CCR Script

Hi, my name is Katelyn wagner, and you’re about to watch my CCR for the title sequence of our thriller film “Lucid Elucidations.” I took on the role of Cinematographer my group, which consisted of my group members Bianca Raby (production designer), Pierce Thomas (diretor) and Ben Isaacs (editor). During the production phase of our project, we mainly followed typical thriller genre conventions due to the fact that we wanted to make our film as creepy as possible without stretching too far from the basics of thriller. For our setting, we filmed in a mock hospital on our school camps. Hospitals have been successful settings for thriller movies in the past, such as the critically acclaimed 2017 thriller film “Get Out” which contained a hospital scene towards the end of the movie. Hospitals, which are directly associated with death and despair, gave our film the instant spooky vibe we were aiming for. When filming, I found it best to obtain a lot of shots from behind our actor, Robert. Doing so makes the audience feel as if someone is watching and following him as the title sequence goes on, which is later proven to be true towards the end of the title sequence when we can see an on-screen antagonist/shadow figure attack Robert. Another common camera shot often used in thriller films are over the shoulder shots, which I filmed numerous times during production. Over the shoulder shots are very effective for building tension and fear, because they put the audience directly in the action of the characters on screen. It makes them feel as if they are experiencing the same fearful events our character is, which is the feeling I want the audience to be exposed to when watching my film. During the editing stage, we added on a blue filter to our clips, due to the fact that the lighting at school had previously been too warm to give off the suspenseful and eerie vibe that we were aiming for. The blue tone reduces the happiness of the scene and makes the character much more vulnerable to scary events, such as the attack from the shadow figure. The pacing and rhythm of our film remained roughly the same throughout the title sequence. In the beginning and middle, it felt slow and steady so as to tell the audience our character is exploring his surroundings and getting used to them. Towards the end, however, the pacing suddenly speeds up once Robert is attacked by the shadow figure. After he dropped his computer, Ben used a flicker effect to dramatize the events happening on screen. This allowed the speed of events to feel faster, which is how we wanted to convey to the audience that our character was suddenly in a state of panic. This, simultaneously, evokes panic in the viewers as well. We also used a combination of musical stings during climatic parts of the title sequence, including when the dummy was reveled behind the curtain, and after the attack of the shadow figure. Musical stings are especially important in thriller films because they dramatise important moments in the film, making the scary parts louder and more aggressive for viewers, thus creating more fear. In terms of social group and representation, our film challenged typical modes of representation in thriller films. Our actor, who is a male, was portrayed as the victim, while a mysterious female shadow figure was the aggressor and antagonist. This completely switches up typical representations of gender, as females are almost always portrayed as easy targets and victims in thriller, while men are the stronger antagonists, including examples of movies such as The Boy (2016) and Split (2016). Along with that, Robert, who is African-American, was casted as the lead role in our thriller film. This is a very uncommon thing to be seen in the thriller genre, as white males or females typically take the lead in thriller, but we chose to challenge that normality.









Our film will be a low-budget indie film produced by the independent production company BlumHouse productions. BlumHouse specializes in making thriller films on low budgets, such as Truth or Dare, which was released in 2018 with a low budget of 3.5 million. This will work in our favor as we are high school students and won’t be able to accumulate a high budget for the film. As with most indie films, Lucid Elucidations will first be released at film festivals such as Sundance to gain an audience and promote its popularity. If things go well at the film festival, we hope that it will gain enough attention to be picked up for a wide theatrical release, which could help us make a large profit if the customers like our product. We could create our own teaser trailers before theatrical release, considering we might not have enough money to pay another company to do it for us. By uploading these trailers onto popular social media sites such as Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, we will be able to reach out to our target audience. This group consists of young women aged 18-24 years old, because 57% of young females prefer to watch thriller movies versus the lower 43% of young males who do. This younger audience will be easy to reach out to on social media platforms. Along with that, a younger audience is more likely than older generations to enjoy watching a film that consists of twists and suspense, making it easy for our target audience to want to watch our film.









Before starting this project, the closest thing to a camera that I had ever truly used was the one built into my iPhone. I had owned a Canon Rebel T3i for a few years prior to the creation of this film, but I had never actually taken a picture on it, much less understand how to work it in general. After deciding I wanted to be cinematographer, I had dedicated time into learning how to film on my Canon through sources such as YouTube and Google. Now that post production is over, I can proudly say I learned how to use many of the functions on the Canon. I started with the basics of learning how to actually record a video, and advanced all the way to controlling exposure and aperture manually and even learning how to record a rack focus. I also learned a lot about the importance of limiting the amount of times a video file is transferred, due to the risk of its resolution or quality being substantially lowered. This is why we mainly kept all 132 video clips saved in folders on my computer, and would transfer most files via flash drive, to help maintain video quality. Before starting this project, I would watch movies in theatres without having any idea of how much work went into the movie making process. Though I don’t want to call any stage of the film-making process “easy”, I will say I found pre-production to be the least difficult. The production stage required lots of dedication to acquire all of the shots necessary and making sure we obtained things such as continuity since we had to shoot over multiple days.I learned that the production stage is much more difficult than it seems, because factors such as creating the right lighting and filming on multiple cameras at once to get various angles is a hard task to achieve. These were many important elements to the production stage that I never knew existed before I began this project. Along with that, I had never realized how vital post production, or editing, was. Without editing, we would have never been able to arrange the shots in the correct order, add color corrections or even add our music, to name a few. Editing is the stage in the process where emotions are created for the audience to experience, which is something that the pre-production & production stages cannot achieve alone. Editing also proved to be the most time-consuming stage, which came to a surprise as it does not seem that difficult from an outside viewpoint. However, editing is the stage that takes every piece of the film and makes it one solid masterpiece, which I learned during the process of this project, so it makes sense as to why it takes so long. Working throughout this entire process has made me a better filmmaker in many ways. First, I was able to spend a large mass of time learning how to operate cameras and how to control lighting since we split up roles and I requested cinematographer. Along with that, being in a group has taught me vital skills such as communication and teamwork along with learning how to compromise in tough situations. This closely simulates what it’s like to be a real filmmaker when working closely with a large team to create a movie, and practicing these important skills has allowed me to leave this class a better filmmaker than when I started.






Considering our production designer Bianca does not have an iPhone like the rest of us, we couldn’t use an iMessage group chat as our main form of communication. We did, however, use the popular social media site “Snapchat” to form a group chat that won’t be affected by the type of phones used. This way, all four of us could text, share photos and videos, and communicate important ideas to each other at any time. During production, we used my Canon Rebel T3i to film complicated shots such as a rack focus. However, I was quick to put down the Canon and use the camera on my iPhone X instead. I found that the Canon was extremely inconvienent, due to its heavy weight making it hard to hold the camera steady. Along with that, I learned that the camera quality on my Canon lowers substantially when the lighting becomes darker, making the videos appear grainy. Personally, I found my iPhone to be a much more effective way to film, because it was lightweight, it made recording shots easy due to its small size, and the video quality on my phone was just as good, if not better, than the Canon. On top of that, when recording on my phone, the videos were instantly saved to my camera roll and could be transferred easily between my iPhone and Macbook due to Apple products being extremely compatible with one another. Obtaining shots off of the Canon was more complicated because I had to extract them off of it’s SD card. All in all, I learned that using my iPhone X to film, along with using Robert’s iPhone 8 at times as well, proved to be much more convenient than the Canon. For creating my CCR, I decided to use iMovie, which took me a few hours to understand as I have never touched it before. After googling many questions, I eventually discovered that the software is rather user friendly, and made creating my CCR much less intimidating as I can find most of the answers to my questions on the Apple website. When editing our title sequence, our editor Ben used a software called Sony Vegas Pro 13. This was far more complex than iMovie, though it does have a much wider range of capabilities. I found it was too complicated for me to try and use since this is my first time at editing, so I just stuck with iMovie. The internet itself proved to be a huge help in the creation of my project as everything was stored and created digitally. I used YouTube and Google vastly to research other thriller title sequences in order to gain ideas for what cinematography should be used in my title sequence, and to get an over-all feel for the visual aspects and genre conventions that we should have hit during production. All in all, this has been an amazing learning experience that has taught me what it takes to be a filmmaker, and I hope you enjoyed watching my CCR. Thank you!