Ellis's Media Blog

Phone Booth (2002)

A thriller directed by Joel Schumacher, starring Colin Farrell, Forest Whitaker and Kiefer Sutherland. The film involves a young publicist put in danger when a mystery sniper who calls him in a phone booth. The film's reviews are generally positive, and it was a box office hit, with a worldwide gross of $97 million (against a $13 production budget).














Taken (2008)

An action thriller starring Liam Neeson and Maggie Grace. Liam Neeson pays a former CIA agent who sets out to track down his daughter after she is kidnapped, along with her best friend, by a human trafficking service. It grossed more than $226 million, and has gone on to be the first in a trilogy.












The Call (2013)

A crime thriller directed by Brad Anderson, starring Abigail Breslin, Halle Berry and more. Berry plays a 911 operator who is suffering emotionally from being responsible for the death of a teenage girl, and has a chance to save another girl who was kidnapped by the same man. It grossed over $68 million.














The Purge (2013)

A dystopian horror film starring Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey as a family held hostage during 'The Purge', a 12 hour period where all crime is legal. It grossed over $89.3million













Information from Wikipedia and IMBD

We had a short list of possible names for our thriller:
Avalanche
Seige
Pravda

We ended up choosing Pravda because of the double meaning. In Russian it means 'truth', but it's also a communist newspaper in Russia. Considering our sequence is set in Siberia, we decided to go with it.

We wanted a simple font that was different to the standard font that Premier Pro has. After having a look at a few different ones, we went with Baskerville because it looks simple but effective.

After realising we had to re-record the sound, we couldn't edit anything until we had recorded more sounds. We're doing the dialogue and some sounds next Tuesday, and after that we can get on with the editing.

Today we went into the studio with the Shotgun Mic to record the sounds of the bed and the cupboard. Once finished, we went up to the suite and put in the sounds during the rest of the lesson. I found it easier than I thought it would be to sync the sounds, and I'm hoping the rest will go the same way.

This week we went back into the editing suite to look back at our footage and start to edit a rough copy. Matt reminded us of how to use the Adobe Premier Pro editing software, and how to find our rushes and label which ones we liked. We found the cut we liked the best, and because it's all one shot, we only needed to trim the start and end. Unfortunately, we found out that the microphone wasn't attached to the camera properly, so what we ended up with was the sound from the camera which is lower quality and you can hear a bass rumbling throughout the shot.

1. What kind of institution might distribute your media product and why?

To begin with I looked into some films that had similar storylines or styles to our thriller.

Taken (2008)

Our whole film idea is similar to Taken, where a girl is kidnapped from under a bed by Albanian abductors. It was distributed by 20th Century Fox, one of the 'big 6'  distributors, in LA, California. They've distributed some of the highest grossing films such as Avatar, Titanic and Star Wars to name a few. They produce high grossing films with high budgets. 20th Century Fox would be our ideal distributors because they are a powerful company and could provide us with the opportunity to be distributed worldwide with a huge audience to create maximum profit. We'd want a large amount of advertising to get interest in our thriller as well, and 20th Century Fox could do that.




Die Hard (1988)

Again, our idea has some shared elements with Die Hard, involving terrorism but in a company building instead of a hotel/hostel, hoping to teach them a lesson for their greed and taking money from them, with terrorism as a distraction. This is also distributed by 20th Century Fox, suggesting that they would be suitable for distributing our thriller.








In reality our thriller is likely to be more low budget, so 20th Century Fox may not be suitable for distribution. Tristar would be more likely to do it because they're lower budget but still have the opportunity to get our thriller to a wide audience. It would mean that gross is potentially smaller and the audience not as large, but they still have some power in the UK film industry and have had success with previous films such as The Call (2013). The Blair Witch Project (Artisan Entertainment) is an example of a film that had a lower budget of $60,000 but grossed over $248.6 million. Maybe YouTube would distribute our product because they have low budget films but have huge opportunities to create a large audience and lots of advertising as so many people use the site, with 3.25 billion hours of videos watched a month and 4,950,000,000 videos watched a day.



