Prey DVD cover

I made this DVD cover for our film to show he we would market and advertise our film. I put the actors' names on the top of the cover as this is the typical layout of lots of DVDs, with some of the credits at the bottom. I put the photo I took of Elliot in the attic on the cover because I like the darkness around him with the light focusing on his face, which makes the credits stand out against the black, and also the photo best describes the storyline of the film.

I put the Paramount, Miramax and DVD logos on my cover to make it more realistic, as these are film distributors and they are included on DVD covers.

Photos from fourth filming shoot and editing

Due to the fact my group and I felt that there was no real climax or final tension to our film introduction I thought that the shot I filmed of Elliot coming down the stairs would be a good clip to use to create this. Originally we cut and edited him walking all the way down the steps, but I felt the way to build tension would be by cutting the clips very short and having them flick between him and

Sophie in her room. Each clip of Sam coming down from the attic was less than a second long, whereas Amy's were slightly longer. Once he was down, we added in the bit when Sophie is watching TV and looks towards the door because she hears something. This clip is used because we did not film Sam walking towards her room therefore we needed to show something else in the meantime, and also because Sophie is finally aware something is wrong which lets the audience know something bad is about to happen! The final shot we imported was the shot I told Claudie to film from outside the door. This brings closure to our film as he shuts the door on the camera, which we used to then show the title once again. We did this by adding the 'fade to white' transition as the white door slammed, then adding the text 'Prey' into it which we made deep red like blood. I felt this was a much better ending to our introduction than what it would have been if we had not filmed these last few shots today. Ellen added the 12A rating next to the title of our film. At first I wasn't sure if this was really necessary as this is rarely, if ever seen at the start of a film. I felt it made it look more like a trailer which was not the task but my opinion was overpowered so we kept it. The final thing we did to the editing of our film was add the voice over that Tilly recorded again, as the title was on display, but only the end part... "like I was his prey". We chose to add this because it emphasises the title and reminds the audience of the start of the film and how the man sees the children he is molesting. As his prey. This would make a great start to the beginning of the rest of our film if we were to have made it into a full length thriller movie.

(next day)

Finally, today we finished the last of our editing. After watching the movie over and over whilst showing it to our friends, I looked out for minor mistakes to ensure everything was perfect in our film. I noticed that the colouring in some of the clips towards the end were different to those at the beginning because I turned the saturation down when we edited these as I felt the scene needed to be gloomier as the day was quite bright. This would tie in well with the mood of the situation going on. I therefore had to change each and every clip to a saturation of 66% which took a while but in the end it looked better. I then decided to change the colour of Amy and Elliot's credit transitions because they were white like our names were (Olivia, Ellen, Claudia and Matilda), which seemed very confusing as it was not clear who were the actors and who were the producers, so I changed the colour of the text to a deep red like the end title for Amy Williams' and Elliot Williamson's names, and kept ours white but added 'Produced by' before the first name to ensure there was no misunderstanding.

Fourth day of shooting

Yesterday we filmed the final finishing touches of your film! Once we finished editing our third shoot we realised our introduction did not have an ending or form of closure, so we asked Elliot and Amy if they could come to my house once more to film. Once we got them into their costumes again, we opened up the attic and got Elliot to go up the ladder so we could film him walking down. If we did not do this then it would not be clear to the audience that he left the attic to come and find her. We thought for a while of an interesting way we could film Elliot as he lowers himself from the attic, and I came up with the idea of placing the camera on the floor looking up towards the attic so Elliot walked into the camera. This would engage the audience and draw them into the scene. As a way of closing the shot I suggested that Elliot put his foot onto the camera lense instead of the floor to turn the shot black. We had to film this a couple of times due to mistakes such as Elliot's face being seen as he looked down to ensure his footing was correct, and also because he occasionally tripped on the steps!! After this we filmed Amy's part when she was in her room watching tv. We filmed her from quite a few angles walking into her room and sitting down on the sofa. We tried to film a shot that was different to the rest, where we focused on a picture of her and her friend and then zoomed out to reveal Amy, but we found this stopped our shots from running smoothly together and therefore making it look amateur.

