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.