Ident research

psycho titles

Evaluation.

Audience feedback

Once we had made the final edits on our opening sequence we showed it to people include some students in our class, these people gave us some audience feedback on our sequence.

From the feedback we found that it was our older audience members that enjoyed our sequence over the younger audience, they also understood the choices we had made but some of the younger, teenage audiences didn't see this as much.

Our sequence was originally made for an older audience but we still took the opinions of the younger audience into account.

These were the most popular praises: our sequence was described as "very artistic" and the audience "enjoyed the lighting choices" they also said that "the use of music was very effective and increased the tension (which) followed the conventions of a thriller genre." Although people did like these things about our film they did find criticisms some of them being "too much silence, bring the music in sooner as it is too silent". Some also mentioned that the narrative is too hard to figure out as not much has been given away, as we can see where they are coming from by saying this we felt that the lack of narrative at the start of the film was imperative for the film to have a greater effect, and we feel that the lack of narrative will make the audience to want to watch on and see what is happening. Due to this we decided to extend the opening to add some context to the sequence, due to technological problems this wasn't added to our final edit of the sequence.

We took all comments into account. We edited some of our sequence because the feedback highlighted some problems with the film that we had not noticed. We did bring in our soundtrack sooner and it gave the entire sequence a different feel and seemed to flow much better and also more narrative was given through the use of this music, as well as having a greater impact on the audience, as there was not a long silence.

We also changed the ending of the sequence to make it flow better and look more like a opening sequence rather than an trailer as we felt that the original ending gave this effect.

Opening Sequence

This is our finished opening sequence.

Because of the nature of our film we have isolated the mass film market as it is not a mainstream film, as ours is more artsy needs to have full concentration on the film as if you don’t you will not understand the plot. We understand that many people may not want to see this all the way through the film so because of this we have decided that brakes in the plot will give us a larger target audience, although we are still targeting a niche market of the media industry because we feel that the people who would watch the sub-genre of film that we have chosen is a niche market in its self so we have tried to continue this market type. But saying this we have also added some mainstream elements to stretch the target audience slightly so that more people will watch and understand the film.

Final Plot Of The Film

Our new film idea has developed from previous ideas, as a result of the complications that we came across while attempting to create the original ideas. As we feel that this new idea will not only be simpler to make but will also be easier to film.

We hope that because it is a simpler film the film will have more meaning and adhere to more of the conventions of a thriller genre.

Unlike most films that will have the start of the plot at the beginning with action or some form of dialogue weather it be in chronological order or not. The sequence will adhere to the conventions of the thriller genre while also creating a sense of suspense and confusion because the audience will not know how it relates to the plot. All of these things may not have any obvious connection by their symbolic meaning instantly informs the audience that the film will incorporate femininity, as well as the theme of life and death.

Audience feedback and decisions made

When we had made a rough cut of our film we showed it to our target audience and got some audience feedback. This feedback is good to have because it lets us know what our target audience think of our film and if they got the message and themes that we were trying to display and get across to the audience. In most cases this was true and the majority of the audience underdtood what we were trying to get across, but there were some aspects of the opening sequence that they either didn't quiet get or didn't like. As a result of this we have taken their views into consideration and have made some slight changes to our film accordingly. We hope that these changes to the film will help to make the target audience totaly happy with the outcome and understand it completly.

Editing

When we had all of our footage that we needed to create our film, we started editing the footage. At first we thought that this would be easy as we had edited using this software on our preliminary task.
While creating our opening sequence we have had several problems. The biggest being with the technology as when we saved our work and tried to reopen it, it wouldn't be there, because of this we had to keep redoing the editing, eventually we found the problem to this and finished the editing.
The actual edit of the opening sequence went well, we experimented with different effects to see what would convey the meaning better. And because we had used final cut perviously we didn't have to many problems with the technology of it.

conventions of our opening sequence

On a macro level, our opening sequence reflects the conventions of the thriller genre this is done through mise-en-scene, sound and the characters that are introduced. The conventions are shown through the type of lighting that is used. As the opening of the film will have dark lighting, there will also be long shots this will also show the conventions of the genre. This will create more tension and confuse the audience; the distortion that will be used will also shock the audience. Our opening sequence will not subvert the genre conventions and expectations because we feel that this would not get the meaning of the film across to the audience as would like it too. But we will have some aspects of the film that do not fit the conventions of a thriller because we feel that this will get our intended meaning across better. The aspects of the opening sequence that will not fit the general conventions are the quotations that will be used throughout the film, although they do not meet the general conventions there are some thriller films that do use quotations in their films.

Problems with filming and locations.

A number of changes had to be made to our opening sequence during the filming process. We had to do this because of numerous problems that arose.

The first of our problems that we encountered was the location we chose this became unavailable to us after we had permission to use this location this was at Westwood College in underground cellars. When we arrived to film in this location we were told that we couldn’t use it because of the lack of staff on the grounds. After we were told this we realised that we needed to rethink our location for filming. In the end we decided to film at St. Edwards's Church in Leek, as we thought that this would give the nearest possible substitute to what we had in mind as a suitable location, but as a result in this location change the plot of our opening sequence had to be changed to fit the location, although this wasn't a huge change it cost us filming time due to the complications from changing locations.

We changed the plot only slightly so that it made sense to the location, instead of having a neurologist as the antagonist we had a priest. But in our original plot the neurologist wanted to mentally torture people for his own reasons, whereas the priest in this sequence wants to inflict the same torture but because of a neurotic obsession with the supernatural. This neurotic obsession made our title of neurosis still usable. Our priest is obsessed with the devil and the idea that his victims were somehow connected with the devil and that he caused them to sin, so the in the priests head he thought that what he was doing was right in the eyes of God and felt that he was helping.

In our opening sequence we didn’t want to give to much of the plot away but we felt that not giving anything away would not give the full effect of a opening sequence so to show characters and hinting at the story line we had shadowed figures so the audience would react to something this will represent the corrupted victim which is followed by an establishing shot of the priest sitting alone in a church pew. We hope this will make the audience begin to realise there is a connection between the two characters. 

The problems we encountered which lead to us changing parts of the plot made our overall opening sequence more effective. In changing our plot we were able to include more conventions of the thriller genre some of these being dark lighting, and a church setting, in using these it became a more stereotypical genre than we originally planned.