Diary Entry

7th March

  Now that we have filmed the party scenes indoors yesterday, the outdoor scenes and the kitchen scene, we just have the final part to do - the match on action sequence of the killer.  For this sequence, we would be filming match on action shots of the killer walking into the house, up the stairs, looking around and eventually going into the room that Carla ran into.   We chose to abandon the scene of Carla leaving the party and going up the stairs as it would take up too much time in the opening sequence without really building much tension.  Also, if we were to film the match on action shots of both the killer and Carla, it would become a bit repetitive and the tense scenes might appear to drag.  Therefore, we only filmed the sequence involving the killer.  However, this proved to be more difficult than expected because, although when edited the scene only takes a few seconds, there are a variety of angles that need to be captured and we needed to film a few repeats so that we had a lot of footage to work with.  We thought that it is always better to have lots of footage and decide which is the best in editing rather than just trying to film it all in one go.  The bonus from having a match on action sequence at the end that involves lots of different camera shots is that lots of tension is built because the scenes are snappy and quick but also, it really portrays a sense of continuity to the audience.

  As before in other shoots, Mise-en-scene is a very important feature of the opening sequence that can draw the attention of the audience and this scene is no different.  Therefore, the Mise-en-scene for this sequence had to look right in order to maintain the same level as tension as that created by the camera shots.  When we arrived for filming, the hallway was slightly untidy so we had to move clothes out of the way.  If we had carried on filming without clearing the hallway, the look of the scene would be messy and would spoil the atmosphere.

  A final part of the Mise-en-scene was that of costume.  As there was only one character in the scene, this made it simple.  Also, the killer was a character that had already been filmed in the outside scenes.  Therefore, for continuity, we kept the costume the same (long dark grey coat, dark jeans and brown boots) so that the audience wouldn't get confused and perhaps think there are different killers.  The dark colours also connote that the killer is, himself, a dark, mysterious and evil character which creates tension in itself.  Also, when it comes to editing this scene, we will add some tense mood music so that more tension is built up and in turn, this would have a foreboding effect that something bad will happen.