AS Level media studies-Foundation production evaluation-Question 1

What is a thriller?

A thriller is a book or film which is designed to keep the reader or viewer on edge with suspenseful and sensational action. Thrillers have also been produced in the radio, theatre, and television media. This genre is incredibly large, and thrillers often overlap with pieces of work produced in other genres; mysteries, for example, are often thrillers. Many people find thrillers very enjoyable, and they appreciate the fast pacing and complex plots associated with this genre.

Thrillers typically involve sudden plot twists and lots of red herrings, for example, keeping people unsure about what is going to happen, this suspense can get almost unbearable, especially in a long piece or a television series. Thrillers also have a lot of action which is often chaotic and they typically feature resourceful heroes and exotic settings.

In some thrillers the plot can vary dramatically, an example of this could be a supernatural, scientific or medical in nature, forcing their protagonists to contend with biological agents or mysterious scientific happenings. Some are simply straight mysteries with clever, horrific, or intriguing antagonists, while others be focused on the inner workings of the legal system, environmental threats, technology, or natural disasters.

Thriller sub genres

Techno thriller, techno thrillers look into the manipulation of sophisticated technology playing a prominent part in taking over the world and giving the new world order where mankind is overrun by robots. This particular subgenre is mainly based on fictional speculations on life that tend to follow a science fiction trend. Common themes linked in with this sub-genre are world wars, action and science fictional occurrences like aliens taking over with new technologies.   

Crime thriller, crime thrillers often focus more on the criminals and their activities leading up to the crime or starting at the end of the film and working backwards to show you how it all started and how the villain got into the position that her or she was in, crime thrillers usually emphasise action over psychology aspects although there is also a psychological part to this genre as well,  the crime genre usually includes killers & murders, robberies, chases, shootouts, heists and double crosses.  

Mystery thriller, mystery thrillers focus mostly on the efforts of the detective or private investigator in order to solve the mystery, this sub-genre looks at circumstances of the mystery or crime its self to try and figure out what the clues are, the audiences usually trying to take part in trying to uncover the crime, mystery thrillers also have the audience follow the protagonist as they are trying to find out what is going on and try to guess what happens before the protagonist does.  

Psychological thriller, psychological thrillers play with the audiences minds and produces suspense in film because it reflects the main characters conflict being mental and emotional. It shows the mentality of a character and thought processes that they go through which makes the sub-genre so suspenseful

Disaster thriller, disaster thrillers follow a certain group of people or personal survival in conflict with natural or artificial disasters like floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and volcanoes. Many disaster films have also had causes of human activity that has brought man kind to the brink of extinction, this type of genre plays with what the future is going to bring for mankind if such disasters were to happen.  

Political thriller, political thrillers look into the stability of the government and the reliance on a hero or heroine who must ensure that stability of the government that employs him or her in order to prevent a bad things happening, commonly used scenarios are the US presidential elections and the preventions of world wars occurring.

Religious thriller, religious thrillers usually unravel the good and the bad points about religion in particular the catholic beliefs, this connoting the good and how it overcomes the bad in films, through a quest to finding out the truth.

The expectations of a mystery thriller are some sort of mystery, which provides a reason for a chase scene e.g. in taken when the Brian Mills (played by Liam Neeson) goes on the chase to find his daughter and free her from a terrible fate, these kind of scenes are normally done in iconic locations such as the streets of Paris or in the Pyramids.

Mystery thrillers also tend to have lots of fact nice looking cars which 9 times out of 10 will normally be trashed by the end of the chase.

Characters - can be a more athletic especially the main lead (like Jason Bourne) but the hero may be a more brainy character rather than straight action it’s got a faster pace than other thriller subgenres and it can almost be described as a ticking clock as we as the audience or the hero in the film is almost waiting for the next crime to happen as we can see it on the horizon.

Conventions

The conventions of a thriller film include low levels of:

Lighting, low lighting is created by using the key and backlights, used together. They produce a sharp contrast between lights and dark areas on screen. This creates distinct and deep shadows which is often a common technique used within thriller and horror films as they create sinister and dark tones. For example in Shutter Island when they enter the institute the lighting goes quite low which shows that they have entered a dark place where bad things may happen on the horizon    

Quick cuts, Thrillers often use quick cuts to create tension and quicken the pace. A good example of this is seen in the thriller Psycho when the woman is murdered in the shower.

