Evaluation of Movie Extract - Jack Cunningham

In this essay I will be evaluating my role, responsibilities and input into our group movie extract task. We were put into groups of four and were given the task to produce a two minute extract of a film that we would come up with ourselves. We had to pick a genre and then decide on a plot and story for it. We then decided on a two minute extract in which to film and perform. We set ourselves individual roles, a cinematographer, a director, editor and sound designer. My role was the sound designer. We decided our film was going to be following the genre of action/thriller. Our films narrative was that there was a special agent named Kurt Prancer who gets abducted and captured by Middle-Eastern Terrorists. Our character then manages to escape from captivity and back to safety. We chose to film our two minute extract from right in the middle of the narrative so during the capturing and in the torture sequence. We got the ideas and influence from films such as Syriana staring George Clooney, the capturing scene from Iron Man with Robert Downey Jr. and lastly the torture scene from Mission Impossible III starring Tom Cruise.








Before we started this task we had been studying horror genre films. This definitely had an effect on our film as we had studied all of the cinematography and use of sound such as soundtrack or special effects sounds in the horror films that because ours was an action/thriller we wanted it to have a bit of tension in it so we took a few techniques from the horror genre. Some of elements which were used were close ups, fast transitions between shots, point of view shots and also shots which there was nothing to see, shots of pure darkness except for a small light. This represented the captive being blindfolded or in this case having a sack over their head. This shot was effective because it meant the audience will focus on the sound. They cannot see and when one of the human senses is impaired or lost the others are emphasised so when all their can see is darkness, they are listening to all the noises in the background, listening to the soundtrack to establish what sort of setting this is, listening for anything which will give them a clue as to what is going on.
Our film consisted of mainly diegetic sound. There was footsteps, background noises, the sounds of the struggling captive trying to break the tape that forced his hands together, the heavy breathing, and the sound of the terrorist laying out all of the torture weapons. As well as diegetic sound we did enhance non-diegetic sound for example additional heavy breathing was added in, I wanted to add more breathing in because the diegetic breathing sounded a lot like wind so I needed something more noticeable as breathing. I created a very diegetic soundtrack with aspects such as road noice and a Turkish voice over with subtitles to create the feeling of a strange environment to the audience and busy roads for example around where our agent is being held. I also added a crash of lighting towards the end, although this is very stereotypical for a horror film, in our action/thriller I thought it might have a slightly different effect, it is subtle but still noticeable, and this creates a much tenser atmosphere for the audience. Originally I hadn’t planned to include a soundtrack but after seeing all the footage come together and listening to the sound we needed something which would set the scene for the audience and something which would build up the tension. I came up with a two minute piece of sound; using different effects and instruments I created a soundtrack which made the extract noticeable as a middle-eastern environment and which had a high and increasing tempo to build tension. All of our film extract was shot in a classroom so the original sound and background sound was very poor, this is why I felt that a lot more sound needed to be added in both diegetic and non-diegetic.

As a team our group worked well together, we all helped each other with our roles, made group decisions as well as individual and everything was shared with everyone. I worked a lot mainly with the editor because as he was changing bits around making them longer or shorter obviously the sound needed to be considered so I was always adding bits in or giving advice on where to put sound.
My favourite shot from our extract is when the sack is finally removed from the captives head. This is because we have it in a point of view shot and a close up shot. The diegetic sound which came with this shot also sounded better than we ever thought. It has a very loud and shard machine like tone which just adds more tension.