Inside the thriller genre, there are sub-genres such as action thrillers, crime thrillers, supernatural thrillers etc. Our media thriller is more a psychological thriller, using characters that have different ideas and motives which clash when their paths do, leading to a dangerous conclusion.
We’ve used certain media techniques to grab the audience’s attention such as suspense, nervousness and fear of the unknown – all of which you would expect from a successful thriller.
The film identification or genre allows films that have the same elements to be grouped together and thus allows people to more easily choose the type of film they wish to watch. By expecting these elements or conventions, a higher standard of the film is set by the audience as they can relate to other films and genre ideas which they are already familiar with.
Many teens would typically be interested in the tense, exciting atmosphere of a thriller. They will be familiar with the social networking site used and understand how someone of that age may be found in such a situation and how they would feel (as the audience would be of a similar age).
The settings used for our thriller opening were the girl’s house and the stalker’s den. We used my house for the setting; since it had all locations needed for the scenes as I came up with the plot with the setting of my house in mind.
I felt that the old grandfather clock would add the pace and suspense of the story, suggesting a feeling of time running out and had perfect positioning to carry the scene on into the next room as it was right next to the doorway. Old grandfather clocks are used in thrillers such as ‘The Lovely Bones’. The age of the clock and its eerie ticking added to the peculiar feeling that we were trying to portray throughout our thriller to suggest that something strange or bad will happen. (Image of the grandfather clock used in ‘The Lovely Bones’ below)
My house had two sets of stairs and two doors which could be used to suggest two different houses for the stalker and the girl, meaning we only had to film in one place. The stairs looked very different, and as one set of stairs in my house were still under construction, it helped to add to the rough, dirty perspective of the stalker.
The bathroom next door to the bedroom enabled us to link the bathroom and bedroom shots well.
My office is fairly small, and seemed perfect for shooting the stalkers shots to represent the theme of entrapment. This theme was also current throughout the opening by how the girl’s death is pre-determined; she appears trapped by this fate from the start and when her name and date of death is written, this thought is proved correct. We used the zipping up of her dress to suggest the sealing of her fate and the close-up of her eye and the shower-head to suggest an eye continuously watching her, an effect which is used in the film ‘Psycho’ through the constant use of circles (examples below).
(Psycho also uses imposing shower scenes of the girl to create the unnatural feeling of being watched)
We also used other thriller convention themes such as voyeurism (sensation of being watched) and isolation.
The girl was clearly being watched/ followed by the stalker, as we can see that he has all her details and even zooms right into her bedroom window. This sense of being watched is also apparent in the scenes of the girl as we get very up-close personal views of her in the shower, a close-up of her eye and we even follow her up the stairs. These are not perspectives you would see of people in everyday life, and considering we do not even know this girl, these shots are very imposing and stalker like.
The opening to ‘Final Destination 2’ uses very imposing shots in this way as the camera moves over the girl from an extreme close-up of her face then goes down along her body. We get a view which is quite intruding, suggesting that something is watching or getting closer to hurting her and hints that she is the victim.
Our scenes use this sensation of getting closer by starting with full-length body shots of Hannah, that get closer and closer up to a shot of her eye. This gives the effect that the danger is getting closer. We also see that the stalker is getting closer and at this point uses Google maps to zoom intrusively right up to her bedroom window.
Isolation is shown in our opening by the isolation of the stalker, alone in life, alone in his house and alone in this den. The girl is also alone at home, since when we see many rooms of her house, no one else is there. She also is alone in the sense that she does not have a boyfriend, and so this is why she plans to meet this boy (shown early on, she looks at an image on her phone, when she gets to it she smiles at the thought of meeting him soon and then goes to get ready. Deception is used as she does not realise that she will be meeting the stalker).
Deception is apparent in the opening of 21, as we see the main character applying a wig, glasses and moustache to hide his true identity. However we are aware that it is much easier to create a false identity with the use of the internet to deceive others.
A theme that may not be as clear in our opening is gain. This is shown briefly as we get an insight into the stalkers life, his den and his conquest book which suggests the gain and sense of accomplishment he gets from killing all these girls.
The stalker portrays the typical ‘bad guy’ character, being a psycho, assassin and criminal all in one, which gives the threat that this character possesses a large amount of power, whereas young girls are a weaker, more vulnerable sex and mostly the victims of this sort of crime. This type of story, dates back to before the “Yorkshire Ripper” back in the mid nineteenth century and more recently for example the Ipswich serial killings which involved an older man killing several girls. We have since become increasingly more aware of rape and such cold-blooded events that it seems like it is a regular occurrence on the news due to advances in forms of media such as television. This means that our audience will be familiar with the topic and are likely to relate to the situation.
Our opening conformed to the convention of the girl being a victim, as the girl in our story is obviously the victim of the stalker along with all of the other girls who are shown in the stalkers book.
The fact that we know the stalker has killed more than once previously and is about to again, suggests that there will be more victims later on to come. We would also expect that later on in the film there will be a detective character who tries to capture the stalker.
Limited light is used in many thrillers (such as the opening scene of Body of Lies, where the terrorist’s face is half in shadow) to keep mystery and wonder.
We used this effect of limited light and the time of day to create this iconography. We can see from outside the girl’s window when she is getting ready, and when both the girl and the stalker leave the house that it is late in the day and dark outside. The fact that they will be meeting in the dark with little light helps the stalker to get close to her without being recognised as someone different from afar and creates another worry for the girl in our minds. This darkness also hints to the characters dark thoughts and personality.
In the stalker scenes, the light of the computer screen was the only light source used where possible in the shots (like this shot from Final Destination 2 where the TV is the only light source - giving us a clear focus),
but additional light was needed in some shots to allow easy vision of what the stalker is doing in the book. I used soft photography lights in these shots as full lights were much too bright and did not create the right atmosphere. I angled them so that only one side of the stalker’s face was lit, and although we can see one side of the stalkers face and his hands in many shots, this does not give away any real detail and still leaves the stalker unknown and a mystery. We cannot identify this person, just as we cannot with the character in the opening of ‘Seven’ which our plot was highly influenced by.
The focus on the stalker's hands is used in this shot of 'The Lovely Bones' as he flicks through a similar book.
One thing we do pick up from these views of the stalker though is the fact he is wearing glasses. Our typical association with someone who wears glasses is that they are clever, shy and generally kind and trustworthy. The fact that the bad guy in our thriller is wearing glasses could be his way of deceiving the everyday public to making him think he is a kind honest man. The murderer in ‘The Lovely Bones’ also wears glasses, and is perceived as a kind, quiet lonely neighbour.
This deception that our stalker possesses enables him to be a greater threat as he is trusted. This is also true of the ‘Hollyoaks’ soap character Silas Blissett, who uses his superficial harmless character to get close to those he kills and still be seen as the lovely old man by the rest of the village.
Our opening switches between scenes of the two characters. This we had to do to immediately introduce the characters and their personalities so that the audience would be pulled in and feel a connection with the main character from the start. This go-between of the characters I feel we managed to make very successful though by showing constant connections between them and what they are doing, building the story from both sides, slowly finding out more about each character. This connection between their actions grows throughout, starting with a vague connection such as the stalker getting closer to the image of the girl on her social networking site, and the camera getting closer to the girl going from a full-body shot to closer, more imposing shots of her in the shower. The connection continues to grow as the same photograph is shown in the stalker’s book, circled in red, and the same photo is on the girl’s desk which gets covered with red nail varnish – using the same photo and the same colour which is used to hint at something bad happening to her which will most likely be death (we make associations such as death, blood and pain with the colour red).
The nail varnish scene was used to enable the audience to foresee that harm would come to this girl in the events that follow. This hinting of things to come is used in all of the ‘Final Destination’ films. In the opening of ‘Final Destination 2’, there is an image of the main character with a friend, which has a sharp blade lying close to the main character, close to hurting the image of her, hinting that the character herself will soon get hurt.
The link between their actions comes to a climax at the end, as we see both of them walking down the stairs and the scene of them walking out the door is cleverly blended to look like one. This connection foreshadows that their two paths will cross, and this becomes more apparent as the plot goes on and the similarities of their actions increase until they find themselves doing the same thing at the same point. This increasing connection also builds on the effect of time running out.
A thriller usually shows a storyline as it happens in a fairly fast pace. Although the plot of the story unravels quite quickly in our opening, there is no fast paced action exactly. Everything that happens does so slowly, thus creating even more tension for the audience in the wait, and it is the speed of cutting between clips that is increased opposed to the actions of the characters. Our thriller does not obey this thriller convention but challenges it.
