Rough Draft Of Our Thriller Opening

Kristy Fricker:
Starred as Hannah Warren, filmed the shots of the stalker and edited the clip.

Beth Taylor:
Filmed shots of Hannah Warren (me) and edited the clip.
We both did an equal amount of editing, taking it in turns to have control of the computer. We both came up with different ideas of what scenes we should keep/cut-out, and other ways that we could edit scenes to give certain conotations or make shots shorter. We worked really well as a team and came to decisions together on what we thought would work best and create an opening that would best for-fill the thriller genre.

Beth came up with the brilliant idea of cutting the action of each character closing the door to seem like one scene. We achieved this by cutting the scene where the girl is closing the door part of the way through and adding in what would be the same moment but with the stalker pulling the door behind. As there is a refelection on the glass when the stalker is closing the door, the audience will be disorientated when they first see this. They will then see the stalkers hand as he pulls the door closer shut and will hopefully get the idea that we were trying to achieve - that the stalker and girl are getting closer and closer together. We start by showing them doing some similar things, which then icreases when we see them both walking down the stairs, doing the exact same action. This is then intensified again by the split shot of the girl and the stalker closing the door - not only doing the same action, but also doing it at the same time. The fact that they walk out of the door at the same time, shows that they have both definatley left to meet up and heightens the fear the audience have for the well-being of the girl as the stalker gets closer.

As our opening is supposed to be only two minutes long, and previously its length was double this, we had to try to find ways to cut it down without loosing any importance of the storyline.
We both felt that the opening with the zoom-out from the clock was too long, but too effective and important in the lead-on to the next scene to cut out. I came up with the idea of having a few jumps in the zoom-out to save time inbetween. We cut the scenes at certain intervals so that when we had another jump-zoom the music got to the end of its current pattern each time, which made the zoom-outs match up with the music and together work really effectively.
In-between each shot, we used a blending transition so that the jump seemed more natural and was a lot easier for the audience to view without getting confused - it was much less of a shock to the system and didn't look unnatural.