For the final shot of our introduction, I thought it would be a good idea to film from outside the door, so Amy was in the shot, but also Elliot's feet were visible in my mirrored dressing table opposite the camera, so before he walks infront of the camera, the use of reflection shows he is on his way, hopefully making the audience feel worried for the girl's safety.

Editing our third shoot

Today Ellen edited the latest part of our film whilst the rest of us were in a lesson, so unfortunately we did not get to take part in most of it but she knew what we wanted the scene to be like and the tension it needed to build. She did this by enhancing the sound of the kettle as the clips went on because it would emphasize the time running out before the girl walks into danger. Each clip of the kettle gets shorter and shorter as it goes on, with the clips inbetween getting less and less which is used to build a sort of climax for the audience before she walks upstairs.

Target audience and film rating

We have decided to rate our film a 12A because it is not horrific, or does not contain any gory scenes, just tense and nerve racking moments but nothing for the faint hearted.

The certificate 12A means:

The 12A rating is only used for films shown in cinemas. It is given to films that are best suited to those aged 12 or older. However, people younger than 12 may see a 12A so long as they are accompanied by an adult! In such circumstances, responsibility for allowing a child under 12 to view lies with the accompanying adult.

Definition from - http://www.cbbfc.co.uk/guidelines12-12a.asp

Our target audience is mainly towards teenagers, as they can relate more to the film as they are similar ages to the characters in it. It could also be a moral lesson for them because children go missing often from meeting up or talking to strangers over the internet.

More photos of our filming progress

Third day of shooting

Today we filmed the end of our thriller opening. This involved both Elliot and Amy, and the location was my attic! We began by giving Amy her costume - shirt, tie and skirt, then did Elliot's make up. We got some brown eye shadows and a cotton bud, and then let Claudie put this under his eyes, in the hope to give him the appearance of dark bags, to make him look older.

We used my laptop as Elliot's prop, because he needed something that showed the audience how he was talking to Amy. The light from the screen was really effective when we turned off the lights because it made his surroundings pitch black, and only his face was lit up which we found really effective.

Whilst shooting this scene we once again filmed from a lot of different angles, such as long shots, mid-shots and high and low angle shot, mostly from the tripod. We adjusted the height frequently to ensure a range of different shots to choose from when editing.

After this, we filmed Amy's part. In our story, this is after she leaves the computer and goes into her room because she hears noises. She is worried, and looks around to find out where it's coming from.. Little does she know her stalker is right above her, watching her. We filmed Amy walk up the stairs from many different angles. We did a high angle shot from the attic, where you can see her through the opening which is supposed to be from Elliot's point of view. Then we did ones from the banister as she walked up the stairs, and from the landing and the end of the corridor she walks down. We are planning on using all of these shots in this scene to keep it intense and fast paced!

Editing our second scene

Luckily we have all get the hang of editing now, so we edited this scene quickly with few problems. Once again we uploaded it from the camera and then imported our selected clips into iMovie. For this scene we cut each clip quite short, so that we could fit a variety of different shots into a short bit of time. We included hand held shots, close up shots of her face and shots from behind and beside our actress. This way it captured her emotions whilst also letting the audience know what's going on, by being able to see her point of view conversation, and her reaction when he stops replying.

Second day of shooting

On Wednesday after school, everyone came round my house again to film the second part of our film. We have already filmed the scenes outside, so we were working inside on the bit when Amy signs onto MSN and starts chatting to 'Sam', her stalker (played by Elliot).

We began by filming some more shots of her walking away from the kettle as this followed on from our first day of shooting. We filmed a variety of shots such as from the floor, so we could see her feet walk away, and others mid-shots from in front and behind her.

