Evaluation task 7: comparing preliminary task and final thriller.

In flmmaking it's important you learn something new continuously and never stop improving and stretching yourself. To make sure I'm doing the same I've compared the preliminary task we did in the beginning of the year to the final thriller we filmed recently in terms of how our planning, group work and editing improved.

Evaluation task 6: technologies.

We added annotations to our final thriller in order to describe what different technologies we used and how we manipulated camera work and editing.

The list of all the different technology we've used:

Pre-production technologies

Google

- for research 

Blogger

- to keep the record

Facebook

- communication

Canon 80D DSLR, Microphone RODE NTG2, Glide Gear DNA 1000, iPhone

- Filming the test shoot and the target audience research

Final Cut Pro 

- editing the pre-production videos

YouTube 

- to upload the videos to Blogger

- to research other thrillers

Amazon

- buying props and costumes e.g. fake blood

Production

Black Magic 4k URSA, Tripod

- Filming the thriller 

Directional Shotgun Mic, Dead Cat

- Recording the sound 

Key Light, Fill Light 

- Setting the right lighting

Adobe Premier CC

- editing 

YouTube

- publishing

Post-production

iPhone

-filming behind the scenes video

Final Cut Pro

- editing behind the scenes video

YouTube

- to upload the video to Blogger 

Blogger

- keeping the record

Google 

- for research

Evaluation task 5: attracting the audience.

In order to describe how our thriller would attract the audience I wrote a magazine article as if I've became a famous filmmaker and talk about my first ever film, discussing why I've chosen such locations, actors, genre conventions, e.t.c.

Evaluation task 4, part 2: how would our target audience look like?

In order to display our target audience I've created an Instagram account to show what she might look like and what might be her interests.

- That would be a young woman aged 19-21.

- She might be studying in uni or already going to work.

- She would probably have similar interests to the people of her age: modern music like electronic or indie-rock, nice food, games, good movies, travelling, hanging out with friends.

- She doesn't mind violence neither in games, nor in movies.

- She likes to think of her-self as a strong woman, so she would see an image of a powerful, a bit cruel woman as a role model in some way.

   

She enjoys watching films + also occasionally goes to the cinema  

just to spend her free time with friends.

She's ready for the new experiments and doesn't afraid to make mistakes.

She enjoys seeing the world from different perspectives.

 She's inspired by the image of strong female characters.

She doesn't find blood or violent disturbing.

Analysing all of that, I think she'd be interested in our thriller because it presents a strong female character and also some interesting (and a bit violent) plot twists, with a gradual built up of tension.

Evaluation task 4, part 1:who will be our target audience?

With our questions printed in a form of a questionnaire we've started our research.

Firstly, we've interviewed a couple of people from our school, including teachers.
Then me, George and Aidan went to Guildford to interview more citizens.
Altogether, we've interviewed 46 people from the age of 15 to 60. 

Here is the data we've collected:

Out of 46 people we've interviewed there are: 26 males and 20 females.

These are answers to simple yes/no questions, divided by gender, which helps to see what people think about type of films, similar to ours. For example, the data shows that men and women have similar opinions on movies about family drama - 40% of women said they enjoy watching it, the same stated 39% of men. Also, only 8% of women, and 7.69% of men find violence in movies disturbing, which is really good for us as broadens the target audience. 

Summing up the information from this table, I would say that men and women had pretty the same response rates - there were no major differences between the gender, so it's reasonable to say that our thriller is not strictly gender-specific and would satisfy both men and women.

What I personally found extremely interesting was that only 1 man and only 1 woman out of 46 people we talked to, said that female lead villain is unrealistic. 

This graph shows which film genres our interviewees prefer, also divided by gender. 

Overall, it's obvious that men give preferences to comedy and action films, and women, which sounds quite odd, to horror and thriller films. From that data we can conclude that our target audience are most likely to be women.

We've also asked people whether they've seen 'Shining', which is quite similar to our film, and that's what we've got:

only 7/26 men have seen it and only 6/20 women.

This may suggest, that even if people say they like thriller films, it doesn't mean they will go 

and watch it.

We've also asked people about what would they expect to see in a good thriller film, where men were mostly talking about good script, good plot and acting and only women said they would also like to see blood, murder, death - which may also suggest that women are more likely to enjoy our thriller.

Lastly, we asked our interviewees how do they feel about violence in film. 5 men and 4 women answered '10', meaning they absolutely love seeing violence on the screen and don't mind it at all, however, overall men seem to mind it less.

Out of 46 people we've talked to - we only had two men in mid 50s, one woman in 40s and a couple of man aged 20-30; everyone else were aged 16-18. I understand, this makes our data less representative, but it's not really our fault - we tried to talk to older people when we went to Guildford, but they rarely wanted to participate in the research or was in a rush, where all the younger people were really nice and wanting to help.

Analysing all the information, it's reasonable to say that our target audience is likely to be: young women aged from 19 to 21.

Preparing questions for evaluation task 4.

In order to find out our target audience we wrote a short list of questions to interview people:

Gender of the interviewee:
The question helps to establish the gender of our target audience.

How old are you?
The question helps to establish the age of the target audience.

Where are you from?
The question helps to predict the area, in which our thriller is likely to succeed most.

1. What's your favourite film genre?

This question will establish interviewee's preferences straight away.

2. Do you like movies about family drama? (yes/no)
Asking this question we'll know if people do watch that kind of films at all.

3. Do you find violence in movies disturbing? (yes/no)
This question will helps us to understand if people would feel uncomfortable watching our thriller or not.

4. Do you think that domestic violence is a topic appropriate for film-making? (yes/no)
Interviewees are showing their opinion and attitude towards our idea.

5. Would you still enjoy a movie if it has a tragic ending? (yes/no)
Here we are making sure our plot 100% fits the demand of the audience.

6. Do you think a female lead villain is unrealistic? (yes/no)
This question is mostly targeted on men - to see whether they would believe in the story.

7. Do you find films where the main character has a mental disorder interesting? (yes/no)
Shows whether our audience is likely to be interested in our film.

8. Have you seen Shinning by Stanley Kubrick? What did/didn't you like about it?
This is a practical question, which shows how many people who said they loved thrillers, films about family drama and violence have actually seen the most famous film in this category.

9. What do you like to see in a thriller film? 
A simple question, which allows us to check whether we've included the most popular expectations of our audience into our story.

10. On the scale from 1-10 how do you fell about violence in film? 10 being "good, I enjoy it, I don't mind at all" and 1 being "I hate it, it's inappropriate".

This allows us to check whether we keep our thriller within the framework of what is appropriate for the audience. 

Evaluation task 3: choosing a production company.

Now when we've nearly done with the opening sequence of our thriller - it's time to think about: where would we go if we needed to make the whole film?
In other words: what production company would make our film?

I've looked at two different companies,
to try and predict which one will be more likely to produce our thriller:
- 20th Century Fox, which is on of the 'Big Six Film Studios',
-  'The British Lion', which is a smaller British independent studio

20th Century Fox.

Here are some key information about the 20th century Fox film company, presented as a learning set  on the Quizlet website. You can choose different study modes such as: flashcards, test, spelling, e.t.c.

20th Century Fox has a very varied filmography, which contains lots of  dramas and thrillers like ours, apart from comedies and cartoons, which they occasionally produce for the younger audience. What I'm trying to say is - they've already made films, similar to ours by plot and genre: films about violence, problems within the family and marriage, films with the intense story-line and subverted stereotypes, so they should be interested in our story as well.

Films, similar to our thriller, made by 20th Century Fox:

Gone Girl.

This is a crime and drama thriller about difficulties of family life, home abuse and mental disorders, where both characters (male and female) are cold, cruel and have their own secrets they hide from each other.

Unfaithful.

A loving husband discovers that his wife is cheating on him - and kills her lover. She helps him to hide the crime. Film about dark sides of marriage and complicated human feelings, with a bit of violence on top.

Don't say a word.

This film was distributed by 20th Century Fox - the thriller tells us a story of the psychiatrist, who has to reveal the secrets of his young paciest with the post traumatic disorder, otherwise his family will be harmed.

As you can see - 20th Century Fox is interested in thrillers to a substantial extent, so there is a possibility they would like our story and would want to make another interesting thriller, because it suits what they've already done before in their films - amazing plot twists, stereotypes subversion, use of violence, e.t.c.

However, it seems to be that 20th Century Fox are best at making action films. Look at top ten highest grossing films, produced by 20th Century Fox - all of them are action films!

But that shouldn't be a problem - we have just enough action and violence in our film.
Okay, now lets imagine 20th Century Fox agreed to make our film. So how are they going to promote it?
From the research I've done I noticed that 20th Century Fox love innovative marketing. They are very good at spotting target audience and know what to do, to make them want to see their film. For example, recently, '20th Century Fox' released 'Dead pool', which made $783,112,979 worldwide! This is a big success for the '20th Century Fox' marketing and distribution department.

So to get a better idea of how 20th Century Fox would make our thriller - let's look at some of the key marketing tools they've used with the 'Dead Pool' as an example:

e.g. Dead Pool Christmas trailer

e.g. Dead Pool's Instagram account.

e.g. St.Valentines's day billboard.

As you can you see, '20th Century Fox' know what they are doing, when it comes to editing. 

In terms of our film - '20th Century Fox' earn enough to be able to afford to promote our thriller not only by the new media, but by traditional media (like print, TV adverts) as well.

For example, the trailer for our film can be uploaded to YouTube and also be shown in the cinemas before the actual movie; there can be a poster published on the social platforms, as well as printed version can be spread out.

To conclude: '20th Century Fox' love thrillers and films with twisted plot, so they would probably like our idea + they have money for the good marketing campaign, which sounds tempting.

The British Lion.

Some key information about that small British studio:

Why would 'British Lion' want to make our film?
I've looked through the films they've produced and noticed that they make a lot of drama films and thrillers, mostly - action thrillers, sci-fi thrillers, crime thrillers, e.t.c. So should be interested in our film, which kind of falls under the "drama-thriller" category, which they seems to be really excited with.

Examples of films, produced by 'British Lion', which are similar to our thriller:

Endless Night.

The plot of the film builds up around the love story and the family life of the poor chauffeur and his rich girlfriend, who moved into the haunted house. Apart the sci-fi part of this thriller - I like the fact that in this movie, just like in ours, female is shown to be more powerful, than man.

Tears in the Rain.

A very complicated love story of men and women, who hide secrets from each other.

The Constant Husband.

This one is really interesting! The constant husband is actually a comedy, but it reflects the idea of our thriller so much, adhering the stereotype of men being unfaithful and careless, also showing how much women suffer from that! This is the actual plot: "Charles Hathaway wakes up in West Wales with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. With the help of a Cardiff specialist he traces his life back to his gorgeous wife and their large London house, so all seems well with the world. But more detective work starts to uncover an alarming chain of further stunning wives and a way of going on that the new Charles finds pretty unacceptable."

'British Lion' studios had quite major financial problems in the past, so most of their films were low-budget, which may be the another reason why they might agree to make our thriller - it doesn't really involve any major action scenes, where you have to use lots of CGI(which takes time) and lots of actors and crew(which takes money).

To sum up: 'British Lions' like drama movies (like love-drama movies), so our plot should make them interested. They would also see our film as an opportunity to raise profit - as it's costs(especially above-the-lines one) would be relatively low.

OVERALL:

Obviously, I personally would chose '20th Century Fox' to be our production company, primarily because they have money and amazing marketing department.

