Creativity

Due to this being our first creative activity, our opening two minute followed a conventional storyline of a young victim, being followed by the protagonist unaware. However, we did use techniques to add a unique selling point on our opening two minutes. For example, she was kidnapped in day light, walking home from school after just talking to her friends. This showed to the audience that this could potentially happen to anyone and emphasises the victim’s vulnerability as the young girl had just finished school. Whereas it other films were conventional with a dark alley in the middle of the night mostly when the victim is intoxicated after attending a party. This therefore allowed the audience to put themselves in the characters shows feeling sympathy for her. Therefore, we did include twists to our opening two minutes but the disadvantages of it is that it wasn’t a new rejuvenated film that nobody had ever seen before.

Due to the main task of our blogposts, which was to research and analyse opening two minutes in depth, from the beginning we knew we thrived to do a horror. Therefore, starting straight away we analysed this genre more than the others, so our group could get a deeper understanding into the conventions of horrors; what each opening two minutes could provide for the audience. This was successful as we could understand the type of clothing the victim would be wearing, compared to the protagonist, where music was used to build suspense and tension, and the types of shots horrors used to create that eerie atmosphere that got their audience on the edge of their seat. For example, close up shots to represent their emotion and high angle shots making the characters seem vulnerable. This allowed each person in our group to take notes on what they thought was the most important aspect of a horror genre, and at the end we put the notes together and then stated to incorporate this into an opening two minutes, which we found was extremely successful.

Adobe Premier Elements allowed us to add features which could make our opening two minutes look more skilled. For example, sound is a key feature in an opening two minutes. If there was no sound the audience would be unaware of what emption to feel at what time. Therefore, we researched un-copyright music and got listed a different soundtracks that suited our genre. This is because we got asked what feels we wanted to see in our soundtrack where we chose: Mysterious, Suspenseful, and Eerie. Adobe allowed us to add in these soundtracks wherever we wanted to in our opening two minutes, clipping and extending them to fit into the piece. This was efficacious as it allowed us to create a climax for the audience, letting them know something was about to come, successfully following the conventions of the genre to frighten to audience; create adrenaline. It also allowed us to include titles which again is needed, so the audience know the title of the film. After watching YouTube tutorials, which was a great hep to us as we were new to Adobe, we got a much better understanding of not only how to use it but what more it has to offer. The first thing I learnt whilst watching the clip is the three different types of titles that were ranging from default still, default roll and default crawl. After giving definitions of them all it helped me decide which one I wanted to choose when editing my film. After this I then learnt how to change the font, size and spacing of the title to make the piece more appealing and appropriate for your type of genre. Here I would use the font I have chosen which is Felix Titling as our group found that it was most successful with the genre. I then learnt how to place this title onto the chosen background getting the final look of our title. I also learnt about a variety of transitions such as: cross dissolve, centre split, cube spin, flip over and many more. After this I then learnt how to apply this by taking your clips and trimming off each one allowing the transition to be smoothly cut. The next step would be to pick your chosen transition and place it in the centre where these two clips meet, then adjusting the transitions lengths to suit your film and that is the final of how to add transitions successfully. This would allow the audience to benefit from a high quality piece, where the shots seamlessly cut from one to the next allowing jump starts to be avoided which could make the opening two minutes look amateur.

By researching other opening two minutes we found that close ups were used on the victim to show her vulnerably and her facial expressions of fear, clearly allowing the audience to sympathise with her. As well as this high angle shots were used to take the power away from her again emphasising how alone she is.

Last year we quickly adapted to Adobe and lots of research on watching YouTube tutorials allowed us to understand what we need to do. However, this year titles were much more crucial as it was a trailer. Therefore, we developed much more into one piece which was more challenging. For example, we were able to sell the trailer and increase popularity of the trailer over a global scale by including hashtags, which is very effective in this society as social media is such a large distribution in everyone’s life and it is free, therefore is a successful way to advertise a trailer. As well as this we were able to explore in more detail of what Adobe had to offer by us having to make our own production titles. We browsed our own photos for the production titles, put this into a document on Adobe and incorporated the effects: Glow soft, Additive Dissolve, and Fade in and out of black making them look practised.