Our film extract was about a girl who was discovering her gift of being able to hear people’s thoughts and the genre was a psychological thriller. This influenced the decisions we made because with a psychological thriller, you have to be careful with what type of sound you use. We used digetic sound in the form of people’s voices, but we also used non-digetic sound as the music playing over what was happening. We had to be careful with what non-digetic sound we used, as we didn’t want the music to sound too upbeat, and we wanted it to help create the tense atmosphere and help build up the tension. The genre also effected how we used the camera as well. We thought it would be more affective if we didn’t always have the camera in one steady position so we decided to, when appropriate, use different ways of using the camera. An example of this would be when Sarah picks up her phone, and we turn the camera upside down, this is because Sarah was turning upside down so we thought it would be good for the camera to do this as she did it. 

In this project I was responsible for the cinematography. I developed the narrative through this by using different camera angles, and also using a range of ways to film the narrative for example moving the camera in ways that are suitable to the mood, like in the shot of all the people walking down the street, and the camera is moving frantically. This would help the audience understand the mood that the main character is feeling and create tension; this is the effect with the audience i was hoping for with the use of the cinematography in our sequence.

To get to the narrative that we decided in our group, we all came up with different suggestions of what we could genre we could do and what the narrative of it would involve. We all agreed on doing a psychological thriller as we all thought we could do this at a good standard better than something like a comedy genre. As we carried out the film extract we didn’t change our plans of what the narrative of it was, we made some changed as we went along when filming, for example what places we would film at or the camera angle we used, but nothing that made a big change to what we were doing.

The feedback we received on our extract gives the impression that the things we did well included the use of sound, and the use of camera angles and good editing. However it shows that we needed to pay more attention to the details, such as cutting out things out of the picture that made it look a bit messy. Also possibly more attention should of been paid to the steadiness of the camera when shooting. I think these little details could have made a big difference to the overall appearance of it and would have made it look a lot neater.

I learnt a lot in technical skills in this project. However I wouldn’t say that they hindered being able to make the creative choices i wanted to because i had other people in my group who knew a bit more than me, so they could teach me and I learnt new things which enabled me to make more of the creative choices I wanted.

A clip that particularly inspired me was the Spiderman clip shown in our blog where he gets his powers. This inspired me because as I was working with the cinematography aspect, I found that this clip showed a really good range of camera angles and I feel that it uses the camera really well to create the mood for the audience that is intended for this clip. I also feel that this clip has good non-digetic sound and the music when he realises he may have some sort of gift really helps the audience understand what he might be feeling. This clip also helped me get ideas of what sort of sound might sound good with our extract and how important it was that the music fit in with the mood of the main character with the particular scene that was being carried out.

 I did struggle with some camera angles. We wanted to use the vertigo effect in our extract, but when we tried to do it it didn’t come out as we planned and looked messy because we didn’t have the right equipment to carry it out effectively so we didn’t use it. When Mel and Sarah are on the phone I thought that a good camera angle to use was to close up on Sarah when she realises Mel might be able to hear her thoughts. I think that this helped the audience realise the tension. We also decided to use quite a lot of close ups of the eyes in our extract. We decided 

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