Changes in camera angle, things that seem to be quite common are the low levels of framing and the high angles at certain points, the high angle is used mainly to show those powerful positions but they might also in films such as the terminator 2, with the arrival of the terminator, this shows the terminator having control and the most power.   

Tension building music, most of the music in films is non diegetic, some films may even use dialogue instead (this may be to explain a situation that would not be made obvious if there was no music or dialogue what so ever,

Flashbacks, they can provide depth to the character. However, the flashback must be absolutely necessary to the story and not just a way to dump information.

The typical shots used in a thriller film are: high angle shots, (to make the villain look more threatening and the victim look completely powerless many of these are used in the final destination films to emphasise the presence of death and the fact he is constantly watching them) close up shots, (to show expressions these are used a lot also in the final destination films to either show the fear of the unknown or focus on how the person or people has died) canted angle (to show disorientations or the view of someone on the floor looking at something used in psycho when she had been murdered).

The editing in a thriller film is usually very quick and choppy as short choppy scenes add a lot of tension to the scenes E.G. say if the character is in a room with many different objects them camera could go from the eyes to say a book then back to the eyes then the character hears a noise and the camera turns to where the character thinks the noise is coming from. Quick shots are used to emphasise the feelings of suspense and tension, they are mainly used in important parts of the film or thrilling scenes, and they sometimes create a disorientation of space and time by using things like montage editing.

Mise-en-scene

Setting

The normal setting for a thriller film would be somewhere quite dark possibly an old house or an abandoned park or wooded area, this screen grab is from the opening to the hunger games catching fire where they have used an old looking village to emphasise the fact that she may be alone and possibly scared of the unknown.

Costume

The costume is again usually quite dark in a thriller film which can sometimes cause confusion as to who is the hero and who is the villain, this screen grab is from the Bourne ultimatum, if you have never watched this film you would think that Bourne would possibly be the villain as he is wearing very dark clothing, when looking at these clips the things that we took from this section was the dark colours, to achieve this in my own film we used an effect called bleach bypass.

 

Lighting

There is very low lighting in a thriller as a dark setting makes the scene look more tense then a light scene also shadows can make a scene look tense as well this is because many people have a fear of the unknown this is a screen grab from seven and as you can see the lighting is very dark which creates a tense atmosphere as we can only what the person doing the action is doing.

We took ideas from films such as The Lovely Bones, The Blair Witch Project and Orphan, the reasons why the lovely bones inspired us was because it is about a girl who was who was convinced to go with a man who she thought she knew and then she was brutally murdered, the murder went unknown for many years until her sister managed to uncover the truth, the ideas that we took from this film were the murdered girl and the fact of not knowing what was going to happen.

The idea that we took from the Blair Witch Project was the setting, we chose to film in a country area that was quite empty and they filmed in a wooded area which is originally a location that we wanted to use but there was no building that we could use to film the rest of our opening in.

The idea that we took from orphan was the idea of hidden identity as we find out in orphan the main character who is causing a problem for the family is not quite who she says she is, we took the idea of this and applied it to the girl who was found under the blanket, we don’t know who she is, we don’t know how she got there and we don’t know exactly what happened to her and then we see some pictures of a board with what looks like the female that found the body which again created more questions.

We also looked at the openings to these films on YouTube to see if there was anything we could take from them and add it into our own film.

·       The lovely bones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQZq0d1vzOE

·       The Blair Witch Project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdS9DYaiCEE   

         Orphan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgxVIB2WuHU

Question 2

As we only had one main character in our film this will be the character that I will focus on, I have also chosen to focus on this character from the lovely bones; these two characters have many things in common for example they are both female which is normally stereotyped in films as the weaker gender, another similarity maybe that they have both been lead there by something e.g. in the picture of the girl with the yellow trousers she was lead there by a man who was a friend of the family and who she thought she could trust, whereas the girl from our film was lead there by seeing scraps of clothing and blood stained cloth, there are also some differences between the two e.g. the girl with the yellow trousers is very brightly coloured which could suggest that she is a happy character but bright colours may show that she could be too trusting, whereas the character from our film is in very dark colours with a bright white t-shirt, the t-shirt could show purity and vulnerability.

The character from the lovely bones is the victim in her film, the character in our film would probably be the victim as well this maybe because she has just come across a murder and then she see pictures of herself and is wondering if she’s next, the two characters look a similar age we chose to use someone of our age because we thought it would be me convincing for her to be out on her own than a younger child.

We also tried to show our character as a victim in the film by dressing her in white which can be seen as a colour of purity and innocence, the girl from the lovely bones is wearing very bright clothing, this could suggest that she is quite naive and childlike which could also suggest that she is too trusting which if you have watched the film you will know that she gets asked to follow a man and then he murders her. 

Question 3

Question 3

This is our production name and logo, for our logo we wanted to include all of our group member’s initials, we drew out many designs for our logo and they were similar to this one but as we found out it was difficult create it on the computer, we then had another discussion and drew up some more ideas and came up with some new names (some of these were ‘cheesy grin productions’, ‘whisper’ and ‘paw print productions’) but again trying to draw one up on the computer was very difficult, we then looked at other film company logos and found this one, we then decided just to keep it simple with just our initials and a little symbol.

What does a film company do?

A production company helps to create the film by helping with budgeting, scheduling, scripting, casting; it also looks over the film from when it’s just an idea to completion, they are also responsible for finding a director and the majority of the acting talent required.

The film distributors that I would choose would probably be ‘Film Engine Entertainment Films’ as they have produces thrillers such as final destination 2 and 3, Apollo 18, Snow White and the Huntsmen and the Butterfly Effect.

Film engine was founded by Anthony Rhulen in 2001, Film Engine Entertainment is a leading full-service production, management, development and finance company focused on motion pictures, television and digital content suited for worldwide audiences. 

To date, the company has produced over a dozen movies, including the upcoming crime-thriller Evidence and action film Killing Season starring John Travolta and Robert De Niro. Notable Film Engine credits also include THE RUM DIARY starring Johnny Depp, Sleepwalking starring Charlize Theron, Lucky Number Slevin starring Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman, The Butterfly Effect starring Ashton Kutcher, and O starring Josh Hartnett and Julia Stiles.

The title order that we have selected is, camera work, directed, co-directed and then edited, we didn’t really think of any order to put the titles in we just put them in the order that the events happened.

Another distributor that we considered going with was ‘Lions gate’ any they have produced films such as The Hunger Games, The Hunger Games Catching Fire, Saw, Now You See Me the Enders Games and many more.

Lions Gate is an American entertainment company, the company was formed in Vancouver, on July 3^rd, 1997 and the headquarters is in Santa Monica California, as of November 2013 it is the most commercially successful independent film and television distribution company in North America and seventh most profitable movie studio

Question 4

The target audience for our thriller opening would be for 12+ male and female audience, this would probably be because with dead body and the blood stained cloth, some younger viewers may feel a little bit uncomfortable or maybe scared by it, I am aiming the film at both male and female because I think that both genders will enjoy it as it hasn’t so far made any suggestions as to whether it would be aimed males or females, if we got to make more of the film we could introduce more characters into it which may give us more of an idea of what gender the film could be aimed at.

The British Board of Film Classification, (BBFC) is a non-Governmental organisation funded by the film industry and responsible for the national classification and censorship of films in the United Kingdom. 

·       At 12A, moderate violence is allowed but it should not dwell on detail. There should be no emphasis on injuries or blood, but occasional gory moments may be permitted if they can be justified by their context (for example brief sight of bloody injury in a medical drama).

Action sequences and weapons may be present at 12 or 12A, and there may be long fight scenes or similar. Weapons which might be easily accessible to 12 year olds should not be glamorised in 12A and 12 works.

The U symbol stands for universal. A U film should be suitable for audiences aged four years and over, however it is impossible to predict what might upset a particular child, especially at the lower end of the category range.

 




PG stands for parental guidance. This means a film is suitable for general viewing, but some scenes may be unsuitable for younger children, A PG film should not disturb a child around eight or older. Parents should consider whether the content might upset younger or more sensitive children.

12A means that anyone aged or over can go and see the film unaccompanied. The A stands for ‘accompanied’ and ‘advisory’. Children younger than 12 may see the film if they are accompanied by an adult (e.g. someone over the age of 18), who must watch the film with them.