Originally we kept all cutting between shots short and snappy, hoping to add to the pace and sense of time running out, as we had observed this in many other thrillers such as ‘Body Of Lies’ and it is also current in thriller TV series such as ‘24’ and ‘The Event’. However, once we had added all our scenes together, the time of the opening was around 4 minutes. Our opening had to be no more than 2 minutes long so we had to come up with a way to cut it down. We felt that all content was important and that if each scene was too short then the audience would miss certain aspects so we were reluctant to cut the scenes too much. However, some scenes such as the very first scene with the clock and the zooming into the house on Google maps we felt were a bit slower than other scenes, and although we needed the content, there were times (even if a second or two) where nothing was really happening. We cut these scenes in two and took out sections where nothing happened, or didn’t happen fast enough and added in transitions so that the time was shorter and the scenes flowed easier. Although this goes against the convention of snappy shots, I feel it works well with the plot of our thriller, as things are not currently happening at a quick pace and probably will not later on either. The plot tension is created from the waiting and wondering what is going to happen next, opposed to other thrillers in which death and action would happen quickly. As our thriller comes under a more psychological sub-genre, this lack of pace is important to the style.
Our transitions also enabled us to make certain points in the plot seem more powerful and tense by cutting them to go with the music. Music is used in all forms of the media to make the audience feel certain emotions subconsciously. In our thriller we used music at the beginning that we thought would create a solemn mood and as the piece was called ‘In Remembrance’ we hoped it may seem that we are looking back on what happened to this girl before she died. The next piece we used was to show a real sense of the danger that the stalker possesses and to build up tension. This tension build up is used often in thrillers, for example this scene in Jaws:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I91DJZKRxs This tension built by music is also current in this clip from Hollyoaks which represents a similar murder about to take place:
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our thriller opening includes two characters which represent two different social groups. Hannah Warren is 17 years old. Like nearly every other teenager, she uses the social networking site ‘Facebook’ to speak with her friends and plan meetings etc. Hannah is a realistic character, one which the audience should find easily relatable as she is a typical teenage girl going out on a date and nothing out of the ordinary. When the audience can relate to a character, they start to picture themselves in the characters shoes throughout the film which enables them to feel what the character feels, imagining their situation. The audience then care when something happens to that character as they feel a connection to what they are going through, and are hooked, fearing for the characters safety as they would their own.
There is no speaking in our opening, and so it is harder to tell what sort of character Hannah is. But we can pick things up from her movement, actions, facial expressions and the way that she dresses. From this we can presume that she is gentle and loving. She could be seen as naïve for falling for this boy she has never met, like a typical silly teenager, which is how an adult audience may view her. But I think that the real reason for her doing this is that she is young with hope of love, (which is my feeling when she is looking at the boy’s picture) she’s trusting & doesn’t imagine that anything bad could happen to her, only seeing the good in people. This is very much a teenager’s perspective and not how an adult would perceive the situation. However this would challenge adult audiences to try and get inside the mind of a teenager.
I wanted to portray the stalker as an undesirable loner who is dirty, living in squalor within a secluded, dark, wooded area where he can take his victims & carry out murder undetected by anyone living close by. I imagined him wearing an old, long, oversized, shabby jacket and large walking boots.
We tried to create this character in the scene of the stalker walking down the stairs. His boots created an eerie, loud, thudding noise as he approached the camera. This heavy thudding shows that he is not a small, weak man, he is big, strong and powerful: highly capable of killing the much smaller and more fragile Hannah. These boots indicate that he is not going out for a typical stroll. If he is going to take his victim deep into the woods at night, then he is going to need reliable foot-wear such as this so that the mud and other forest features do not cause an issue in the important time of the killing.
The slow pace at which he walks here is very chilling as you can imagine yourself in a situation where you are trapped and he is coming towards you in this manner. Tension builds as you wait with each step he takes.
The low angle camera shot used for this scene makes him appear even bigger, more imposing and leaves us feeling like the victim as we are lower down than him so have a lower status.
(Since we had to cut a lot from our original footage, you do not get to see the oversized coat as he is coming down the stairs, but you can briefly see it as he closes the door).
We tried to portray his unnatural qualities through the scenes of the book. A book is used in a similar way in the opening of ‘Seven’ and through the film ‘The Lovely Bones’.
