One Step Ahead: Finished AS Thriller opening title sequence

Evaluation task 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to your final product?

Evaluation Task 6: What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing this product?

My finished, annotated opening title sequence, 'One Step Ahead'.

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

One Step Ahead: Finished AS Thriller opening title sequence

Editing Evaluation

On starting the editing on Monday 2nd March, myself, Tyler and Kingsley opened up Adobe Premier Pro and began to sort through all of our rushes, however instead of collecting the ones we wanted into bins we dragged them all into sequences of action. Once this was done, we started to edit our shots together into one smooth and understandable story. After having our shots cut together it was still a rather rough version, therefore Kingsley went over it shot by shot so that each transition was smooth and made sense to the audience.

By Tuesday's lesson we were ready to begin to trim our thriller down in time from 4 minutes 20 seconds to 2 minutes 20 seconds, which we succesfully did. We did this by going through our thriller shot by shot once again, and trimming them down, cutting out excess things that we did not need. This not only put our thriller into the desired running time but it also helped to create a faster paced opening title sequence. Having previously booked the editing suite from 6:30pm until 9:00pm me and Tyler continued editing after dinner, joined by Kingsley shortly afterwards. This allowed us a huge chunk of extra time to get ahead with our editing.

Almost the entire two and a half hours was spent choosing music and ambient sounds to suit our thriller. The music that we wanted had to be slow that exactly met the pace of our thrillers story. The sound had to be creepy and with a slight element of building supsense. We found these by searching through over a hundred different sounds and songs including ambient sounds, which we slowed way down and placed a reverb on to enable it to sound just right. We also dug through many different suspense sounds, a few of which we used however I felt that they were too clichè and not what our thriller needed. In terms of the background sounds we kept all of the background sounds except when our character is packing up his bag and when Ted and Adam are speaking to the receptionist. I also feel that the moment where Simon lifts up the ceiling title (0.43 seconds) and the music blends perfectly in time to the tile being moved works very well and highlights the significance of the hard drive that has been kept hidden in the ceiling. Following this we began to add our titles.

We used Copperplate font and placed a fade in and out on each title, but even watching the titles that we had done, it was apparent that they were still not as good as we could make them. Therefore Kingsley went through each title and places the insignificant words in smaller font and the names in a larger font so that they looked like this. Our main problem came when we had to decide on a name for our thriller, the first idea we had was for, 'Hubris' however we felt that wasn't fitting for our thriller, therefore we decided on 'One Step Ahead'.

Overall, the editing process for me was interesting throughout and an experience that I greatly enjoyed, however as we worked on it more and more I began to become irritated and bored of doing the editing. The proccess on the whole was one that taught me that I much prefer the directors side of things, and giving direction to Kinglseys and Tyler who were doing more of the editing side of things.

Evaluation task 4: Part 2- My Target Audience

As you can see in the video above, I have gone around the country and interviewed a few people all from different places and backgrounds. All of these people fit into either my secondary or primary target audience and it was useful to see what films they had all previously seen.

The only problem that I encountered in doing this was that within the time I had, I struggled to find woman that were willing to be filmed.

I used my IPhone 4S to film the interviews and later used IMovie to edit the shots together, to add music, photos and annotations. All photos were taken myself apart from the Football club crests, for example the shot of my dad outside the Liver Building and of myself in the Cavern Club, where The Beatles began, both places being in Liverpool.

The sound in the video came out rather quiet in places so in order of appearance we have:

'The last film I saw was American Sniper, my name is Alex, I'm 19 and I'm from Stoke-On-Trent.'

'Hi I'm Jade, I'm from Stoke, I'm 20 and the last film I saw was Fifty Shades of Grey.'

'Jordan, 21, last film I saw, Inbetweeners 2.'

'My names Gary, I'm 29 and the last film I saw was American Sniper and I'm from Liverpool, Croxteth.'

'Hi, my names Motil, I'm 30, I'm French, the last time I went to cinema was to see Batman: The Dark Knight Rises.'

'My names Ellena, I'm 18. I'm from Sanbach, Cheshire and the last film I saw at the cinema was Taken 3.'

'Hello I'm Nick, I'm 16 from Guildford and the last film I saw was Taken 3.'

'Hello my name is Martin. I'm 51. And the last film that I saw at the cinema was Interstellar.'


The Music in the video is 'We didn't start the fire' by Billy Joel, 'Penny Lane' by The Beatles, 'Waterloo' by ABBA and 'Hey Ya!' by OutKast