15 means no-one under the age of 15 is allowed to see a 15 film at the cinema or buy/rent a ‘15’ rated DVD. 15 rated works are not suitable for children under the age of 15 years old

Films rated 18 are suitable for adults. No-one under the age of 18 is allowed to see an 18 at the cinema or buy/rent an 18 rated DVD. No rated works are suitable for children.

 
The ‘R18’ category is a special and legally restricted classification primary for explicit works of consisting sex or strong fetish material involving adults. Films may only be shown to adults in specially licensed cinemas, and video works may be supplied to adults only in licensed sex shops. ‘R18’ videos may not be supplied by mail order.

 

Audience profile

Age: 14+

Gender: female 

Media usage: news papers, television and radio

 Interests: films-thriller genre preferred,

TV shows- soaps, documentaries

Music- no preferred genre normally listen to what’s in the charts

Magazines- don’t really read magazines

To collect this information I asked my younger sister what like dislikes and interests she has (this picture is not of her, as we had to do the conversation over the phone), my sister is at the correct age that we are suggesting our thriller film should be viewed.

We also handed out a questionnaire to a number of people to find out what things we should and shouldn’t include in our film, some of the results we got back were:

 

·       No chase scenes they can look cheesy and have been done to many times before

      ·       Make sure your music fits the kind of thriller you are producing as if it is wrong it can make the whole opening sound strange.

Question 5

We made our thriller opening appeal to our audience by taking in to account everything that was said to us in the questionnaires E.G. one of the main things that came back was to think carefully about the music choice we made sure that it was suitable for our thriller movie, we spent a lot of time trying to find a suitable track for our film and in the end we decided to go for two different track as half way through the opening the character walks into a shack and as we show a pan of the inside environment the music changes to many ambient sounds to create a sense of panic. We also used a variety of shots in this film including close up, i feel that the use of the close ups in the opening helped show emotion and show how the girl is feeling, we can tell by her face that she is feeling confused, a reason for this maybe that she has just come across alot of old clothes that lead up to an abandoned shack.

We also used an effect on all of our shots to make them look darker (as when we filmed it was a quite a bright day and made it difficult to see some parts that we wanted to film e.g. we wanted to include a part of the girl on her phone but couldn’t because the glare on the phone made it difficult to see what she was doing, the effect that we used was bleach bypass, the reason why we chose this effect was because it gave everything a darker look and also created some shadows which added some more tension to the film as we don’t know what’s out there.

This is one of the first scenes in our opening and it is of a blood splatter cloth, the reason I have chose this shot is because as I said it is one of the first shots in our film which separates the shot of her walking down a long path it makes it appealing to the audience as nobody knows what’s happened for there to be blood on these pieces of cloth or where they have come from, I feel that this creates tension as nobody knows what’s happening also it could be considered to be quite disorientating as some of these shots rotate and move (this was not intentional but we felt that it worked well in the film) it also creates questions from the audience as they don’t know why the scene is rotating.

This is the shot that is just after the previous shot and as you can see it is an extreme close up of the girls face, we chose to do a close up so you can see the facial expressions on the girls face which in this current shot show confusion as we can see that the eyebrows have sort of moved into a frown shape, I have chosen this shot as one that grabs audience attention because of the facial close up because we still don’t know what happening or where she is also the fact that the photo is very dark suggests that something bad is going to happen or has happened as dark colours such  as greys blacks and browns suggest mystery and darkness.

This is the next shot was one that we hadn’t actually planned to shoot like this but we thought I was a nice effect so we kept it in, the way we filmed it was when we were looking round the shack we found a beam with a gap in it and then we did a bit of improvising and got a shot like this, I feel that this shot is appealing to the audience as we still don’t know where she is or why she’s there which again creates tension and drama, this shot is being filmed through a confined space which make it look quite claustrophobic, also with the background being black it make the character in the middle of the shot look very defined and stand out which could suggest vulnerability.

