Stroke of luck? more a stroke of genius I feel dear William.
Anyway as my companion so unenthusiastically stated filming has begun on our thriller opening!
Things generally went ok on Monday night, lighting was a prominent issue throughout, however i feel on the whole we generally confronted the issue and produced footage that reflected our astounding media ability!!

We were hampered by a few more teeething problems, one of which the fact that our acting skills are hardly the equivalent of that of "momento" or "stir of echoes" however we worked hard to avoid the 'student' look we'd witnessed in the work of previous years.

Now We're Actually Filming

Filming has begun, and finally our thriller is genuinely on its way in a medium other than pencil and paper. It's nowhere near finished by any means, we got maybe about a third of all the footage we need on Monday, which was when we decided to get all the night shots sorted before we dare to figure out a convenient time for all three of us to shoot during the day. It wasn't entirely perfect - a few shots were too dark, too shaky, too... weird, etc, etc. But I was surprised at how much the shots that DID work worked.

It was a bit of a stroke of luck that the setting turned out as well as it did, as I had a fairly pessimistic idea that we'd get to this underpass that only George had seen before today and it would be somehow totally unsuited. But it actually turned out alright, except for maybe the fact that most of the shots of oneself mincing along less-than-coolly towards the underpass were so dark that you could barely tell what was happening, and turned out to be what I think were the worst shots attained during the brief shooting period. But apart from that it was swell - it had the brightly-lit Clockwork Orange quality that looked pretty sweet on camera.

However, shooting the sequence has made me realise that plotwise, the film is less than fantastic, since the murder involved in this location would never, ever work and turned out to be totally ridiculous and nonsensical. Why would you shoot a guy in the face in some brightly-lit and frequently-travelled pathway after standing around waiting in a balaclava and holding a gun outside for ages waiting for him to turn up? It doesn't make a great amount of sense, sure, but hey, we can work with it. I just hope people will get their heads around the rest of the plot - office worker by day, killer by night and such. Far-fetched doesn't even cover it.

Inspirations

The opening scene of Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) is a fantastic opening for a thriller movie. There are a lot of close ups throughout the scene which creates a sense of mystery for the audience. For examplw we don't see the main character's face until near the end of the scene. It confuses the audience and makes them ask a lot of questions, so they will have to watch the rest of the film to find out the answers. I think it would be a good idea for us to use a few close ups in our opening so that we dont reveal everything that is happening in one go and create a sense of suspense for the audience.