Group Planning - Miss Georgiou

Group Planning

My group consists of Danny Wheeler, Alfie Harris and myself. Group meetings are essential to have because it helps in planning our sequence and ensuring that each person's individual ideas are put across. This way, more ideas are developed and better ideas become a result of this and a final idea is agreed. Furthermore, it helps the group be more organised with a clear idea of what needs to be filmed and why. 

In our first group meeting we discussed our different individual narrative ideas. We then combined all three narratives to create a narrative we were all happy and content with. By combining our ideas, we were able to create a narrative which was a lot stronger conventionally than our original individual ones. Therefore, this will increase the success of our thriller sequence as it has more than one viewpoint of it. With all of us being happy with our sequence, it will increase the percentage of people that will enjoy it and like it themselves. After thorough discussion, we decided on a narrative that consists of a girl who is being stalked by a craze man who's intention is to kill her. 

For our next meeting, we came together and had discussions on the following elements: 
Mise-en-scene
Cinematography
Soundtrack
Editing
Target Audience/Age Certificate
Codes and Conventions of a Thriller Film
Research Carried Out/Thriller Film Inspirations
Representation of Characters
We then wrote all of our ideas down to plan for our own sequence and ensure that all individual ideas were taking into account and inputted into our group planning. We aimed to get as many ideas down as possible so that we could narrow them down to our best ones
Here is evidence of our planning of these elements:

We will follow the codes and conventions of a thriller through our planning as we know that we have to in order to make our sequence the best it can be and as successful as possible. Each element has been planned from inspirations from each of our research from previous posts. Therefore, having inspiration from existent thrillers will mean that our thriller opening will be stronger conventionally as we have more knowledge and research on what is expected to be included in a thriller. 

Our next group meeting was to plan editing styles, opening credits and the characters in which we were to include in our sequence. For planning our editing, we constructed a table to list all of the different ideas we had individually came up with. This means that, our ideas were clear and set out in an orderly, organised manner allowing for easy analysis. After looking upon the ideas, we discussed which ones would strengthen the conventionality to the thriller genre and decided which ones would be most appropriate and effective. We decided to go with the use of a dim filter throughout the sequence to create a consistent dark and eerie atmosphere all the way through the sequence. As well as this, we had to think about how we were going to create a tense effect for our montage and so we decided that we would use fast editing by speeding up the clips and also using flashes between clips within the montage as this illustrates clearly that it is a montage of what she is thinking and flashing back to previous events in the sequence. With opening credits, we discussed what font and colour we would like our title to be shown as. This is the most important credit as it is the one that is supposed to attract the audience the most. After some thorough discussion we decided that keeping the credits simple with a black screen for the title was most effective and common within thriller films. We decided to have a sound aswell to emphasise the presence of the title on screen and more impactable on the audience. With the production roles, we decided to graduate them into the sequence in the different shots where a gap for them was existent. The characters in our thriller had to be discussed in detail and so our 3 characters all had to be distinctive to their individual personalities. We created a brainstorm for each character as to how we would like them to be portrayed and how we would achieve this through different characteristics such as body language and costume. For example, Chloe, our student character is dressed in smart uniform to display this occupation.

The next group meeting in which we have was to discuss and plan our group storyboard. To complete the group storyboard we combined our individual storyboard ideas to create a strong conventional storyboard that succeeds the expectation of a typical thriller storyboard. We developed a detailed storyboard that clearly demonstrated the contents of each frame including the actors, editing and sound. For each frame we also drew a sketch of what generally we wanted the scene to look like.

Our next group meeting was to plan our filming schedule and risk assessment. For the filming schedule we discussed the days in which we would all be available to film and planned what we would film on particular days. We resulted in a table that is organised in a way that we all clearly knew the agenda for each filming day. We then discussed what we would do for our risk assessment, and discussed the different risks that are possible to occur. We noted these possible risks down and then wrote how we could resolve and prevent these risks from occurring. This ensures that our filming process would be as safe as possible.     

After this, we filmed our sequence and created an opening sequence rough cut after editing.

Below is a table demonstrating the various group meetings in which we had to ensure that group planning was being kept consistent and up to date: