Newspaper Thriller

Throughout the past few media lessons we have been getting ready to make our final thriller openings; a thriller is designed to excite the reader, viewer, or audience through action and most importantly suspense. In the first lesson we had to prepare a storyboard by either sketching what would happen in each scene or using a digital camera and taking the pictures. My group which consisted of four members including myself, were: Henok, Sevin, Selma, and myself Ola, we all agreed to use the digital camera to get the images for our storyboards as this would makes sure the images were clear, concise and also enable us to interpret what was happening in each scene and the type of camera angles which would be best for each scene. Whilst using the digital cameras we took pictures from different camera angles for example, over the shoulder shots, high angle shots, low angle shots and close ups; this helped give us a good impression of what these shots would look like once we started filming. Also in this first lesson we were given an introduction into how to use the Final Cut Pro software on the Macs, we were shown how to put clips together along the timeline, how to add a soundtrack, adding in and out points to video clips in order to cut certain bits out that may not be needed etc…

In the second lesson we were shown by Mickey (media technician) how to insert the tapes into the camcorder, the main buttons to remember, buttons to use and not to use, how to set up the tripod and more, how to insert the battery etc.. This was done through a presentation that Mickey had kindly put together showing us what to do and how to do it, after watching the presentation we tried it ourselves and were assessed by a member of staff.

After we had all been shown how to use the cameras and all the other equipment we were able to go off and do some filming. Though this is the part were my group had a slight problem as two of our members were not present due to a religious festival. At first I though this would have meant we would fall behind the other groups by far but I was wrong, me and my other group member (Henok) decided to do all the filming with some help from Mickey we were on our way, after we had finished the filming we then went on to start the editing. As we were editing we found out that it was more time consuming than we had thought, the editing carried on through to the next lesson where we had the rest of our group members back and ready to work. Me and Henok briefed them on what we had done in the previous lesson and we got straight down to editing. With the different ideas of our other group members we were all delighted with the end result and finally we started the soundtrack creation and editing. At first we all found the creation of the soundtrack rather difficult and hard to get to grips with, it was quite difficult to find appropriate soundtracks to put together and this inevitably consumed a lot of time thus leading to us not being able to complete the soundtrack for the last half of our thriller. After this we had to convert the video into an MP4 format and finally upload the video unto www.blogger.com