However, talking realistically - I think 'British Lions' are much more likely to be willing to produce our thriller due to their unstable financial situation.

Evaluation task 2: evaluating our thriller.

The whole thriller follows the pattern of firstly adhering and then subverting the stereotypes, that we associate with genders and social class, using camera, editing, mise-en-scene and sound.

The very first shots immediately reveal to the audience something about the characters’ backgrounds because of the way the mise-en-scene is set. Straight in the beginning, we see a female’s hand with the ring, which suggests she is married and is relatively wealthy, which adheres with the stereotype of a typical middle-class women in her 30s: she is married and she is taking care of the house and her husband by cooking, cleaning, e.t.c.

We also see bits of kitchen and furniture in the first seconds of the opening sequence – everything is tidy, clean and matches in colour, which instantly makes the audience subconsciously realise it’s a middle-class kitchen, which is our secondary social group represented in the thriller. This is important that the mise-en-scene sends across clear messages – the status and class of the characters – because our audience can associate with them, if they are also middle class, and treat the story more personally, which is beneficial for us as producers, because the impact on the audience will be greater, and our film, therefore, more successful.

In the beginning, there are two close-ups on the woman – her face when she touches the hair and her hands cutting – which reveal the bruises. The camera doesn’t make accents on these bruises, but film regular routine actions like cutting and walking, what may connote that our character treats this violence as every day stuff and this is not a big deal for her anymore. The same message is sent across to the audience through her facial expressions - she is very calm, her eyes are not red, so she was not crying, her breath is normal, so she is not worried or scared.

At that point things start to look a bit more weird and this is the first sign of subverting a stereotype - why a woman doesn't cry or look upset after being beaten up? Why is she not talking about her emotions, but carry on with her daily house tasks?
The shot duration in these shots is also quite short, so the audience doesn’t get enough time to properly notice the bruises, but only realise subconsciously something is wrong after a short glance, which is relatively effective as people become more involved in the world of the film, starting to look for other bits, which doesn’t quite fit in the whole scene, which subvert the stereotype of ideal, routine life of middle class woman.

The sound is vitally important in this thriller. All the diegetic noises like oil sizzling, lemon squashing and cutting sounds make the opening sequence look realistic. Where the non-diegetic piano music makes shot transition smoother and because it’s so light and up-beating it juxtaposes with the horrible and violent actions, which start at the second part of the sequence. Such juxtaposition is highly effective on the audience, because they didn’t expect to see blood accompanied by soft piano so it shocks them, helping us to convey main messages through the narrative.

 There is a great panning shot, following the woman when she walks towards the cupboard to get the lemon, which reveals half of the body of the man – as the camera follows female, but not male it connotes that she is more important than him and the audience should pay attention to her.
The character positioning in this scene is also important. She is on her feet throughout the sequence: cutting, cooking, walking, while he is behind her lying down. Such positioning not only connote she is more powerful than him, but also represent the flow of their everyday life, adhering with the stereotypes - women is doing all the work in the house, while the man is lying down somewhere unnoticed.

Camera work and character positioning reflect our primary social group – gender – by showing the fighting and tension between male and female. Close-up on the women’s feet when she’s looking at the man on the floor below her makes her look more powerful because she is higher than him. Character positioning is very much beneficial for her and supports the same idea – she is stronger than him, she is more powerful and more important.

Editing also represent our social groups by highlighting the difference between male and female genders. For example, shot-reverse-shot when the man notices the woman in the kitchen establishes the fact that he’s scared of her for some reason, unknown for the audience.

The costume supports the whole idea of gender differences as well. She is wearing a red dress, which is associate with love, passion and blood, and makes her look both sexy, but a bit mentally unstable. On the other hand, he is wearing a black suit and white shirt, which makes him look serious. Also, the fact that white shirt is soaking with red blood is quite shocking to see, because you imaging something innocent being overpowered by some external force.

