First Filming Session of Thriller (DIS-CONNECTED)

During the lesson on Thursday with Laura our group finally managed to start filming and I am personally pleased with the amount of work, effort and enthusiasm that was going on during Thursdays lesson. In order to start filming we had to wait for everybody in the class to leave the room and do their own filming; as the class was in the Media studies room that we were to use for filming. We decided to start filming the beginning of our thriller as the person that was to be on the table was not yet decided. The first shot is an extreme close up of a door handle with my hand slowly reaching the handle and opening it, the slowness of my movement was done to create extra tension within the audience. We used this as an opportunity to add in a match cut, showing my character entering from the inside. In the room we switched off the main lights and got a single spotlight from the media departments resources. The use of lighting also helps heighten the sense of unease and fear within the audience as they cannot really see the rest of the room. This first scene took us about 30-45minutes to film as we had loads of retakes due to people walking past etc…

The second scene was another match cut showing me still walking in the room towards a brief case. After this there is a close up on the brief case and an over the shoulder shot so my character is obscuring or impeding the audiences vision of what is in the brief case. After this we finally relieve the audience and show them my character slowly putting on rubber gloves, this was also done very slowly to create tension and an extreme close up was used.
Due to us having to move tables and chairs to get the room fit for filming and waiting for the class to leave the room; precious time was lost. Next lesson we are hoping to get past all of these obstacles swiftly and get straight down to filming.

After this filming session I was thinking about different ways to incorporate different camera angles and shots into our thriller and came to a conclusion that we need to use more different shots such as point of view shots, over the shoulder shots, high and low angle shots to convey status between the characters within the scene. Also when we go to do our filming at King’s Cross I think we need to have a pan across the area to establish where we are and a close up or zoom in of a significant area.

Also in order for our thriller to be the best it can possibly be and reach its full potential we have decided to take the filming equipment out during the week when we don’t have a lesson and we are all free, we will use this filming session to tidy up previous shots we have taken and add new shots where possible.