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.

Final idea

The opening sequence has CCTV footage throughout it, taken from an old building. This will become clear by the use of editing, which will create the effect of old footage which will also be in black and white which will make that footage seem more like an old CCTV camera.

Within the CCTV footage images of people and objects within the narrative of the film will appear in-between the different CCTV footage, this will create confusion because at this point the audience do not know what the images mean or relate to. Throughout the sequence quotations will appear on the screen, which will relate to the narrative, these will be edited to look like they could be in Hitchcock’s work, the words being thrown around on the screen.

The change between the CCTV and the images will be done by the use of TV noise (distortion) this is because we won’t it to look like someone is looking at this footage. This will also suggest that both the CCTV footage and the others are somehow related weather that is in the past or the present. The quotes will be used throughout our sequence.

We have found that to get the greatest effect from the sound in our sequence, we are not going to use much at all. The sound used in the sequence will be mostly diegetic sound but there will be a non-diegetic sound track playing in the background towards the end of the sequence finally fading out to the end of the opening. White noise will also be used in the beginning of the sequence where the CCTV footage will be shown. The noise will hopefully break up periods of silence, shocking the audience, causing them to focus on the sequence.