The whole sequence we've made is filmed on the tripod, producing stable shots which reflect and associate with normal and a bit dull life of middle class people. However, there is one handheld mid shot, which follows the woman when she's about to attack the man for the first time. The fact that the camera is shaking connotes that she is irritated and loosing temper, so something bad is about to happen.

The shot filmed under the table not only shows the causes of the fight, which took place before the sequence started, but also subvert the gender stereotypes by showing how woman overpowers the man.

The very last shot is quite long, but effective, because the audience so not necessarily expect to see him trying to escape for the second time so it's quite a surprise. Also, we kind of see that from her perspective, which helps the audience to sympathise with the villain more, than with the victim, which again subverts the stereotype, as typically men are the main heroes and those, who we sympathise with.

Overall, all the technical areas represent our social groups – gender and social class – quite successfully. Sound creates a juxtaposition with the image, subverting the stereotype of a typical middle-class day. Manipulating editing, shot-reverse-shots and shot duration helps to create the right pace to follow the atmosphere set by the images. Camera is emphasising the female character more than the male one, which makes her look more powerful and strong. Mise-en-scene also reflects the social group we represent by introducing a really nice picture of a middle-class kitchen, fancy clothes and beautiful ring.

Evaluation task 1: using, developing and subverting the conventions of similar products.

In this video I'm discussing how we've used, developed and subverted the conventions of already existing media products, which are similar to our thriller.

Media products	Genre conventions	Use	Develop	Change
1)      ‘Unsteady’ by X Ambassadors	Use of colour psychology and juxtaposition.	Used a lot of red, which connotes love, passion and danger.	Smart use of shot juxtaposition, giving hints about characteristics of the main heroes.	We created a strong female character, rather than presenting a typical woman victim.
2)      ‘Enough’, 2002	Particular use of camera work and stock characters as a base to main heroes’ characteristics.	Eye line matches to show the moments of realization or shock.	Creating characteristics of the main heroes, which would fit with the stereotypes – aggressive man and emotional woman.	We created a strong female character, rather than presenting a typical woman victim.
3)      ‘Love the way you lie’	Fast pace and the use of stereotypes about men and women.	Stereotypes about strong men and emotional women.	Keeping the fast pace of the actions through shot short duration and also creating a revealing panning shot, which adds tension to the story.	We didn’t create a love story behind the violent actions in our opening sequence.
4)      ‘Sleeping with the enemy’	Powerful, evil villain.	Fast pace and straightforward villain and victim roles.	Character positioning – stronger character is on the top of the weaker one.	We have subverted the general stereotypes about women and created a strong female villain.
5)      ‘Treat you better’	Clever use of the mise-en-scene and contrast to create  bigger impact on the audience.	Natural lighting and set juxtapose with violent actions.	Shot duration is a bit longer on the violent scenes in our thriller than in ‘Treat you better’, so that the audience understands exactly what is happening.	We created a strong female character, rather than presenting a typical woman victim.
6)      Video games	Women are victimised, oversexualised or, which is less likely, are presented as main protagonists.	Use of blood and weapons like knives.	Unexpected plot twists.	Presenting a woman as a main strong protagonist, who doesn’t need help of another characters.

Overall, we have used and expanded most of the thriller genre conventions and stereotypes - like characteristics of the main heroes (e.g abusive, angry man and crazy, mentally unstable woman) or colour connotations (e.g red = love and danger). On the other hand, we have subverted the stereotype of a weak woman and introduced a strong, cold-blooded female character, which has most of the stereotypical male characteristics like smartness.

Post production: editing.

- 'Film editing is a creative and technical part of the post-production process of filmmaking.'

- 'Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information.'

- 'Editing is arranging, revising, and preparing a written, audio, or video material for final production.'

My definition of editing:

Editing – is a process of putting shots together in a story, with the use of cutting, sound and digital tools.

When we just started editing we wanted to produce a believable linear narrative to engage the audience – an opening sequence, which would create demand for our thriller movie. Every member of the group, including myself, was expected to participate in the whole process, be flexible and produce good ideas. We also were expected to know how to use different editing and sound tools – like Adobe Premiere Pro CC and titling software -  and regularly save, not lose our footage.

The key decision throughout the editing were:

1)    Which shots to use - for example, we had a really nice shot of Clare's legs when she's standing over Chris, which for me made her look more powerful, but also feminine - and we were discussing whether to use this shot or not, because some people in our group thought such character positioning is a bit oversexualising our character, making her looking less villain-like. However, at the end we decided to use it, because overall character positioning - he is at the floor, she is standing over him - is beneficial for the flow of  the story.

2)    What song to use - before the shooting day we've been looking for a soundtrack to put in to highlight the juxtaposition, but we didn't know that we are not allowed to use copyrighted songs. During editing we were told our song must be un-copyrighted and we started panicking a bit because we didn't know where to find the song we need. However, it was not as hard as we expected - we've looked through some jazzy compositions on the YouTube and chose a couple of extracts to try with the footage.

3)    Creating names for titles - as we are not a real production company making feature-length movie - we don't have a company name, a director or other cast apart from stars - but we had to invent those names for the titles to give an impression that we are actually making a real movie. This doesn't sound like much of a problem, but if someone asked you to say a random name from the top of your head it would probably sound weird and we didn't want any weird names in our titles.

4) Coming up with the movie name - all the same reasons from above - making a name for something so that it reflects your ideas and conventions is not easy. We have not come up with the actual name for our thriller yet, but we had a chat and put together around 20-30 different names - out of which we will choose one, when we finish editing.

As I’ve shortly blogged previously – our first editing day we spent on looking through our footage – it’s vitally important because you, as editor, get to see what shots have you actually got, which helps you to structure and compose your product. We then quickly ‘re-named’ clips, so we knew exactly what shot we were dragging on the timeline - it saved us a lot of time. 

The timeline in Adobe Premiere is very helpful - it allows you to easily drag and drop clips from rushers, move apart and put together. If you press '+' button you will zoom in your footage so that you can cut off small sections of your clips more easily. This becomes essential when you're editing a fast pace piece, like ours, and need to cut on action - you have to make sure all your transitions are as smoothly edited as possible. After that you can press '-' which brings clips on your timeline back to the normal size. You can also unlink sound from the clip and move it around, shorten or crop it to fit with what you're trying to create.

After dragging all of the footage on the timeline – we’ve deleted all the shots, which were completely messed up – for example: on the couple of shots we saw a shadow of a camera man moving, so we couldn’t use it. This stage is also really helpful because you now have shots, free of continuity mistakes, all of which you can use. 

However, at that point we realised we didn’t have as much footage to choose from as we thought we have – some shots didn’t even have a backup, so we had to be creative to overcome some problems we faced. For example: at the dragging scene, when she is facing the camera – we can see our actress actually looking at the camera, which completely broke the 4th wall and just didn’t look professional enough. We tried to use other shots, but they didn’t fit as well as that one, so we had to crop the shot from the top so that you can’t see her eyes - and it worked, so we didn't have to replace that shot.

Another example of cropping we had to do is – the very last shot, when she’s chopping the squash and he is trying to escape for the second time. We didn’t have another shot (another angle) of her chopping the squash, so we had to use the shot from the beginning when she’s cutting the yellow pepper and put it right before the cutting of the squash. This is a continuity mistake - because there are different vegetables - which we didn’t like – so we cropped the very last shot so that you can only see her cutting something, but you can’t see an actual vegetable. After that the scene looked believable - looks like she's just cutting one yellow pepper.

Mostly, we’ve done all the editing in Adobe Premiere Pro CC. We’ve uploaded our footage there, we used razor to crop the shots and timeline to drag and drop clips, which made it easier to maintain continuity and create the right shot composition. We also relied on the shot list to keep the correct chronological order and faster choose the best shots from the rushers.

