Note to the Examiner

Hi, may name is Ollie and i have been working in a group to produce this film. I took the lead on editing which i have never done before and i have really enjoyed the experience. Below is our film "CLOSE CUT", the film is about a paranoid schizophrenic with an obsesion of teenaged girls hair. His objective is to collect the hair and addmire it in his enclosed little room.
Thanks for your  time hope you enjoyed!

Evaluation question 1 - "In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products"

We have used many developments from other films. We liked getting inspired form other films. The main one that is obvious is that main story, we got inspired form the film "a girl on the train". The main plot to the story is a stalker cutting hair, so we decided to research into stalker films and obsession we cam across a film called fear, this is another film that inspired us.

Our entire piece only took place in two locations and these were the train station and a dark storage room which made it look like a little office room for the stalker to keep is evidence. the Store room looked very dark and gloomy we took inspiration form an opening sequence form the TV series a series on unfortunate events.

We edited a shot to make it look like CCTV footage, it went really well, we got inspired form the paranormal activity movies which is mainly filmed on CCTV footage and cameras.







The uses of camera in our piece is mainly inspiration especially the murder board scenes as we have done shots that have been taken from the TV series " a series of unfortunate events.

STORYBOARD FINAL DRAFT

This is our final draft of the story board

SHOT LIST

Here is the Shot list produced by Alex Newbold, one of our group mates.

Evaluation question 7 - "looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?"

When looking back on the preliminary task, I am able to see how much we have improved as a group. When we were filming our first task we were lacking the knowledge of these new editing and filming techniques.

We filmed our preliminary task at school. This didn't help as we didn't get to use as many locations as we could of. also time was a big thing we didn't have a lot of time to do it. As we were only able to film in the school we were faced with the problem of a lot of background noise due to other classes in the proximity. This did effect the finished piece as we weren't able to edit the sound out due to lack of experience.


Another problem we have noticed now as we have the knowledge is the lack of creativity with shots. This is a problem we had as we didn't have the experience back then but looking back over it we can now reflect on it and creatively think of better shots to do for the future.

Comparing our preliminary task to our final opening sequence we 100% notice one big thing at the very start. The sound, we were only able use the dietetic sound of the the dialogue and background noise. We weren't able to use any non-dietetic sound such as music or sound effects. It didn't really make the piece an exceptional piece. Where as in the final opening sequence where it had music and sound effects it really brought the piece out to be a good piece as the non-dietetic sound really made the piece. For example the long shots of the stalker in the piece has dark gloomy music to make thew audience realize that is the stalker and he is the protagonist.

Overall i feel like i have gained a lot of knowledge and picked up a lot of techniques to do with editing and camera work.

Evaluation question 6 - "What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product"

I have never used blogger before my A levels, i have never even heard of it. I now feel that I know how to use it well, i am very confident. I had fun editing my layout and design a blog page. Blogger is a very useful page as it can help people see what you have been up to during your process of the event which for us is making a thriller.

I have used Premier Pro before as i have it in my house so i knew how to use it when we started using it. i Feel that premier pro is a very useful way to edit clips/shots. It is very easy to pick up, however i have learnt new things on the software that i didn't know before such as editing the sound on clips. i didn't really know how to edit the sound on clips before but now i am confident with the software a lot more.

We edited our product on an apple computer. At home i have a windows PC and not an apple. i have used apple before however i only like to use them, after using an apple mac for a few week si do now feel a lot more confident with using a apple mac however i still prefer to use windows.

Evaluation question 5 - "How did you attract/address your audience?"

The main way we attracted audience to our product is through editing, the story line and characters. The editing in the piece was short and fast past making the audience on edge, the CCTV part is very well done, making that shot actually look like CCTV footage making the audience on edge.
The story line is very realistic as it is based on a true even, so we are basically showing the audience a true story through film which with me would want to make me watch it to see what is happening. We found an article in the newspaper about a man cutting girls hair on trains, we developed on this making it into a film we also made it so that it is at the train station no in a train.
We used characters to attract the audience as they may not be able to relate to the victims but they can feel for them. The audience are mostly teenagers and the victims are teenagers making the audience feel for them.