Naming Process For Our Thriller

• Matt and I really struggled to choose a name for our thriller as we disagreed on what was appropriate on occasion. I initially thought of names such as Dysphoria, but Matt and I agreed that it didn't fit in with the thriller genre enough so we had to re-think our ideas quite a lot.

• Eventually we decided on Hysteria as we agreed that because it is only a short clip of the film, the audience wouldn't instantly be aware of Amy's mindset and we wanted to display her schizophrenia through the name of the film.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria
  

Marketing

The marketing side of media is very important when you're creating a film. I wanted to consider how the film would ve advertised if it were to be produced into a real media product, ready to be sold on the shelves. It is imperitive to ensure that the right people are advertising you, so I thought it would be best to have support from the following companies:

Dreamworks:

Channel 4/Film4:

Universal:

Music and Dialogue

Music is very important in a thriller, and in ours we felt that it was vital for it to be perfect. We struggled a lot with getting it exactly right as for some reason, GarageBand wouldn't save the file in the way that we needed, and we ended up re-doing the music on many occasions, which was a cause of concern as we didn't want to risk not finishing our film on time. However, once we had mastered how to fix the problem, we decided on two specific Apple loops to use, which made our issues much lighter as they were not downloaded from the Internet so there was no risk of copyright infringement or not being able to access the sound on other computers (only on Macs, or only on PC for example.)

After the majority of the editing was coming to an end, Matt and I were beginning to become concerned that the music wasn't going to work properly. We really felt that music, although minimal, was very important as we wanted to build tension in more ways than one. Eventually we managed to fix the music issue, and we put an eerie high pitched sound, mixed with an acoustic piano loop over the middle section of our film. We had three attempts, as with the first two, the high pitched sound had way too high a frequency and was painful to listen to, therefore we had to ensure that the sound on that area of GarageBand was turned down. After this, we ended up with the perfect music.

Following our music creation, we had to consider dialogue. As Amy wouldn't be working with a script, we had to rely on her more, which was fine as she has prior acting experience. As we filmed her, we wanted her to express pain in her voice and facial expression, which she did perfectly, enabling our editing process to be easier.

Final Task: Second Filming Expedition

In our second filming expedition, we only needed to film for an hour or so, as the majority of the filming was already completely. We had filmed up to the point where Amy was about to experience her psychotic episode, so this was most certainly the most interesting part of the filming process. We redid her make-up, and ensured that she was wearing the same clothes as last time, as it was very important to ensure that there was continuity. We included multiple shots and angles, and ensured that we portrayed her in a way that wasn't too confusing to the audience, but in a way that the audience would be kept guessing and tension would be created. It was a very successful shoot in that we managed to finish the entirety of the filming in an hour, and this meant that Matt and I could begin editing immediately.

Location Photos and Vlog

Matt and I thought carefully about our location, and we needed a wooded area. We figured that the woods behind our school would be perfect, and as they are public property we wouldn't need permission to film there which made the filming process easy. We also made this decision based on the fact that it is a very eerie location, and the lighting will be perfect at around 4 pm in the afternoon. We have taken shots of the woods to show examples of natural lighting, and to present the camera angles that we intend to use. The location offers intense foliage and arch ways created in the trees over head, creating a disconcerting appearance and adding to the tension of our thriller.

Here is our short film of our location footage and an update from Matt and I on our choice of location:

Casting, Costume and Make-up

Casting and Costume on Prezi

Final Task: First Filming Expedition

Vlog update on the first filming expedition: