Soundtrack

The piece we used for the bathroom scene (01 Ghosts I from the Ghosts I-V album) is sparse due to the individual piano playing dissonant chords. We thought this fit the main character's (Max) personality as he is vulnerable and trying to rid himself of his previous life, and start anew. Additionally, the track could be said to evoke a 'classical' style of music, similar to some of Chopin's pieces on the piano. Seeing as classical music is more upmarket, and stereotypically it's listeners are more 'intelligent', it punctuates the persona we try to create of Max's character being successful in his work.

The tracks we ended up using for the interrogation scene were 'The Four of Us Are Dying' and 'Corona Radiata' which are both from The Slip. The former worked well for the action part of the interrogation as it has a sinister, sneaky sort of sound; emphasising the fact that Adam sneaks up on Kieran with a knife. The music is also more foregrounded in the sound mix to give build tension and atmosphere. 

The latter on the other hand is much more suited for dialogue driven scenes, as it is atmospheric and does not rely on riffs or ostinatos. It is backgrounded in the mix to connote an uncertainty in the atmosphere of the opening. The track relies mainly on pedal notes and so it is very slow, which works much better on the first part of the interrogation as the action following it is much more fast paced.

Risk Assessment

The three locations for our production each had their own inherent risks, but these were minimised as much as possible to ensure safe filming of our production.

Max’s Garage

The main danger was in the use of a knife in the fight scene. To prevent any injuries, we used a blunt knife and used the flat side when Kieran’s wrist is seen to be cut.

We also practiced the blocking punches whilst the garage was well lit before filming them with chiaroscuro lighting.

Road

The road we used was on a housing estate, so there was a risk of our filming being interrupted by passing cars and therefore accidents. However, it isn’t near a main road, so we didn’t have this problem. There was a risk of cars pulling out from the several driveways, so we had to check there was nobody in them before we filmed the car chase scene, which was also risky due to the fact that it was in the middle of the road.

Someone being chased by a car may look slightly odd to the public, so we informed Max’s neighbours that we were filming AS coursework before we started.

Bathroom

Due to the small sized of Max’s bathroom, some of the shots had to be filmed from inside a slightly wet bath. To reduce the risk of slipping, we first dried it with a towel, and then put down a non-slip mat, which also prevented it from being scratched by the tripod.

Possible Problems On Shoot

People

We found that when we were filming the car scene that some people disrupted some of our shots by walking onto them, so obviously we had to wait for them to not be on the area of the location we needed to use (which was quite a big stretch of road). Furthermore, seeing as we were pretending to chase Adam in the car, one neighbour was a bit concerned by this, so we made sure to fill her in on what we were doing. We then informed the rest of the neighbours and they all agreed to let us film and not get in the way of our filming.

The road we selected to film on is not very busy which obviously means that there’s much less hassle regarding unwanted sound and getting in people’s way.

Another problem with using another person for our opening (Max’s Dad) was getting a time that was long enough and convenient enough for us to film. This is why we filmed that particular part in the weekend as he was off work.

With the bathroom scene, we just had to make sure Max’s Mum and Dad were out of the house to ensure that there was no unwanted background noise and that we wouldn’t be interrupted whilst filming. We also made sure to organize a set time slot with them, and fill them in on what exactly we would be doing.

Weather

This did not affect our filming so much as only a small portion of our opening was outside, it was quite cold in the middle of winter; but we made sure to wear appropriate clothing so this did not inhibit our work.

Lighting

This was a much bigger issue, and one that we made sure to plan for as it started to go dark at about 4PM. We made sure to film at about midday so we had plenty of time to film, and, if necessary, film shots again if we weren’t happy with them. Then at about 4:30 – 5:00PM we started to film the interrogation scene as this is what we needed to achieve our chiaroscuro, high key; low contrast lighting that would establish the sinister mood we needed.

For the bathroom scene, we also made sure to film during the day as we needed day scene to contrast with the night scene as the binary opposite of good and evil.

Legal

As we were using a BB gun that looks very similar to an actual gun, we made sure that we didn’t use it outside as obviously people would assume that it is a real gun and this could get us in trouble with the Police for possession of firearms. It was of course fine to use it inside however.

Setting Up The Interrogation

Set up from Kieran Brooks on Vimeo.

We filmed ourselves setting up the area for our interrogation scene by messing around and changing the lighting to get the best possible mise-en-scene. We ended up having a very good chiaroscuro lighting and location for filming our scene.

The Tester New Rough Cut

The Tester. NEW. Rough Cut. from Kieran Brooks on Vimeo.

This is our latest rough cut of our new AS thriller opening. We still need to add a lot more to it such as sound effects, music and fine tuning the editing. However, this is all going smoothly and we have plenty of time to complete it. We will edit the footage next to make it much smoother and coherent and we will then add the music to enhance the video. We showed this to our class and to some of our friends/family members and they agreed with our corrects as well as suggesting some suggestions and possible places to put sound effects to make the opening better such as removing a couple of the scenes and adding certain sound effects in places. This information has proved to be valuable in our editing experience.