Once we were happy, we went on to the study to film shots of Amy logging into MSN. I filmed an over the shoulder, mid-shot of her typing and logging in, and a hand held shot of her view of the screen to make it look like her point of view, which will hopefully engage the audience and make them feel as though they are her to create more emotions towards the character. Also, this way it would be clearer for the audience to see what is going on during the conversation between 'Sophie' and 'Sam', and how they both have pictures of different people, pretending it is them. The idea of this is to show they are both pretending they are someone they're not.. Sophie is pretending she is someone prettier as she is not very sociable and obviously very self conscious, and she thinks she is talking to a boy her age who is interested in her, but little does she know he is a lot older. She is the vulnerable one in this situation because 'Sam' knows who she really is, and what she really looks like, even though her picture says otherwise.

We then took a shot from above the computer screen, so you could see only Amy's face and her expressions, especially when he stops replying to her.. She looks worried and confused.

Finally, we then filmed the kettle from start to finish. This way we could use the sound for the entire scene, to create tension as the kettle gets louder and louder. I thought we could also use the clip and cut it into sections and place them in between clips of Amy on the computer, to build tension as the kettle boils to represent time running out for Amy before she meets danger.

Naming our thriller film

In order to do this, we began by thinking of words to do with the situation the victim in our film is in; she is vulnerable, unaware, naive etc. Then I thought of what she was to the man who has been stalking her. She is his prey. I thought this was a really good name for the film because it is short and describes the girl very well. My group liked the name too so I then looked at the definition of it to make sure it was definitely relevant. This is the definition I found: One that is defenceless, especially in the face of attack; a victim. I then came up with the idea of including the definition in the film along with the title to add effect and to explain the meaning of the work 'prey'.

I really like, this idea and I think it is important to make the definition look like the definition, not just a tag line, so when we added it to the film we put a noun abbreviation next to it like you would see in a dictionary --> n.

I got the definition from this website: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/prey

Fixing the sound effect

Unfortunately we ran out of time in our last lesson to figure out how to play the voice over and sound effect at the same time, so Tilly and I did it today. Instead of importing them both separately, we made them one track in GarageBand by having them play at the same time. We turned the volume of the soundtrack almost right down because we did not want it to drown out the voice over, as this is the most important part. Once we were happy with it, we saved it to iTunes and imported it to iMovie.

This is our chosen sound effect:

Searching for 'creepy' sounds

We used our lesson today to show Claudie and Ellen what Tilly and I did with the voice over. They really liked it so we then went on the computers to search the internet for some creepy sounds that we could download and import. We browsed through many different websites, and finally found one with the sound effect we wanted! We got it from www.mysoundfx.com and it was called 'Suspense Horror'.

We downloaded this and then imported it into GarageBand, where we duplicated the clip to make it last longer as it was only about 10 seconds before. We then went the new version into iMovie, but realised it would not let us have 2 imported sounds playing together at once.

Changing the voice over

The voice over that Claudie recorded was really good, but sadly she only brought one version of it into school and this version had a weird crackling sound in the background, and our aim was to have silence besides the voice. We've had a lot of trouble trying to find silent conditions to record our voice over in, but today Tilly and I found an opportunity to do it. We had a free lesson so we wanted to play around with different effects and techniques to try and find a way to eliminate unwanted sounds in a recording. Unfortunately we didn't find a way of doing this, but we did find an empty classroom with a cupboard at the back which we locked ourselves away in to ensure no sound got through, because we wanted the voice over to seem as though she was privately telling someone what happened. We recorded the dialogue through GarageBand and then duplicated it because we wanted the word 'stalking' and 'prey' to be slightly emphasized against the rest of the words. We did this by cutting the duplicate clip, leaving just the section where these words are used. We then went through the different voice effects to find one that created an eerie sort of suspense.

