Almost finished film opening

Our film opening must be finished by the end of the week so we have been finalising our voice over and music and have almost finished it now. In our last lesson we editing some of the music that was on our previous draft and made the bird noise quieter as it was quite over powering and made it sound quite fake. We also faded the music together more so it had more of a flow to it and sounded better. We also deleted the clips that were put in of Charlotte at the end in the mirror so that it ends on just Charlotte walking down the path as this looks more effective.
We just have to make a few more changes to our music by making it a bit quieter as the voice over is sometimes drowned out by the music at points and then this will hopefully be our final edit of our coursework.

This is the draft of our film with the music and voiceover put together:

Background music

After recording our voice over and putting it to our film we realised that it did not fill up our film and we had really big gaps that we needed to figure out a way to fill. We decided to make some fast tension music to put in the background throughout our film.
We used garage band so that it was not copyrited and then tried to fit it to our film to make it fit.
This is our next draft of our film opening with the music included.

Script for our voiceover

Policewoman (Charlotte): This is PC Smith interviewing Mrs.Richardson concerning the disappearance of her daughter Leyla -. Time is 12:43.

Policewoman (Charlotte): Mrs. Richardson, when was the last time you saw or had contact with your daughter?

Mother (Aimie): She was at home yesterday, we had a cup of tea and lunch together. Just like we always do.

Policewoman (Charlotte): What was her mood like?


Mother (Aimie): Well she's a typical teenager, how do you think her mood was?!

Policewoman (Charlotte): Did she say or do anything that you consider out of the ordinary?

Mother (Aimie): She was on the phone for a long time, probably to that boyfriend of hers, and she wasn't paying me enough attention. I wanted her to stay in with me but she stormed out. That was the last time I saw her.

Policewoman (Charlotte): Is there anyone that you know of that would have a desire to harm your daughter?

Mother (Aimie): No. Maybe you should be talking to her boyfriend, not me.

Policewoman (Charlotte): Why? What was he like?

Mother (Aimie): I didn't get to meet him. She never let me.

Policewoman (Charlotte): What about her friends?

Mother (Aimie): I only really met Sarah Underwood and Stephen Land, but they haven't been to the house in months.

Policewoman (Charlotte): Do you know if she is still in close contact with them?

Mother (Aimie): No, like I said, she never told me anything like normal daughters should.

Voice over

During this week we re recorded our voice over to finalise it and make it a bit longer. We used Chrlotte as the police officer and me as the mother because it was the eaisest and convenient situation.

We have also edited our voice over to distort the surname of the victim, similar to that of Plan B in his song Suzanne. We also put more effects over it to make it sound eery and mysterious. We timed all of the parts of the voice over to fit our film and realised that we do not have enough to fit. We decided that we should make some kind of sound track to fill the gaps and used garage band to add sounds and melodies together to create some background noise for inbetween bits of the voice over. We just now need to move the music and voice over from garage band over to imovie and make it all fit in together with our film.

Evaluation of my 2 minute film coursework

This is my evaluation of our 2 minute film and the final part of my coursework. I enjoyed doing this peice because it was interesting to look back on how we have progessed from our preliminary task to our final film and how far we have come. I think I've learnt a lot from this course and from doing this evaluation I have seen just how much I have gained from the work.

Media - Evaluation

What's eating Gilbert Grape

I just watched the film "What's eating Gilbert Grape" with Johnny Depp and Leonardio Dicaprio and really enjoyed it. I had heard a lot about the film and how good it was and it lived up to all the expectations as Leonaro Dicaprio and Johnny Depp played their roles really well.

The film is about Gilbert Grape (Johnny Depp) and about all the stuggles he faces in a year of his life whilst looking after and supporting his family. His brother Arnie (Leonaro Dicaprio) has a developmental disability and although he is turning 18 he has to be cared for as if he is a younger child, he has to be bathed by other people and watched wherever he goes. Their mother, Bonnie Grape, is morbidly obese after turning to food when her husband died and she had not moved from the house in 7 years because she was just gaunted at where ever she went by the rest of the village. Gilbert also has two sisters who also help look after their mother and the house.

At the beginning of the film there is a voiceover of Gilbert introducing his family and their past, this is similar to our film as it also opens with a voice over.

This is the trailer to What's eating Gilbert Grape:

Genre research

Psychological thriller:

'Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the wide-ranging thriller genre. However, this genre often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre in addition to the typical traits of the thriller genre. Also, occasionally this genre will border into the also wide-ranging Horror genre.

Generally, thrillers focus on plot over character, and thus emphasize intense, physical action over the character's psyche. Psychological thrillers tend to reverse this formula to a certain degree, emphasizing the characters just as much, if not more so, than the plot.

The suspense created by psychological thrillers often comes from two or more characters preying upon one another's minds, either by playing deceptive games with the other or by merely trying to demolish the other's mental state.'


This is similar to the genre of our film as we have a character, the mother, who plays games with others minds to distract them away from the fact that she has mental problems and committed a crime.

The rest of our film..

We have decided on the plot of our film for after the opening and where it will lead to.

We decided that it will be made out that Leyla's friend hurt Leyla and left her for dead in the forest but there will be a big twist at some point of the film where it turns our the mother is not in a fit mental state and it was actually her who drugged her own daughter and left her in the forest after a small disagreement they had, but to it was a big thing because of her mental state. The film will be about the police working with the family and friends of Leyla trying to find out what happened before finding her in the forest at the end of the film. (the beginning of the film will be repeated at the end)

Our voice over

We started to record some of our voice over the other day by using three people to read our script that we roughly made. Abby was the news reporter, Emily was the mother and Charlotte read the parts of the police officer. We recorded it on garage band just roughly to see what it's like but we may need to re record in the future if it doesnt properly fit.

From using the idea from Plan B's song, Suzanne, we decided to distort the girls surname on the news report using effects on garage band. By doing this is makes it sound more real as if we cannot say her full name for legal reasons and makes it seem more eery.

We also recorded the part for the beginning of the rolling tape.

We put the rolling tape and a small bit of the news report onto imovie to see what it's like and we will complete it when we go back to school after Easter.

This is the draft with parts of the voice over in it: