Group planning - Miss Georgiou

In my group are Jessica Day and Ryan Samuels and we all have to do our regular group meetings as this can be very good for group members to get their ideas across for our opening sequence or we could elevate certain ideas so that our film seems like much more of a conventional thriller film. We talk about how these ideas can be incorporated into our film and how we can explore the different micro elements that can also be incorporated into the opening sequence.

In our first meeting we discussed the narrative of the sequence, we had all made our own narratives and had exchanged each one to each other to see what was the most conventional of the narrative ideas and Jessica's seemed to us all to be the most conventional narrative out of the lot as it had all the small elements like the setting being a forest, a hidden identity for the antagonist and a blonde female victim. We didn't go into much detail about inspirations but me and Ryan had agreed that our favourite thriller film was se7en as it very conventional to the thriller genre. We had agreed as well that the mood and tone of the start of the sequence will be calm but then it would shift to a more contrasting tone.

In our next meeting we then had to make several different A3 pieces of paper of planning that we were going to use for our film when we came round to making it. The fist A3 piece we outlined every element, so camera shots, mise-en-scene, sound and so on, to a basic degree so that when it came to planning these all individually, the elements that is, we could look back and go into more detail into each specific element later on. With each element we had to use techniques from that element that would make the use of it conventional, so for example, hand held camera movement for cinematography will be used to show the dysfunctional scene at hand which would be conventional to the thriller genre.

In our next group meeting we discussed mise-en-scene, for iconography the most important thing we added on there was the weapon we wanted the antagonist to be wielding which is a knife as they are more conventional to the thriller genre, plus the other characters like Cathryn would be using bags or phones, but they are not that important. Lighting and colours were dark and low key as these represent the dark themes behind the film and helps foreshadow horrible intentions that the antagonist will carry out later in the films narrative. the setting of the piece was agreed that it would be a forest as it can get very dark in the forest very quickly and is a conventional thriller setting. We also agreed that the antagonists positioning would always be higher or seem higher than Cathryn so it suggests that she is weaker or has less authority than the antagonist who always seems to be higher to the audience. We also discussed the body language of the antagonist and Cathryn, the antagonist would seem strong, however Cathryn would seem fragile.

For the next meeting we had to decide on the cinematography in our piece this meant we looked at a range of shots, angles and movements that we would want to incorporate into our scene. Without a doubt we all agreed that there should be a hand held camera movement in the scene to show the panic in the scene. I said that we should have point of view of the killer as this would show the audience his perspective but also develop the mysteriousness of the character further which creates enigma for the audience, they thought that this would be a good idea. We all agreed at least one shot of Cathryn would be a high angle of her to make her seem smaller to the audience, and we also said the opposite for the antagonist(low angle) to make him seem bigger.

Moving forward to the next meeting we had to discuss editing styles, this was definitely our hardest one as editing is quite hard to plan out before making the film, it makes it easier by planning it as when we have all our footage we can then edit it and because we have already planned our edits it won't be too hard or long. However in all our storyboards we have used the editing technique of fading out after a scene is done, the reason we have done this is because it shows a passing of time, and in our narrative the character Cathryn has quite a bit of a walk to go on her own and a fade gets across to the audience that quite a lot of time has faded. We also agreed the edits would be slow to convey the mood and the pacing of the opening sequence, as the audience would think it is a calm atmosphere being built.

For our next meeting we had to discuss the characters in our piece, this was relatively easy as we only had to talk in detail about 2 characters and their relevance in our opening sequence which was Cathryn and the Antagonist. For Cathryn our group decided she would be about the same age as our target audience, so around 16 years old, and would be a student still going to school. Cathryn is a woman that is stereotypical to the thriller genre as women are normally the victim or the person in danger, therefore Cathryn is conventional to the thriller genre. The antagonist can only be identified as male, no name or age or background is given, our group thought this would create enigma for the audience as this character could be anyone in the narrative which puts the audience on edge as they don't know who it could be.

After that meeting we came back to discuss the sound that will be used in our piece. We all firmly agreed that there should be a use of non-diegetic sound of eerie music as this would put the audience on edge as they would then think something bad is going to happen. our group also thought that a use of offscreen sound of leaves being crunched or a stick breaking would be conventional as it gives the impression that someone is following Cathryn but because Cathryn and the audience cannot see the thing that made the noise it builds up a relationship between the character and the audience as they are both in the same frame of mind at this point.

In our next meeting we looked at the opening credits of our film by taking influence from David Fincher's se7en by looking at that films opening credits sequence and we found that hand written fonts look more creepy than normal fonts. We also liked the fact that the music in the background that was playing is especially creepy and eerie for the audience that it gets to the point of it being unsettling, anyway we all had to go and see if we could create an opening credits sequence that could be as eerie as se7en's opening credits sequence, this was a challenging task but we did manage to do a good opening credits sequence for our film.

Group meetings and discussions were important as it gave us all a chance to know where we were with the whole project, it was a chance for us all to get a better understanding of what to do and what we will do when it came to filming. It was important as we could even suggest new ideas for the narrative that could make the production more conventional than the one we had previously, as well as helping us create new ideas over the whole production.

My relationship with the group was good, at first I thought it would be quite awkward as i was new but they were nice to me and I fit in well. However the relationship between Ryan and Jess is distracting to say the least, so i have to sit in between them so Jess doesn't get annoyed most of the time. I have to say that we do get the work done and we do all have ideas on the films narrative and how to film it.