The Shining - Stephanie Brand

In todays lesson we watched a Thriller Movie called "The Shining" by Alfred Hitchcock .
We were asked to look at what features the movie has that makes it suspenseful. Where were asked to look at three examples and for each write down what happens in the scene and how it is suspenseful.
In the beginning of the film we are shown from a Birds Eye View, the scenery, is a car driving off to the mountains and while we are watching this there is a soundtrack playing, like a heartbeat sound which gives the audience an immediate feeeling that we are going to be kept in suspense troughout the movie and this keeps the audience in constact contact with what we are watching. Alfred Hitchcock tends to always give the audience a big idea of what might happen in the movie before the actual characters know themselves what is going on.
A second example of how the director keeps the audience under suspense is when Danny, the little boy is playing around the hotel in the long corridors, it keeps the audience in suspense because of sounds that are playing in the background and when things start to appear the sounds become louder! The fact that it takes place in an big empty hotel emphasises the fact that something out of the ordinary is obviously going to happen. Also when a tennis ball appears while the little boy is playing with the trucks along the corridor really scares the audience because the tennis ball appears from nowhere and when Danny gets up to see where it came from, room 237 is open and this makes the audience tense as we know that he is not meant to go inside the room.

All trouhtout the movie we are lept in constant suspense, and most of it is all because of the sounds that are you and the constanst repetition of scenes, like when the little boy plays in the long empty corridors by himself, its obvious to the audience that something is bound to happen.

Stephanie Brand - Thriller - 3rd lesson

In our final lesson working on our clip, we arranged our clips in the order we wanted them to be in. We spent a long time making sure the clips were positioned in the right place, made sure the timing was right and we also added added some transitions that made it seem less obvious where the sudden cuts in the film had been made. After the clip was looking the way we wanted it to, we then cut out the original sound from the clip and were introduced to the sounds clips that we could add instead of the original sound. The clips that we added made the clip sound and look much more thrilling.
We then moved our movie clip back into final cut pro and saved it. We also had to convert the movie clip into a quicktime file so that we could upload it into our blog.
The result of our clip was really good. Overall our clip came out even better than we expected, it was fun to work in a group and learn how to use the cameras and final cut pro.
I learnt that depending on what order the clips are in and what the sound clip is it can change the whole meaning of the clip.

Stephanie Brand - Thriller - 1st lesson

In the first lesson we were put into groups and were given cameras to take pictures and make a story board of how we could record a "Thrilling" movie clip of someone reading a newspaper. In our groups we decided to record one of us girls in the group reading a newspaper in the toilet and make it look as thrilling end exciting as we could. We then made our way to the toilets and gradually started to take different pictures to show what kind of shots we were going to use, medium shot, extreme close up etc. Also to show what angels the shots were going to be in.