The Lovely Bones
Seven
The patience and precision that the stalker shows when making the book, shows that he is proud of his conquests and storing the memories in this book is very important to him. The precision is almost obsession–like and appears a very abnormal thing to the audience.
In ‘Seven’ we see the scribbling out of faces which relates to our thriller where the faces are crossed out, almost as if they have been crossed off an accomplish list.
The images of people that are focused on in the book scenes make the people appear very small and vulnerable to the largeness of the stalkers hands. It shows that he is in control of these people.
Another thing that is likely to be very disturbing for the audience is the way in which the stalker runs his fingers across the girls’ photos, almost as if imagining stroking their faces.
In ‘The Lovely Bones’, we are told early on in the story who the killer is and he is not a mystery to us. In our thriller we have differentiated this idea to create a more imposing mystery.
The stalker’s social group is not one that we as the audience can relate to, and so we find him intriguing. Later on in the film we may come to understand why he is the way he is and what drove him to do such things, which again will captivate the audience.
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Our media product is an unprofessional small-scale production; there is not a high chance of many companies being eager to produce it. However, I feel our plot idea is original, entertaining and with added detail and a professional touch, would be quite a successful thriller film. As previously mentioned, it includes many thriller conventions and relates to previous thrillers (such as ‘Seven’ which the plot was influenced by) which the audience should find familiar and appealing when making the decision of whether or not to watch the film. Also, there is not a film with a plot too similar to ours that I know of. It relates to something that many of us know about as we have heard similar stories on the news, but it is not something too similar to any current films which the audience would hopefully find appealing in the hope to see something new. The fact these things do happen in real life and the audience would more than likely know about it, heightens the sense of fear that they would feel as it is quite a realistic story. Although there is not a film similar to this, the fact that they can relate to stories from the news on this topic will hopefully give them more of an insight to what the film would be like – which is important as no one wants to watch something they have no idea what it is about because they will have no idea if they will like it!
But as I said, there is not a high chance of it being a large-scale production, our best bet at distributing our talents would be posting the film to YouTube in a hope to get many views and a good response. In this day an age, many people have been able to make a career by posting their videos online, creating a good reputation and managing to gain a large audience making them well-known.
Facebook are aware that sites such as theirs are commonly used to create deception similar to that in our story. They constantly try to update the security on offer to you so that there is less chance of you finding yourself in that situation. We could write to Facebook and see if they would advertise our video on their site so that users are more aware. We could offer this to Facebook for free, and although we would not make a profit, this would in turn be an extremely effective way of mass-promoting our services.
4. Who would be the target audience for your thriller?
When producing our thriller opening, we had a target audience aged about 15-25 in mind. As we ourselves are in this age bracket, we were able to think about what we personally would like to see from a movie, what we would expect and how we could make things better from things we had already seen and disliked.
Our plot is very relatable to people of this age group, as many will use social networking sites and be aware of these dangers from stories which they have heard from the news. Also, our main character – Hannah Warren is 17, allowing people of this age group to strongly relate to her and her feelings, fears, and why she may have done what she did.
When holding an open screening for our rough edit at college, majority of the audience were around age 17. However as we had already made our opening with people of this age in mind, it was a good way to see if it would appeal to our intended audience. During the screening we asked the audience to fill in questionnaires (shown in another blog post) which returned very positive feedback and proved to us that this film would be largely successful with people of this age group.
We received positive feedback from a few older candidates also, and I feel that if we made ‘Fixation’ into a full-feature film, then it could also appeal to these older candidates. While the use of the young victim would attract the younger audience, trying to understand the mind and ways of the stalker and why he has committed such horrific crimes would largely appeal to an older audience (who would be in the age bracket as him). This appeal has been proven in films such as ‘Seven’ which are aimed more at adults.
Thus, we have been able to create a wide range of people and a large target audience that may be interested in our thriller.
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
Once we had an idea of our target audience, we were able to create situations and experiences that they could relate to and be interested in, such as the use of the social networking site Facebook and the idea of romance and getting ready to go out on a date. I think that the greatest way we were able to connect to our audience through our thriller was the use of our main character being of this age group.
Even in the short two minutes of our opening, I feel we managed to hook our audience by creating an uncomfortable and tense situation in which the outcome was unclear, and the next action had to be questioned. By keeping this mystery and tension, we were able to fulfil the way that a thriller should take its audience on this journey from the start. They are given a number of questions to think about in a short period of time: Who is the stalker? Why does he do what he does? What is going to happen to Hannah? How has he possibly gotten away with all these murders? Will he kill again and how many more times? Will he be stopped? Also, this could be a flash forward of events, we may find out later in the film what happened to Hannah and the stalker before this situation?