This is the shot just before the female character enters the shack and sees something she wishes she could un-see, the reason why I think this shot is appealing to the audience is because it is kind of the first clue as to what is going on as in the previous shots in the film you see her walk round the shack and pick up this cloth that you can see her dropping in this shot, I have had to slow down this shot as I didn’t fit in with the timings of the rest of the film, the surroundings in this shot also adds to the tension as we can see what looks like to be thorns, a wooden board, long grass and scrap bits of wood which make the location we chose look deserted and uninviting.

This is the final shot that I have chosen and it is a screen grab of a transition between the photos on the wooden board seen in the last screen grab with suspicious photos, writing and maps, to the female character walking into the shack and discovering what lies within, the reason why I think this shot is appealing to the audience is because we are just beginning to piece together what is going on and everything is finally starting to make sense until we reach the end of the footage when we discover what this dramatic build up has been about.

We took into consideration everything that the audience wanted into the film and tried to include most of it where we could e.g. we didn’t not include any chase scenes and we thought carefully about the music, also i feel we had smooth transitions from one shot to another which makes the film easier to understand rather than if the shots were all jump cuts.

I have shown my family members and some of my friends the thriller opening and the comments I got back were very helpful, some of the things that were mentioned were:

·       It was very dramatic

·       Made you want to watch more

·       Could have been a bit longer as didn’t really understand what was going on towards the end.

This helped me evaluate my thriller opening as I looked at the video in detail and picked out what I thought were the good and the bad points and then compared them to the feedback that my family gave me, the parts that I noticed were:

·       The camera quality not as good as we thought I was

·       When the music get tense we could have had something jump out at the audience

·       The setting that we chose worked well with the idea that we had created

Our thriller links in with a few different films, I think these films were ‘The Blair witch project, Orphan and The lovely bones, I feel like these link to our film because they all have similar traits such as the setting, some of the main characters and the idea of stalking I feel like things like this appeal to the target audience because they like the idea of feeling unsafe but knowing that they will be.

Question 6

I have learnt many things whilst creating the thriller opening such as how to import the footage onto a mac, how to edit successfully, how to crop down footage so you get a zoomed in effect and I have also learnt how to film and use different shots effectively,

Camera work: the things that I have learnt about camera work are: the use of a tripod, and hand held camera and the difference between the two and how different they look and what effects they give the film, the things that follow the filming such as editing, I learnt how to edit successfully and make the film look as smooth as it can be so it makes sense, I also learnt about framing and what to include in the shot and what not to e.g. take when she first enters the barn what is surrounding the shot is bits of old wood thorns and then a deserted road behind her which emphasises that fact that she is alone.

Editing: I have definitely learnt how to import footage as this has had to happen more than once for our group, I have also learnt how to find music that fits my genre and how to import it from a regular computer to a mac, I also learnt how to slow footage down so it fits with the pace of the music and what we feel it a correct speed for the film to run at and I also learnt how to export the film onto a memory stick and cd.

You tube played a big part in the thriller as we put the video on there and tried to get some feedback from the general public. 

Question 7

 
The way I have developed as a film maker are by actually learning how to film successfully with a hand held camera and a camera on a tripod, also I have learnt how to use many different camera shot and different angles and how and what effect they give to the film and how they make the audience feel.

When we filmed our prelim none of us had really filmed anything before and we weren’t really sure what order we should film things, also the room we filmed things in was quite dark and we hadn’t realised that until after we had filmed it and couldn’t go back and re-film as we had already done it once as there wasn’t enough footage as a member of the group wasn’t filming when they were supposed to and we missed out vital scenes when we filmed our thriller opening we made sure that we had I different person behind the camera.

I feel that we kept up the continuity except for one part when we just got a bit of the camera turning around and then we switch the camera shot around and we see her walking round again.

We did a lot of planning for our thriller opening in fact we did a lot more than we did for our prelim I felt this was the case because some members of our group were missing quite a bit and when you don’t have your whole group there it become difficult to make the decisions for them, we had many ideas for different shot in both our prelim and our thriller opening but we didn’t really stick to the shot list as when we got going with the filming we got a bit carried away and just went with the natural flow of things and we filmed what we thought looked good, when editing the film we came across problems when we discovered again we didn’t have enough footage or key scenes that we needed this was a similar case for the prelim as the first time we shot both of these we had the same person behind the camera.       

Wrong Place Wrong Time-thriller link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq01XyydWQo&feature=youtu.be