her face and features vivid and welcoming to the audience. When doing the killer, we used the same blue tinted light, but decided to place it so it comes to the side of him (it was placed infront of angel 3323). This angle creates shadows and makes the killer seem mysterious. This was also created by the fact that we never showed the audience his face.

This image is our logo for our production company called 'AWKWARD TURTLE PRODUCTIONS'. We designed it using photo shop and got the image on google images. Due to our main focus in the opening sequence (face space) - a mixture between Facebook and Myspace. We had to incorporate the 'Facebook' feel to our picture which was shown by the blue and white hands. This creates a graphic match.


The phrase 'A place for Faces' once again incorporates both the websites were making a hybrid of. We once again created this design in photoshop.[Photo]

Pre production: Research

I decided to browse the web and my previous film history and try to look at similarities between them and MY horror film.

The films that inspired my group to take the choice we did were:

1. Fatal Attraction (1987)

2. Scream (1996)

3. Taxi Driver (1976)

4. Cape Fear (1991)

5. The Fan (1996)

6. Fear (1996)

7. One Hour Photo (2002)

All these films involve a stalker, however we wanted to put a twist on that typical story. Due to the massive interest on internet social sites, we decided to focus our opening sequence around that.

Pre Production:Location and Props

Our initial idea was to film our opening seqeunce in one of the bedrooms at CornHill Manor. This was due to the fact that it had a homely feel to it which would be represented as the 'Killers' house. How ever, now that our ideas have changed; from showing the 'killer' and the room etc. we are now just going to focus on the computer screen and tell the story through still pictures and short movies. The main computer screen is of 'SpaceFace' a hybrid of Facebook and Myspace. To do this we screen printed our own facebook and myspace pages and saved them to our files.We then opened up paint and started to change the pages into our own format.

In terms of props: we a have very little amount.:
Computer,
Mouse,
Keyboard,
Dead girl