Inspirations For Our Thriller Opening

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

Vox Pop

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.

Audience Research

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.

Shot List

1) Extreme close up of newspaper ad
2) girl pulls ad off her fridge- close up
3) midshot of girl walking out of her kitchen
4) ots of girl walking down her corridor
5) closeup of girl opening her door from inside
6) mid shot of girl closing her front door- tilts down to her shoes as she walks towards the camera
7) match cut to a boy's brogues walking then sits down
8) close up of rubber gloves being taken out of pocket
9) extreme closeup of a boy with headphones on- audience hear the music he is listening to
10) extreme closeup of experimenter putting on gloves- sound of gloves snapping on wrist is           emphasized
11) hanheld closeup of girl running
12) closeup of experimenter pouring water into glass
13) close up of a girl biting her nails- her nail varnish is chipped
14) experimenter clicks their pen
15) handheld close up of girl still running
16) close up of experimenter locking window
17) pan of participants' polaroid shots
18) pan of participants feet in the same order as polaroids- feet are seeing starting to walk
19) mid shot of pps walking into room from behind
20) mid shot of girl who was running rushing into the waiting room
20) wide shot of the same girl joining the line
21) wide shot of the people standing in the room
22) extreme closeup of the gloved hand locking the door
24) black

Treatment

5 kids. One newspaper ad. One psychopathic experimenter who is known for his highly unethical methods. It's survival of the fittest as they are locked in an empty room with only a glass of water and a handful of leaves to eat, which is delivered through a gap under the door. As each participant starts to suffer from extreme dehydration and hunger, the experimenter observes how their individual psychological make-up determines which of them will first die, take matters into their own hands or find their own way to escape.

Preliminary Task in the making

Product Research-Se7en (1995)

Preliminary Task Review

What Went Well
Match on action was successful. We cut from a long shot of Georgia from behind to a mid shot in front of her as she was crawling up the steps. We explored editing through changing the pace of the running-up-the stairs sequence. It helps to show the realism of Georgia getting from the bottom to the top of the stairs however, without boring the audience and showing the whole time that she was running.
Shot Reverse Shot
After completing our preliminary task as a group we realised that we didn't really execute "shot reverse shot" properly.  We didn't use it for dialogue as it is commonly used for.  Although we cut in over the shoulder shots from behind me, it only showed Georgia's movement rather than dialogue.
Jump Cuts
We also didn't focus on the fact that it was a continuity task and included jump cuts of Georgia flexing her muscles because we thought it was entertaining.
What Are We Doing About It?
We are going to focus on the task objective for our thriller openings to therefore meet the audiences expectations on the task.

Preliminary Task - SuperZero

Product Research: Knowing(2009)

Knowing is a 2009 American-British Sci-Fi Thriller film directed by Alex Proyas and starring Nicolas Cage.

In 1959, student Lucinda Embry hears whispers as she stares at the sun. Later, she writes a page of seemingly random numbers and adds it to her school's time capsule, set to be opened in 50 years.
In 2009, Caleb Koestler is a student at the same school. When the time capsule is opened, Caleb is supposed to read and write about some of the capsule's contents. He's given the page of numbers written by Lucinda. His widowed father Jonathan played by Nicolas Cage, a professor of astrophysics at MIT, notices the numbers have a specific set of sequences referring to the times and locations of fatal disasters over the last 50 years.

I found the opening really enjoyable as it sets an unnerving aspect throughout the clip. We first see this by the murmur at a fast pace joined by the titles changing from numbers to texts in an unnatural way.

We first see a close up of a young girls face. However her face looks a little bruised and she is looking up at something. It appears that it is only the little girl who can hear the voices which implies that there is something sinister happening. Then Lucinda ignores her teacher and countinues looking at the sky the rapid whispering stops and changes to music with a more haunted atmosphere.

The camera moves from the playground to an ordinary classroom. The teacher assigns them a task and the kids start drawing. This is when the camera tracks the teachers movements and suspicious music increases slowly. When the teacher gets to Lucinda and see'a that she was writing down numbers the music stops and changes to a more static and unnatural sound. This is made more abnormal by the whispers. 

Overall I really like Knowing as it includes key elemenets of the generic conventions of a thrill such as a protagonist and a sense of mystery.