The next step: Sound and Voice Over

During the editing of our film, sound was not on our side. We have had many problems with sound due to not being able to hear every little noise when we play it on the laptop because of the atmosphere in our classroom with everyone talking. We had this problem with our preliminary task but unfortunately only noticed the sound was not up to par when we played it to the class, when everyone was quiet and the sound was much louder coming from more powerful speakers. I found this embarrassing as it seemed as though we had forgotten to edit the sounds, but we actually spent lots of time on this, but unfortunately we didn't hear the background noises from the laptop speakers. We really don't want this to happen again, so we have been extra cautious when listening and recording sounds this time around. Ideally we want to use the diegetic sound from our clips but we noticed they did not all run smoothly when pieced together because of objects such as planes flying past and birds tweeting in the background.

After realising we could not just leave the sound as it was, we tried out coping the sound from the first clip and playing it on repeat over the entire scene. Unfortunately this didn't work because there were distinct sounds overhead such as an aeroplane which made it clear the sound was repetitive throughout.

I then suggested going outside and sitting in silence with the laptop and recording for 2 minutes. This seemed like a good idea at first, but the thought of the school remaining silent for those 2 minutes was too good to be true! Although it did not all seem that loud when we sat and recorded it, once played back on the laptop we noticed it picked up every voice, footstep and rustling.

We imported this to iMovie anyway just to see what it sounded like but the noises did not actually fit with the clips. There were sounds that were clearly not from the scene as the two different locations were very different, so we could not use this either.

After this idea was eliminated, we searched GarageBand and found a clip of sound called 'Forest'. At first I thought this sounded too false and obviously non-diegetic but once we turned down the volume to make it more subtle it actually worked really well. Finally!

I feel as though unless a film includes professional actors and actresses, dialogue can ruin a film that is meant to be tense or frightening. My group agreed with me, so we did not include any speech in our film, but looking back on our first edited piece of film I felt as though it was not creepy enough. Looking back on a previous AS thriller opening we viewed at the start of the course, I remembered the voice over they included that told the story as we watched the film. I found this really effective as it was in the style of a police interview, so I asked my group if they would like to do something like this for us. I thought that if the girl (Amy) was telling her story as though the actual opening to the film was a flash back then this could be quite effective in creating some tension. Ellen, Tilly and Claudie all liked the idea so we began planning out the script and where we could place the speech. We decided that it should be short, from the start of the movie to just before she gets into her house. Amy was not present when we wanted to record our dialogue so we let Claudie do it as she has the softest voice, and the audience would be unaware that it wasn't actually the actress' voice as she does not speak in the film.

We then went into a quiet room and began recording the dialogue and placing it into our film to work out whether it needed to be longer, shorter, faster or slower. As we did this during school hours, lots of sounds were picked up from people talking and moving around in the floor above us, so Claudie went home and recorded it herself on her own Mac where she could find a quieter surrounding.

First day of shooting

Filming is the part I enjoy the most, as I love thinking of new and creative ideas that we can include as we film, and I did this a lot on Sunday and also came up with ideas for our future filming. Luckily everyone in my group, including the actors are friends so we get things done efficiently without many problems. This makes working together much more enjoyable and we all feel comfortable

sharing our thoughts and ideas.

We met up at my house on Sunday at around 2:30pm because we wanted to start filming at 3pm, so needed to give ourselves time to set up. We chose this time because this is the sort of time the girl in our film would be finishing school. We thought that it would make everything easier if we just waited until this time because it would save us faffing around with the brightness of our film to make it look like a certain time., so this way everything was natural. Amy was here for this filming session as she was the only one that was needed. I supplied her with my sister's school uniform. A shirt, tie, blazer, skirt and shoes.

Amy came prepared with her hair tied up, wearing leggings and socks, which we pulled over her leggings because stereotypically, "geeks" always have socks showing.

