Name for our thriller

As a group, we have decided on the name; 'LOST SIGNAL' for our thriller opening. The name fits well with the opening as it contains a scene when the protangonist loses signal on her phone and has to leave her friends. When she returns, her friends are no longer there so she decides to look for them - This is what leads her into the path desired by her stalker, the antagonist!

Our thriller; rough plot

As a group, Me, Sarah, Connor and Hollie came up with the rough plot for our thriller.
We decided together that we would like to have a stalker in our thriller and one main character as the person being stalked. There will also be two friends of the character being stalked in the thriller.
 Characters;
Stalker; The stalker will be a very scary looking character, menacing as such. He will be extremely obsessed with the central character, this character will have many images of the central character on their wall and will follow them using social networking such as facebook. 
Central character; the central character will just be an ordinary girl with an ordinary life. They will be more vulnerable however, as they are a female and slightly smaller than the average height for their age. They will know the identity of the character but not as a friend, more of just a peer. Although, they will not know the stalker is in fact stalking them.
Friend 1 and 2; These two characters will be in the background for most of the shots. These characters are not vital to the thriller, they are just merely background characters.


The plot;
The plot will include the central character and her friends going into the woods for a camping trip. After updating her status, the stalker then knows where the central character and her friends will be and sets out to follow them. 
The central character will then take a phone call and moves away from the campsite. When she returns, she finds her friends to be gone and she has been left alone. Following this, she try's to find them and heads back the way in which they had firstly came. The stalker begins to follow her and she is almost caught be him. This is when our filming will finish, hopefully leaving the viewers on the edge of their seats.
If we were to finish the film, the rest would more than likely consist of the central character trying to find her friends and discover what exactly happened that night.

Our final company ident - Panoptic productions

As a group we picked which two idents we believed to be the best and edited them both on livetype in order to make them more effective and more like famous production companys idents. Below are the two idents we edited, Design 3 and Design 4;

Design 3

Design 4

As a group we decided that Design 4 of the original ideas was the best so the ident featured above as design 4 is our final production company idea and will be used for our 2 minute thriller opening.

Ident and logo ideas

Today in class our group discussed different names and designs for our thriller ident. As a group we agreed on the name Panoptic Productions and came up with four different overall designs for our ident/logo designs. Each one differs from the others as then the decision process would be easier. Whereas if we had made the idents/logos similar, it would be difficult to choose which is our favourite. All the files were saved into two seperate files, .psd, the photoshop file in order for them to be edited later and the .png, file so that the empty areas reamin transparent.

We chose our production company name to be 'Panoptic productions'. This is because the word 'Panoptic' means to veiw things from many directions linking to the idea of our coursework as each shot from our thriller will have to be veiwed from different directions in order to make the opening of a high quality.

Design 1

This design was inspred by a drawing which Connor had drawn some time ago. Cartoon clouds are often used by artists who wish to specialise in forms which are less realistic than others. The font within the cloud is elegant and the colour of the font, blue, corroborates with cloud. This is because rain is blue, and rain of course comes from clouds. A glow was added to both the cloud and the text in order to make them seem more dainty and angelic. The grey background shown, would actually be transparent. the grey background in this is shown in order for the shape of the cloud to be shown.

Design 2

This is the second design we came up with. The white area shown would actually be transparent in the actually thriller. We decided to use faces angled in different directions as it realte sto our company name. The text, aswell the faces are very cartoon like to create the effect of a fun and young design. We feel as though this design is lacking in something, and therefore probably will be less likely to use it for our final production company ident.

Desing 3



This design is inspired by paint splats. Bold colours, pink and purple, were chosen as they stood out from the page and are more eye catching. Also the font is bold and eye catching. The desing is simple, but also effective and we think it would go down well pnce placed onto livetype.

Design 4

This design is the groups favourite from the four. This is an ironic take on Columbia pictures ident. Columbia pictures use a women featured as standing on a podium holding a torch. We created the character withing the ident and placed him on a podium just as Columbia pictured has done. We come from an industrialised area and therefore chose to add a skyline to the design. The white area shown will in fact be transparent. Once placed into Livetype, We could edit it and would use a background of moving clouds, another reference to Columbia Pictures. The text is separate from the picture it can then be moved freely on the page once we edit it on livetype. It can be placed exactly where we would like it on the screen, without shifting the design of the ident.

Thriller ident and logo

We discovered major film production companies usually use a still image, with a moving background. For example; Warner bros use their logo which flies into shot. After this, the logo remains still whilst the background continues moving. We could do this with the ident for our thriller by using applications such as photoshop and livetype. Firstly we would draw the design on photoshop and save the image as .png files in order for it to be able to upload into the software to enable editing and various effects to be added. We would then apply a moving background to the still/stationary logo.

We dicided as a group that it is best to mimic the original, major production companies as they set very high standards for everyone else to match. We would however, put our own stamp on it and make it more relevant to our age as we are still only young and do not wish for the ident and logo to be completely serious

In the cut, Film opening credits.

The second film opening we watched was 'In the Cut'.

The opening credits to this film are also good. It also goes from the general to the particular, staring off with New york City. The first thing shown on this film is also the ident, Pathe productions, and then followed by the name of the producers again. The main credits to this film start of with the central character, Meg Ryan, and carry on to the least important names. 
The credits to this film is effective as the title is shown last. This is effective not only because it is shown last but because the font is slightly different to the rest of the credits and also as the title is at the end of it's showing o the screen it begins to look as though it is bleeding.

Film titles.

Today in class, we watched more fillm openings to discover the way in which they had shown there opening title, ident, main characters and other main components of the film. (E.g. music, editor, production company etc.) This is in order to give us ideas of how to convey the opening credits to our two minute thriller.


The first film opening we watched was: 'The Brave One'


The film 'The Brave one', starring Jodie Foster as the main character shows the opening credits of the film in a very good way. The picture goes from the general to the particular, a blurred image of New York city to Jodie Foster. The ident to the film is the first thing shown, there are three ident's in this film; Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow pictures and Silver pictures. The first credits are then repeats of these names. The rest of the credit's go from the main character of the film, Jodie Foster, to the least important names. Such as music and editors. These credits are effective as they fade in and out of the moving picture behind them.