2. Who would be the audience for your media product?

Taken is rated PG-13, and I think our thriller would be rated similar because the intro is very violent, with death on screen and distress, so would be unsuitable for very young audiences. Adults over age 30 may not be very interested in our thriller becuase of the violent themes and young cast so I think it may be more suitable for older teenagers and young adults, ages 15-30.


       

On Monday 16th January we spent the day shooting our thriller. It took us most of the morning and a bit of the afternoon trying to get it right. The set was perfect, and the lighting made it look more realistic as we had two windows with light shining through (one quite pink/neon and the other fairly yellow).

Our two extremists and the set with lighting

Luke and Katie were there on the day helping us to get the right shot and to ensure that our thriller was the best it could be. Our actors - Callum and Louisa - were extremely helpful and had actually learned the script we provided them with, making the process more efficient.

Passports and plane tickets for props

The set with lighting

We started off by rehearsing a few times to get the timing right and to get it as natural as possible. Once we'd sorted out the look of the set and the rest of the props we started to film. After realising that cutting at a certain point would be difficult for continuity, we chose to do it all in one take. It took a few times to get it right but eventually we got the take we liked the most, as well as some others that could work too.

Picture from a run through

The props for our set (minus the bed and table)

Our only issue is that we didn't know how to do the gunshot wound and make it look effective without a good make-up artist. It would also take ages to get rid of it / clean it between each take so we decided to do most of that in after effects when editing. Instead, before Callum got shot, Louisa splattered fake blood on her face and turned away from the camera slightly. When he was shot, she flinched towards the camera and showed the blood as if it'd sprayed on her face.

A photo of the start of the thriller

The monitor showing the shot

I was mainly in charge of using the mic to get the sound by pointing it at where the sound was coming from. I also helped to direct a little and give input but Elena was good at getting our idea across so she did the majority of it, and it was better to have one person rather than four as it would have been muddled. Later on, after lunch, we recorded some extra sounds (foley): bathroom background noise, bathroom door opening and closing, wardrobe door opening and closing, Russian extremists speaking in the corridor and their footsteps in the corridor and on the wooden floor.

Me with the mic

Over the weekend before the shoot I made some extra props to dress the set, and brought in the ones I had at home (the bag and shoes). They were to try and set the scene even more, but even if they weren't actually seen in detail, they still added something to the set. For the keyring I took the photo out of an old keyring and replaced it with a picture of a landmark in Moscow. For the book I chose a photo of a Trans-Siberian Handbook from the internet and cut it to size on photoshop. I printed it and stuck it to a book I already had to look like the cover.
Here are some pictures of the props I made:

We also had to contact the make-up artist for our gunshot wound and the prop department to source some guns. We did get a reply from the prop department, however the make-up artist did not reply.

Our shoot for Monday 16th January has been confirmed and we emailed our actors to remind them of what they had to wear and find out what they didn't have so we could get it for them.

I did some research into different possible locations in the area. YHA Holmbury is a youth hostel, however it is too modern and too clean for what we're looking for,but it does have the kind of flooring we want and enough space in some rooms to film. It is quite expensive at around £30 for a room big enough so may no be the best option.

    


Another option is YHA Tanner's Hatch. It is slightly cheaper at around £15, however we cannot guarantee that we'll get a room with space under the bed and with a cupboard. It also doesn't have the flooring we want, and may still be too clean.


 



There are benefits to being in the studio:

1. We don't have to pay to use it
2. No time is taken up by travelling to the location
3. We can get the exact set up and look we want with props, colours etc.
4. There are no time constraints where we have to be out by a certain time
5. There are no people around for us to disturb or to disturb us
6. We can make sure there's enough room for us to film

I had a look at different shops that sold the kind of trousers we needed for the Russians to wear as they didn't have any of their own. On Sports Direct I found two pairs of working trousers that would work, and had a look at the prices. If we can't find any others that our cast can use or borrow, we will get these as they're not too expensive.