When everything was set up and ready, we began filming. The first shot we filmed was my idea of Amy walking down a road opposite my house. I thought it would be effective if we filmed her walking from the end as an extreme long shot, towards the camera where we could then cut the film into sections and have each clip of her getting closer fade in with the next. This would look like time was speeding up and would make it more interesting and less boring than her just walking down the road which would take a lot of time. By doing this we could show the same action but in much shorter time, whilst also showing an editing skill. We then moved location a bit further back, so we could film Amy walk further along the turn in the road. We went through with my idea of filming this behind a lamp post in my road, which we stuck a 'Missing Girl' poster to. The idea of this was to have it quite subtly at the edge of the shot, not making it bold and obvious as Amy is not supposed to have seen it, so we are hoping to focus on the poster, and then move the focus onto Amy so the poster is then blurred when we come to edit it. This idea of mine creates dramatic irony as the audience witness the poster and the protagonist doesn't. This gives a hint to the viewers about something that could happen later on in the film, and this is that the man she has been talking to has been stalking other girls too, and they have gone missing. She is just another one of his victims.

Once again, I felt it was important to film as many different shots as possible as if we needed to go back and film something we forgot, the lighting, the actress or any of the surroundings could look different which would make our film look messy and irregular. Therefore I took on the role of filming from lots of different locations and directions. I went into my driveway and filmed Amy walking up it towards the house. I then asked Amy to go back and do the same thing as I filmed her again but from another angle. We also filmed her from behind too. All these different shots can now be mixed up and used to show her walking towards the house, but from lots of different angles which will make the film more interesting to watch.

Once this was done, our next step was to film Amy opening the door. We shot an extreme close up of her hand unlocking the door, then slamming it shut. We shot this several times as Amy was unable to unlock my door but we got it in the end! I then put the camera on a window ledge next to my front door so that Amy could throw her keys towards the camera. This worked well because so far, all of our camera shots have been distant from the actress or any props but this was more personal as the keys flew towards the screen, hopefully making the audience feel more involved as we are now inside her house, where she thinks she is safe.

After this we set up the camera in my bathroom next to the hall way, where we filmed Amy walk in the door and take off her bag and shoes. This shows that now she is home she is in her own private space, and can start her daily routine - get comfortable, make a drink and then chat to her "friend". We showed the sense of routine and order through the still shots that follow her as she makes her way through her house, showing no hesitance as to her next move because she does this all the time. We centred the camera on my kitchen island as we did a panning shot of her walk through the door, across the kitchen to the kettle. This is all part of the build up to what could possibly happen, as everything seems normal at this moment in time apart from of course the 'Missing Girl' poster at the start which indicates something is going to happen in relation to this.

We then thought we had filmed everything we needed to in the kitchen before moving on to the study, but as we took a break discussing what we had done so far I thought outside of the box and thought of a positioning of the camera we had not used yet. And this was to put the camera inside a cupboard, where Amy would get her cup from for her coffee. I placed the camera inside, and arranged the cups so that they covered any sort of light coming through so that when the cupboard opened, the shot would remain black until Amy removed a cup. This worked really well and we have already had numerous compliments from the style of shot I chose as it is unique. This is also another way to make the audience feel involved, as Amy takes the cup from before the screen, then shutting the door on it. It sort of makes the audience feel as though they are there, but hiding. Creating tension and keeping them intrigued.

Influences for our film

I came up with the idea of the cyber-chat concept. I thought this was quite different to a typical thriller; action, investigation, adventure or crime etc. I got the idea from a programme I had watched just weeks before we started filming. This programme is called 'Misfits', and the bit that influenced me was when the guy (Simon) was in a dark room chatting to a girl he doesn't know. The setting around him is dark and gloomy with just the light from the computer screen on his face. It was the same for the girl he was chatting to. I liked how the camera flowed to show his face, his conversation and his hands on the keyboard, and then up again to show the girl on the other end of the conversation. I thought this was clever and made the scene run smoothly.

Here is a link to the clip (Series 1, Episode 3). The section I was influenced by is at 12min 18secs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89SG9stmbnQ&has_verified=1