Film Production Diary

The Journey

This page is a diary of the journey that we went through to make the final thriller film. We went through many stages and on this page is where it will be shown at every stage. It will explain what went on and how this benefited us and our film. 

We started off by planning our film by drawing what we imagined onto a storyboard. The storyboards consists of different camera angles, the sound and what will be happening in this scene. 

This is the final storyboard of what our film should end up looking like and the sequence of which it should end as. 


The next step of creating our thriller was to create an Ident which would fit into this as our production company, the name we came up with was, 'Ellipsis Productions'. We made the Ident in Final Cut express. We then searched for music that would fit our Ident and which would potentially fit a scene of our film. We done some research on this and we got in contact with the people who made the music. They agreed that we was able to use the music. We had to add the beginning titles, we added the Director in with the Ident to make it more effective. We then planned to add all of the other titles in to the beginning scene to the film. 

We then started to film our first scene. The setting of our film was very different to how we planned it. We planned it as the woman was walking down a dark road at night and then gets captured. We didn't really like the thought of filming at night because we would need a lot of lights in able for the cameras to capture the action. So instead of this we ended up filming our first scene in an alley which looked very isolated and suspicious.



Due to the result of our filming of this first scene, we came to a decision to make sure we done it again. The reason why we thought to do it again was because it did not look realistic and the weather was sunny as we wanted a more dull atmosphere. 


We then went and filmed again, making the sequences shorter and using much more camera angles to make it look realistic. It was raining on the day that re-done this scene which we was very happy about as rain shows a sign of sadness and suited the atmosphere very much. We was very happy with this outcome and we decided to use this in our film. 

For the main part of our film we was really struggling about where to set this and where we would get all of the props and actors from. In the end we achieved all of the things we didn't think we would have. Thirteen of our friends showed up in order to be in this film which we was very pleased about. We set this scene in the Robert Clack drama rooms instead of the All Saints one as the lights were much better. We then borrowed a table, cloth and a poker set from people we knew which really set the atmosphere of the casino. We was very happy about this, however the battery of the camera went when we was filming the last part. As the battery went we had to charge it for about 10 minutes whilst everyone prepared themselves. 

We looked back at the last part of the film where we was rushing due to the camera losing battery and we really wasn't happy with the camera angles. There was no time left to film this again, we were unhappy about the shots but we added it transitions to make it a little bit more effective.

As we was about to publish our film, we was told that it was too long. This caused loads of confusion as many scenes had to be deleted. The only way that we could have made it much shorter was by deleting the first scene where the girl was taken, and put it in towards the end as a flashback. In the end of all of this it made our film look so much better, it also made more sense too. We realised that this was probably for the best for our film as many scenes were longer than they had to be. Trimming down some scenes of our film really helped and the outcome was at the correct time. 

Evaluation Question 7

by lizziegrantx

Evaluation Question 6

Evaluation Question 5

Created with Padlet

Evaluation Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

To find out which age range was most into Thrillers and which age range would be the best to focus our film on, we carried out a survey. The survey asked people ages 16-40+ and we asked them what genre of films they enjoy watching the most. The answers came back to us and we found our that the age range 16-20 was the age group that most enjoyed watching thrillers. By knowing this, we then knew how to plan out our thriller as we knew who the audience was going to roughly be. This also gave us more information as it told us that we had to aim for a thriller that would attract younger people as it was the most popular age range. 

During the planning of our film we had to find out who the audience would be for our thriller in prior to class. For us as a group we decided that it should be acceptable for all classes. This is because our thriller does consist of a range of classes which may attract some specific people as they can relate to the type of class. Overall we decided that we are not going to carry out a survey for class as we thought it was not significant towards our thriller film. 

We wanted to know what the audience would be like towards our thriller in prior to gender. We linked our survey and research back to the Vox pop that we done and audience feedback to find out which gender liked thrillers the most. After we took the survey we found out that the main gender who are mainly attracted to thrillers are males. However, the results were not far apart which means that females also like thrillers. 

To start off with, the name of our thriller is very questionable to the auidence. It was made to engage them to question what 'The Game' is about. Our thriller was made to be different and very unique compared to other thriller films. We done this because we believed that suspense should only be made within a particular scene and not throughout the whole film which made our film very unique. The storyline of our film is very modern and it relates to the generation that we are living in at the moment. We done this so we could attract people as it is very common that they would know about these situations. We targeted many young people as these films are mostly seen in cinemas or at home in which young people are more familiar with. 

After carrying out audience feedback we not only gathered good points but we also gathered a lot of weak points. All of the feedback that was given to us was taken seriously into consideration as it could give us tips for future references. One of the weak points given to us was that they found it hard to read the credits. This is because the credits were shown in white which dissolved out which could have blended into the background where the film was going on. However the audience also gave us positive feedback by saying that our film was very constant which brought our thriller more into the real life. They also said that the beginning of our thriller was very engaging which attracted the audience and wanted them to keep on watching. Another point they made was that the music used was set to the young generation which was very clever as the age range was our priority. The music was also set to be different from all other thrillers which they said was very unique. Overall we gained a lot of positive feedback which gave us a boost as it implicates that this age range that we set it to be attracted to enjoyed it very much. 

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 1

Audience Feedback