This technique is used in many thriller openings to draw the audience in, and make them eager to watch the rest of the film – which if they didn’t want to, wouldn’t be very successful! ‘Vacancy’ uses this technique, and straight away poses questions such as: are they lost? Why does the girl get cut with a knife? Is it a symbol of something bad to come? Is the gas station abandoned or are there people there? Etc.
We also addressed our audience’s desires of a thriller and what they wanted from ours in particular by changing certain aspects from our rough draft which was shown in our screening.
Results from our questionnaire told us that although the name of our thriller was obvious to most, it was missed by one member of the audience so we chose to add the name at the beginning also to reinforce it throughout and make sure that it cannot be missed.
One person commented on the music used throughout our piece, saying that it may work better if we edited the opening and fitted the music into the scenes, possibly to create more tension at certain parts, making the plot develop with the music. We took this on board when editing our rough edit further, making transitions between certain shots (like the clock at the beginning) change with the music. We also made sure that the blend between the two pieces of music we used was smooth and that the music ends with a crescendo to leave the audience at a high point of exhilaration.
Although we received fairly negative feedback from our questionnaires on the basis of the deception the stalker used to pretend he was someone else (the young boy that the girl looks and smiles at on her phone), we chose not to add in more scenes to make this point clearer as this would take up too much of our limited time for the opening. We also chose not to remove it from the piece as we felt it was a necessary action between the transition of the girl being in one place to the next. The overwhelming positive feedback on most other questions, suggests that this information isn't important to the plot and the fulfillment of the thriller genre.
6. What have you learnt from the process of constructing this product?
Beforehand, I had little experience with the use of a video camera or tripod, the extent of my filming being clips of family holidays and our media preliminary task. The camera that I was previously familiar with was fully electronic, and so used an SD card apposed to a tape. However the controls were fairly similar and not too complex, and after a short while when filming parts of our preliminary task, I pretty much had the hang of it. The only real difference was remembering to put the tape in and not record over what we’d already filmed when watching it back!
I have the video-editing software ‘Pinnacle’ on my computer at home. Although I had once managed to make a collection of images into a video, I didn’t manage to save it properly as I had done something wrong along the way. However, I was able to gain some experience in some techniques which we later used in iMovie. Such as: adding text, fading things in/out, adding transitions, adding music, and adjusting the length of time the photos were displayed for so that they matched with the music.
When making our thriller, I managed to develop these skills using software iMovie, and also learnt some new techniques along the way. I learnt how to split clips both film and musical at certain times, take away the beginning or end of a clip, move clips around from one place to another, fade music as well as noises non-digetic noises that were created during the making of the film, how to use the image stabilisation tool to make our camera movements smoother, how to speed up or slow down certain clips for effect, change the colour/appearance of a scene – although we did not do this, and how to effectively use transitions to jump in time (for example the clock at the beginning).
I was not previously familiar with using iMovie or a Mac computer, but my skills and awareness has developed over the duration of this task.
iTunes is another software of which I am familiar with and have access to on my computer at home. We used iTunes to import music into our piece, which helped to increase my knowledge of the software as I previously did not know how to cut or fade the music.
Over the planning and construction process of this product, I have also increased my knowledge and skills of using my blog.
Previously I had managed to add a slide-show, word document with images, and embed a YouTube document to my blog. But after doing this project, I now know how to scan documents in and upload them, add photos without using slide share and re-position and re-size them, and add a questionnaire form Survey Monkey.
7. Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from one to the other?
Our preliminary task involved producing a short piece of film with a simple plot line, whilst using as many different camera angles and movements as possible. Overall, our preliminary task was not given attention to detail as our thriller opening was. We did little planning that was more a discussion of the groups general ideas, how we could use certain camera shots for certain situations and who would be acting in each shot. The only real proof of our planning was the storyboard which we constructed, which was fairly detailed and enabled us to take each shot easily and quickly at the time as we knew exactly how we wanted it to be. As this was something we found very important to easily producing the piece, we made a very detailed storyboard in the same way for our thriller. We did however find when doing our preliminary task that with only one person having a copy, if this person from the group was ill, then production was put on hold. This time round, once we had made the storyboard we scanned it into the computer and added it to our blogs so that there would always be some way of retrieving it, even if we had forgotten to bring in a memory stick for example. We also printed multiple copies so that everyone had a paper copy also.
