Filming Hotel Road

Thriller Conventions
When filming our film opening we had to consider what conventions ere used in thriller films, so we did some research by watching several film openings.
In our film opening we used many thriller conventions, one of the main and most effective being the music that we added which caused a great deal of suspense as the eerie sounds helped create the mood that something was wrong. Another major convention that we used was the darkness that featured throughout the whole opening; however there was a problem with the darkness as we in fact made the opening too dark and you could not see some of the main bits of action, such as the figure who wore all black was very hard to see, and since he could not be seen very clearly, you do not feel the full effect of the film.
We tried to create a tense feeling throughout the opening by contrasting slow zooms onto harsh objects, which we got from the opening of Final Destination, and quick sharp cuts. This tense feeling leaves the audience on edge and makes the character seem more threatening when he appears subtly throughout the film – although we did not use the traditional jumpy appearances I still feel that it scares the audience.
The opening credits of our film opening were originally jagged but after watching several film openings we decided that the conventional font is to have plain, white font on a black background.

Problems When Filming
When filming this opening we experienced many problems the main problem was finding time to film the opening as we set it at a member of our group’s home; however she was very busy as it was the Christmas period and she was working a lot so it wasn’t very convenient. We also had many editing problems as we had only just learnt how to use Pinnacle Studios, so we had to re-film several times, which proved to be very time consuming, which was an issue after we started to get a bit behind.