'The Experiment' is closely related to the storyline of our film whereby a group of participants take part in a highly unethical psychological experiment. What we took from this trailer was the idea to include a close up of the newspaper advertisement for the experiment. We thought this was a good shot to include because it sets the tone and puts the context across. It also creates a slightly disturbing atmosphere and a tense, unnerving start to the film. We all jumped on the idea to make this our initial shot which we think works well because it starts off as a close up but the ad is then swiftly swiped away by one of the characters to reveal that it was stuck on the fridge. This is accompanied by a sharp sound effect to represent the dark and dangerous experimenter which becomes apparent throughout the sequence.
We decided to include a voiceover in our opening sequence so when we were discussing the sound, we agreed that we didn't want to have anything that was too overwhelming or rich sounding to draw the focus away from the narration. This trailer for the film 'Hard Candy' grabbed my attention as it is exactly the sound we were looking for. It includes ambience made up of sound effects rather than an instrumental and the sharp sounds help to achieve a creepy, dangerous feel and dark mood. Dynamics and texture builds up throughout particularly towards the end which definitely made me feel more on edge so this is something we incorporated into our own soundtrack. After watching the trailer a few times I decided to watch the clip without any sound and found that the sound really does set the mood, enhance the visuals and gives it that thriller factor so with that in mind we hope our own soundtrack will be able to achieve this.
On our second day of filming we moved location from Grace's house to a meeting room in school. We decided on this location as it had white walls and bright lighting which was perfect to fit with the clinical effect that we are aiming to achieve. These shots are of a horizontal track of polaroid pictures, one device we have used to introduce the characters. We used a track to enable a steady camera movement rather than a hand held camera which was likely to look shakey. We first tried to use to mini tracks, this is like a tripod on wheels. This wasn't successful because of the bumps in the carpet on the floor that we were filming on and because the wheels were going in different directions. Using the mini tracks also made the shots wonky because the camera wasn't balanced, we had to find a different way of filming this shot. We later tried two pole tracks on a smoother floor (in the corridoor of school) which was much smoother and steady. After a succesful track shot we took the footage from the camera and on to a laptop to edit it.
Our idea for our opening sequence was to film a sequence of close ups to create ambiguity but also imply certain things about each character in the same way that 'se7en' does.
Our initial storyboard contained a wide shot showing our lead protagonist pulling the ad off the fridge between shots 3 and 4. We decided to remove this as we found that the close up of the ad being removed from the fridge added conventional mystery as the audience, at this point, do not know who removed the ad and also enabled us to add a creative title onto the shot.
We also decided to include match cuts within our sequence do suggest relationships between people and locations.Shot 8 matchcuts from the lead protagonists feet walking out of her house to Ben walking into the waiting room of the lab suggesting that our main character is also going to the waiting room. We also used match cuts for shots 20 and 21. The different tracking shots fade into eachother to show that the people in the polaroids are the people who are waiting in the waiting room.
We shot frames 2-8, 12 & 17 on day 1 at a friend's house. We used a mixture of different techniques and equipment to achieve the different shots; We used the tracks, the tripod and handheld.
Rebecca is one of Hitchcock's many thriller masterpieces that stars academy award winning actors Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine and marked Hichcock's US debut. The film follows the story of a young woman (Fontaine) who works as a paid companion to a weathly Mrs Van Hopper. On a trip to Monte Carlo with her employer she meets an aristocratic widower named Maxim De Winter (Olivier) and falls in love with him. He then proposes to her and takes her to his country house in Manderley where the new Mrs De Winter is haunted by the lingering memory of Maxim's deceased wife.
The film opens with the credits fading in and out of the foreground whilst scenes of a misty, dark wood play in the background. The fading credits introduce the theme of a haunting presence and could represent the fading then reappearence of the memory of Rebecca which disrupts the happiness of the new Mrs. De Winter with her new husband.
The mise-en-scene of the opening scene is very dark and misty and various wide shots reveal bare trees and a gothic looking wood. The non-diegetic music that plays along with the opening credits acts as an overture, introducing the different themes of the film. A heavy orchestral piece plays, remeniscent of a 1930s waltz- implying wealth and romance in the narrative. The waltz-like music is then contrasted by the low pitched flute and piano piece suggesting a disruption to the happiness and romance that the waltzy music suggests. The music then fades into a very quiet drawn out flute sound and minor piano chords creating a sense of suspense as a wide shot shows dark clouds blowing over the moon.
Hand held camera is then used to track down a mysterious looking path which has been consumed by overgrowth creating the illusion that someone is walking through the wood. A voice of a woman is heard as a non-diegetic voice over, she seems to be reminiscing about her previous experiences in the present location.
A main thriller aspect we have planned to use in our
thriller openings is ambiguity. We want to portray the idea of ambiguity
through five character's body parts. During our product research we made the extension
to look at films other than thrillers to find wider ideas and further
inspiration therefore, researched the comedy "Breakfast Club". The
results of our audience research from our target audience "16-20"
year olds showed that 8/9 enjoy the genre of comedies therefore to respond to
our audiences preferred style we chose to take elements of this comedy, the
cast of five teenagers who are at first strangers to each other. Young adults
are also the main audience for franchisers such as "The Hunger Games"
in which there is a battle of the fittest between the characters; a theme that
we also feature in our film.
Another thriller element that we want to portray in our
thriller opening is a clinical effect. This idea reminded us of the horror
"Human Centipede". We researched this horror and saw that it related
to our ideas. The idea of a character acting in a doctor type role and the idea
of a group of people getting harmed were similar. We have chosen to include a
group of teenagers as our main characters - as in "Breakfast Club" -
who will ultimately have to fight for survival
From our vox pop we gained the information of what our target audience expect to be in a thriller and some thrillers that they know. This has helped to get an idea of what we could include in our thriller opening.
Twenty questionnaires were printed and handed out to help inform use of public opinion. After tallying up the results of our audience research we decided to go on excel and convey them in bar and pie charts. We realised that our questionnaire weren't fully representative as most of the respondants were female and there was not a balance between both genders, therefore we chose a balanced cast of 3 males and 3 females.
According to this bar graph, the seemly age range for our thriller is 16-20 years old. This indicates that we could apply some generic conventions of a teenager in the film. However in our questionnaires we also asked how they are presented in the public and most replies believed that they were stereotyped critically because of there age.
Our audience enjoy both mainstream and independent companies
but from the pie chart we can tell that mainstream was the most popular. This
would mean that our group should aim to include mainstream conventions to
appeal to a greater amount of the audience. Nevertheless we should not forget
that there still is a large amount of people who prefer independent and to
appeal to them we need to try and balance out the right amount of mainstream
and independent conventions.
A great amount of the audience chose comedy as their favourite
genre. At first we did not know how to interpret these findings. As we
conducted more product research and studied what films are also aimed at our
target audience we came across ‘The Breakfast Club’ – a cult comedy.We decided to include the idea of a group of
teenagers.
The results show that a significant amount of our audience have got Facebook accounts. This indicates that this social networking site is the greatest way to let people know about our thriller. Although there still is a great deal of people who are on Twitter, the majority of the participants had both Facebook and Twitter.
