Brainstorms and Influences

Marnie

Having looked at many Alfred Hitchcock's films and his renowned method of producing, directing and editing, one film that particularly stood out and inspired us was Marnie - a 1964 psychological thriller. The film stars Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery.

The YouTube link below (watch from 02:00 - 02:30) shows a classic and effective opening scene of Marnie part:1 where the camera focuses on her bag whilst tracking her movement gradually and every know and again pausing as Marnie's figure goes further towards the platform. This use of camerawork reveals a character to the audience without actually showing themselves leaving it to the viewers imagination, it effortlessly becomes scary.




Psycho
Another film that inspired me was 'Psycho', 1960 American thriller/horror film directed by Hitchcock. The film features one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, the murder of Janet Leigh's character in the shower.

This scene runs for 3 minutes and has a staggering 50 cuts. Most of the shots are extreme close-ups, except for the medium shots in the shower directly before and directly after the murder. The mixture of shots with the short duration between each cuts makes the scene feel longer, more uncontrolled, erratic and illusory. I believe this clip is one on the most chilling and effective scenes of all time, due to the build up of suspense and compelling eerie music.

Preliminary Task

Editing Preliminary task

After finally filming our preliminary task at school, it was time for editing. In lesson we looked at the famous Alfred Hitchcock who was an English filmmaker and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. I knew I would relate back to his works at some point during my thriller sequence as "his flair was for narrative, cruelly withholding crucial information (from his characters and from us) and engaging the emotions of the audience like no one else"

As all of the equipment was new to me I realised I would have to play around with it first, to fully understand all of the buttons and learn how to use and take advantage of all the cool effects- which i will hopefully use in my thriller. There were lots of different features within the 'Adobe Premier' programme as well as the 'Editing Keyboard', which we later used to our advantage as it proved to be a much quicker way of editing. Short-cuts such as the letter 'C' was to cut out a part of the film that we wanted.
Continuity editing was crucial in the preliminary task as it would help show the uninterrupted flow of action in a story. There is no attention brought to the fact that there's editing taking place. This gives the film a more realistic feel and makes it more believable. However when it came to the editing transitions, there were many to choose from, such as;
-straight cuts

-fade outs
-dip/to/black
-crop cut
-dissolves
-wipe cuts
-jump cuts
-reaction shots
-matched cuts
-motivated cuts
-cutaway shots

A technique that we used when filming the preliminary task was waiting five seconds before and after the action in each shot as it easily allowed us to cut each shot without removing any important action or dialogue. When filming the thriller, I will use this technique as it makes the editing process a lot easier.