Over the weekend I watched 'Teaching Mrs Tingle',which is in the dark comedy thriller genre starring Katie Holmes and Helen Mirren released in 1999. The film follows a trio of seniors who must prove their innocence to their vindictive history teacher, who accuses them of cheating their exams. I found the film to be quite comedic in some elements with an unexpected ending and is definitely targeted for young teenagers as there is a sense of relatability with the characters in high school. I also found the editing quite significant as well as the sound motif as when the group of friends seemed to be in situations with danger there was quick cuts and fast paced shots showing how they had a lack of control in the situation.Furthermore there was non-diegetic when the fear of getting caught in Mrs Tingle's House.
In the psychological thriller it is very common that establishing shorts are used,e.by adding this certain type of shot the audience are more aware of the surroundings of the movie and can help create a pre-set atmosphere to forebode. Below are examples of films that have used establishing shots and I have researched the films that are within the same genre, just to establish our opening as other real life media products.
Currently we are towards the end of editing as we are just making the changes that we received from the class feedback as it helps us produce the best final product possible. Also we are getting more audience feedback from a larger group of people e.g teachers, students who don't take media and adults.
Following the feedback we received we have decided that it would be best to make the establishing shot that we currently have longer rather than add another establishing shot in. We have opted for this choice as we feel that adding a establishing shot will not fit in with our opening as we could have easily added a shot of leaves or flowers but from a critical perspective it would have nothing to do with our opening,so this is our justification of this.
Following the feedback on our film opening, somebody had pointed out to our attention that when our actress was wiping away tears from her eyes that you could not really see clearly that tears were present and to clarify this we wanted to put greater emphasis of how her state of mine is slowly deteriorating and demonstrate the effects of this through the imaginary tears just in the same way the blood that has stained her hands.
Below is an overview of the elements in our opening that we could improve on and add to the whole viewing experience that the class and Ms Foster suggested.
add demonic/sinister laughter when the flashbacks occur
pacing on the last shot at the end is too long
adapt the titles and use real horror genre titles.
longer establishing shot or add another establishing shot.
longer black screen after production company to signal the start of the film opening.
After we had finished editing our opening we had a a final viewing from the class to get some criticism and feedback that could help us improve our opening even further.We gained quite a lot of feedback and recorded the whole process.
Over the weekend I watched Lion which stars Dev Patel,and follows the journey of Saroo,the male protagonist who is adopted by an Australian couple after he gets lost in Calcutta. Years later, he struggles with his memories of his birth family, and decides to begin a search for them.
Something I found useful when relating back to our opening was the use of lighting at the very beginning when young Saroo is away from his mother and brother. The lighting is evidently dark particularly when he is alone on the train and in complete desertion.Also it seems very shadow-like and places greater emphasis on his lack of knowledge of his location. Even though the genre of the film is polar opposite for our opening it is an effective technique used and in terms of our opening the lighting is very dim, which is inspired by this film.
We have decided to only have one main production company which is called ' Hatchi Production" and have it as a video featuring Rachel's dog Maisie,who will be howling. The inspiration came from the production company 'Metro Goldwyn Mayer' as they have the iconic lion roaring.
For our opening we wanted to choose a font that fitted well with our whole opening and as it is centered around a young girl and because the concept of the opening is to be a little unsettling and to present the girl's anxiety, we therefore wanted a font that was untidy and messy, and resembled child-like writing. The site that our font was from was;
http://www.dafont.com/
and the name of the chose font was called 'My handwriting'.
The video below aided in customising the font panel on iMovie to the specific font that we wanted.