After finishing editing the shots we moved on to sound. 

To edit sound – we had to unlink the clip from it first. Then we’ve started creating one united diegetic soundtrack – cutting, sizzling, breathing - from what we’ve got, in order to make our audience feel like this moment is happening ‘live’ and that all the noises are ‘real’, just like they would sound in life - smoothly and on the same volume.

The main point of editing – the audience should never notice editing.

In the process of creating sound we had different layers on our timeline - like three or four – because sometimes we had to make the soundtracks overlap with each other or extend one to the next shot – which is known as a sound bridge – to make a transition smoother. We’ve recorded some of the sounds – like oil sizzling – on the shooting day, which turned out to be really helpful when it came up to editing, as we already had the sound ready and we just had to drag it to the right place. The last layer we’ve added on top – was uncopyrighted song, the only non-diegetic sound we’ve used, which we turned down a bit so that it sounds chilling and realistic - not like it was added on top afterwards, but like it was actually playing in the moment.

Lastly, we’ve moved on to titles. 

We didn’t feel like we had to use a different software to do this, so we created titles in Premiere. Titles in film are written to make people aware of the production company, director, cast and crew, who participated in the production of the film. 

They may also be used as a unique selling point, for example, if your film is directed by Christopher Nolan, you know that if you put his name in large font in your titles – people will want to watch your film no matter what, because: 
“OMG. IT’S A NEW CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S FILM!”.

We were struggling with the name for our 'production company' and I said:  'Guys, come on! Just write anything! Like...like..Yellow Tree.'
And they went: 'Yellow Tree? Okay'. :)

Luckily enough our story is quite simplistic and has to look realistic, so we didn’t have to spend time on graphics or CGI – we’ve only done a bit of colour editing to make our sequence brighter and more saturated.

To maintain the genre of our sequence and the juxtaposition we’ve created in our shot list and storyboard – we were really precise with the pace. We’ve started with longer shot durations when she’s peacefully cooking and then moved on to shorter shot durations and tried to cut on action, jumping from shot to shot, which provided high pace and action. 

All of our transitions were ordinary straight cuts – at first it helped us to keep up with the idea of ‘ordinary boring woman’s day’ and then helped to maintain high pace.

During editing we had a couple of moments where we slightly came off our shot list and tried to improvise. In some cases it didn’t work, in some it did. For example, we made a really interesting shot-reverse-shot, when he wakes up and notices her cooking – it cuts to her and then back to him – he looks frightened. This shot-reverse-shot  provides the audience with more information and also adds tension, as you feel she may turn around and notice him any moment.

Examples of the shot-reverse-shot:

We’ve also used one eye line match shot at the very beginning when she’s cooking. The camera was placed right in front of her, which kind of connotes that she is an ordinary women and makes the audience compare themselves with her, but when in the same shot she touches her hair and we see the bruises on her hands – we realise that not everything is as normal here as it looks. This juxtaposition should be really effective for the audience.

To sum up - the editing was a really interesting and engaging process - it wasn't as hard as I imagined. I got a chance to edit a piece that requires a high level of concentration and problem-solving skills because we had to maintain continuity to keep our opening sequence at the higher standard. I'm also really happy we were almost left 'on our own' to edit, so that I got a chance to understand how the process and the program work without teachers constantly doing all the work for us, but letting us to make mistakes and correct them as we believe is better. Overall, it was a great expeience of editing something 'movie-like', not just a fun or beautiful clip where you don't have to stick to the shot list as much, which I've never done before (apart from prelim task). 
However, what disappoints me slightly is that we didn't have a variety of shots + any 'creative shots' to choose from, so our thriller ended up being a bit...I don't want to say 'boring', because it's not - but there are not as much tension, action and unusual shots as I wanted it to be.

Anyway, it leaves us with a lot to analyse for the future so we don't keep on making the same mistakes.