Behind The Scenes: Soundtrack

We knew what we wanted from actors but we still needed good music and sound effects to with it. We had a few songs in mind and agreed it should be a depressing soundtrack but also from the sixties so that it fit in with the Vietnam setting. Here are the songs we thought would be good for the thriller Ben had them already on his Ipod so agreed to hear them and they were all good.

1. Fortunate son - Creedence Clearwater revival

2. Hendrix (Becko) - Vietcong 2 (game)

3. The End - The Doors

4. For what its worth - Buffalo Springfield

5. Clapton - Vietcong 2

good. In the end though we decided to go with 'The End' by The Doors because of its gloomy and more depressing atmosphere and it was lest action packed than the rest were. We didn't plan on playing it throughout the entire intro but we had the idea to play it in the flashback, the graveyard scenes or just the end of the intro. The gun sounds and explosions were easy enough to find because over the internet they have websites dedicated to finding things like that so that was sorted. And with this soundtrack we were confident that sounds would go far in the editing.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0kbC0hQHRg&feature=player_embedded

Behind The Scenes: Camera angles and still shots

When filming we had to make sure we knew what we were doing, we took a digital camera and tripod into Cannock and began filming with the people we had. We would always do more than one shot of a certain scene just to see which one was better. And before that we would do a practice run through so we knew what we were doing. It was extremely important to us that we got everything as close to perfection as we could. So I particularly would spend up to 2 minutes trying to get the camera level and in the right position so we would have the most intense scenes. Something we wanted most of all was non shaky camera angles that meant using the tripod almost all times, apart from the running sequence I think we pulled it off. With the picture on the right especially we needed to explain exactly what to do because Alex didn't know where to go, how to move or anything like that so I had to show her the movements she'd make and then do a practice run of what she'd do. There were scenes where me and Ben were on camera at the same time so we would hand it over to either Sean or Ben's Mum, to make sure we didn't waste time or film we walked them through exactly what we wanted to happen. For still shots and the like we would yell freeze or stop when we wanted them to just hold position this gave us an idea of the actors movements in the filming.

Behind The Scenes: Cast and Crew

Because we were in a group of three we needed more people to star in our thriller opening this was of little concern because Mr Silverwood had already told us that we could use other people from around the school, but we did need more people, especially now that Anthony had decided to do nothing towards the film so here's the members of our team.

Crew                                                                                                                        
Josh Fletcher: Director, Camera man 1, extra
Ben Hilton: Assistant Director/Editor,
Sam Pearson: Editor
Ben's Mum: Camera man 2
Sean Brown: Camera man 3
Anthony Hall: Well... Umm... Anthony did nothing throughout the course of the filming its a wonder he's even in this list.

Cast
Ben's Dad: Main Character
Ben: Main Character (past)
Josh Fletcher: Guy who's shot
Alex Chong: Vietcong
Becky Colclough: Main characters girlfriend before war                                    
Anthony Hall: Again did nothing

These were the people who contributed to our thriller and were a huge help to the Final product, except Anthony of course.

Behind The Scenes: Location Location

The most important thing in our opinion was the location seeing as we needed a graveyard and a place we could make look like Vietnam. The school field looked to familiar and there were barely any trees, Milford looked good but still wasn't as good as we were hoping so in the end we decided to go to Cannock Chase. this was a good setting for the flashback in Vietnam because of the trees and wilderness. We mainly picked it because of the branches and trees and good places to duck into cover. We drove to a deserted part with trees everywhere with a stream running through the middle no-one was going to walk their dogs through it and it was away from any houses so we didn't have to explain ourselves to anyone at home. There was also a point we found that we used repeatedly because we could stand the camera up and have some really good environment shots. As seen in the second picture if you look closely Ben is in his full costume acting out the scene where he hides from the Vietcong because of the camouflage we had some points where we needed the character to move quite abruptly so people could see him but because of the whole scene being very fast paced it wasn't a problem.

The other location we filmed at was the German graveyard again on Cannock chase. Here we filmed the man walking into the Graveyard and the beginning and end of the flashback. We picked this particular graveyard because its set out like a war memorial there are clear lines of sight and rows of gravestones to choose from.

Behind The Scenes: The Story

We understood the storyline perfectly fine because we had created it but we had to take into account just what complete strangers or people who had no idea what it was about would think, this is what we had to clearly show in our thriller opening. Our plot was that a man walks into a graveyard, walks along until he reaches a certain gravestone he then turns and stares at it until he sees a vision of him and his girlfriend before the war when he used to be a good man he then has a flash back to the day he let his friend die. Two soldiers including himself ,either good friends or not, would be on a patrol near the base so no cause for alarm or caution was needed. We then decided that one would be injured and instead of patrolling they would be close to the base so that the injured man could get medical treatment. While they have their guard down they're ambushed by Vietcong, the injured soldier is shot and the other gets to cover. The whole flashback is set in the Vietnam war so it is a brutal experience for these men. The main character looks at his friend dying on the floor and wants to help him but he's to scared so he runs away from the battle and leaves the man for dead. We then return to the graveyard where the man is twenty years older his life is in ruin and he regrets leaving him that day the man then leaves the graveyard. This man has been suicidal for years and seeing as this is an opening it would be what the film is about. So overall we had to show this story to the audience with decent actors, a good location and some real good editing and camera angles. To go into extra detail about making the story as good as we possibly could we would either arrive on location with ideas and pick the best ones or we would meet round each others houses and take notes or ideas on the story.

Behind The Scenes: Brainstorming becomes Idea

When we were told what we were meant to make a thriller we all had different ideas on the subject, I was hoping for a thriller that was based around either nuclear holocaust, a sci fi thriller where a man goes back in time and tries to change events for the better or one where someone knows the truth about the 9/11 attack and is being made to keep quiet because of it. Out of these three we liked my nuclear holocaust idea best because the time travel one sounded to similar to 'the butterfly effect'  and the 9/11 attack might be a sensitive issue to some whereas in a world of nuclear winter we didn't know what would happen. Ben Hilton had an idea for either a rapist or murder thriller where the girl or victim would be hidden while the stalker looks for him/her these ideas were scrapped because we had previously done a murder in our practice thriller and wanted to try something new and we couldn't do the rapist one without getting two intimate with a girl and plus no-one in their right mind would agree to it. Anthony the third member of our group had an idea to do a soldier who deserted his squad and was getting tracked down because of it, though we liked the sound of this idea it sounded to original and nowhere near scary enough but then we had a thought to combine mine and his ideas that are set in war times and put them together. We now had a setting where a soldier leaves his friend to die after an ambush we were happy with this and we came to the conclusion that it could all be set in a flashback like 'Saving Private Ryan' was, this way the man had been living with the guilt for a long time. Ben came up with the idea of us setting the flashback in the Vietnam war so that over 20 years had past. We now had an idea and believed that any plot holes or things we'd missed out we would compensate for along the way, with that   in mind we went on to make our storyboard. 

Our Final Thriller Opening Behind The Scenes

For our thriller we needed to keep in mind that it was not so much the thriller that would get us marks but the process doing it. Therefore we took pictures and archived what we did each day for the thriller. With this in mind we had to make a good thriller in good locations and show evidence for it. So these are the steps we took in making a thriller for our AS Media studies.