Bag Swap

Bag Swap

We were given the task to create a clip where there was a swap. The idea of the task was to make the clip a thriller by adding suspense through Mise en scene, editing and camera movements. In our clip we wanted to make the bag swap more interesting, so we made our story line fit an action thriller. Our idea was originally to use make a male running from another man, and then the newspaper drops and the chasing male collects it sits down and reads the headline which was based on murder. The idea was to make the chasing scene build tension, excitement and suspense as the audience wouldn’t know why they are chasing each other. However this plan never went to plan and we changed our plan, and decided to do a bag swap. Within this bag swap a woman would be robbed by a man. However this wasn’t our original idea and the sudden swap didn’t help us make the clip as thrilling as it could have been.

Problems with Bag Swag:

We had to suddenly change our original clip because one of the actors didn’t come into lesson for the second filming day. And one didn’t bring the same clothing as in the first day of filming; these faults caused us to recreate a new clip with the actors and clothing we had available. This change made us learn valuable lessons; we now have a better understanding of the necessary requirements needed when filming. Firstly we now know that when filming we need to keep the clothing the same throughout the scene. Moreover everyone has a responsibility to punctual and attend lessons as when filming if you are missing an actor or camera person you can’t film or may have to change your idea which is time consuming. We completed the bag swap idea, it’s quite rushed as we didn’t have the necessary time to edit or reshoot a scene because we changed our idea very late towards the end of the project.

Filming techniques to add tension:

We tried to take different type of shots to build suspense. Firstly there is a high angle shot looks down on the male coming up the stairs. Moreover a long there is a close up of the woman hands turning the door handle then a man’s hands appear and take her hand from the door. I think this builds suspense and tension as the audience doesn’t know why the man’s attacking her. Then an over the shoulder shot shows her being attacked and we see the woman get punched, this built tension to a climax where he took the bag and ran off while the woman fell to the floor. I think different camera shots add tension, suspense and build excitement, so in our opening thriller sequence I want to take loads of different camera shots. We also took an extreme close up the man and a tracking shot which built tension as he walked down the corridor.

Editing

When editing we wanted to speed the movement and explore different techniques which would allow us to use them in our final clip. However we had insufficient time to edit properly because we started filming a new clip. Nevertheless we were still able to slow down the speed which built tension, for example when the man walks down the corridor it is slower because we wanted to emphasise the fact he was following the women and therefore build suspense.