Another positive from our preliminary task that was vital in the production of our thriller was how well we worked together as a group. We set members of the group certain roles to perform while planning, which they completed and we shared between us to save time, and both I and Beth were equally highly involved with the editing and the filming – Beth filming all the shots of me, and me filming the shots of my Dad (the stalker). I was happy to volunteer to play the role of Hannah so that we did not have to get someone from outside the group to do the task. When sharing my idea with the group, Beth was supportive and gave positive feedback and helpful criticism to ways that it could be improved. I think that our shear excitement of the idea and how well we thought we could make it was what drove us to try our best and put all time and effort that we could into the production.
The wide range of camera angles was something that seemed to work well in our preliminary task, helping to keep the viewers interested as many very similar shots would have made the piece very boring. We developed our use of different camera shots further in our thriller, using ones that we hadn’t previously such as the low angle shot to make the stalker seem more imposing.
Where the comedy was more than likely the key to keeping the audience entertained in our preliminary task, the key to entertaining the audience in our thriller was the mystery of the storyline and the tension created.
Aside from the positive things that I have picked up from on our preliminary task, there were a few things that we realised after making it that we could have improved.
One problem that we encountered early on when filming our preliminary task was how to film the shot of George supposedly looking in/under a cupboard. This shot was one that we found ourselves unable to achieve well when using an actual cupboard as we had not thought well enough about the reality of filming the shot. We then used a computer desk to try and get a similar effect and we came across with the issue of getting a steady shot so low down to the floor, as obviously we could not use the tripod at that height.
When coming up with the shots we planned to use in our thriller and the locations of them, we tried to make filming easily capable by thinking about the difficulty of taking the shot.
We did however struggle again slightly with a low-down shot in our thriller – when Hannah steps out of the shower and walks into the other room. We again found it hard to keep the camera steady, but as we had already had practice with our preliminary task we found this easier to achieve than before. We were also more prepared and managed to get a large tub of hair conditioner which was perfect for balancing the camera on and slowly turning it as Hannah goes across the room.
Another problem we came across with our preliminary task when we came to editing was that occasionally we stopped filming too abruptly, and that it was easier to cut the end off a scene than to be left with an end that was envisaged to be a little longer. We did not take this to chance while filming our thriller and always left a couple of seconds after we were sure we had finished the scene, and even when we thought we had got a scene perfect, we filmed it again just in case! This meant that we encountered no issues when editing.
I think that the biggest and most obvious glitch in our preliminary task was the lack of continuity. As we filmed the shots across many different media lessons over many different days, we found that we were wearing different clothing each time and had to keep re-filming to try and make it the same. In the end though, we did not have enough time to keep re-filming and had to use clips that were not constant. The fact that we did it across several days I also felt made the whole situation less realistic. We obviously weren’t wearing the same clothes, but things around college were different on certain days and at certain times, and it was hard to pick up the right frame of mind from where we left off.
When filming our thriller, we did it all in one day. This avoided any mix-up of clothing etc and meant that everything was sure to be constant, which it was! For our thriller the time of day was something that was very important to be kept the same, as we needed it to be clear that it was late afternoon going into evening. This was easily achieved as the shots were all done at once.
Clearly our thriller was much more successful from making these changes; another huge credit to its success was our planning.
As I previously mentioned, little planning was used or needed for our preliminary task, but this was much more important to our thriller. We had to first understand what makes a thriller tick, what people expect and how one can be successful. We did research into many thrillers for this, and this research gave us the main inspiration for our thriller, by taking a similar theme to the opening of ‘Seven’.
We had to plan out what equipment and props we would need, when we would be able to film and how we would get there, who would act as the characters, what a suitable name for the film would be, music that we would use, locations for each scene, how our film would be able to attract an audience and conform to previous thriller ideas, and our saving grace and most important piece of planning of all – our storyboard.
We had some indication of what the editing software iMovie was like when we came to edit our preliminary task, but our knowledge and skills of the software have most certainly improved throughout the editing of our thriller. As I mentioned in the previous section, I learnt how to do many more things in iMovie, which helped to make our thriller even better.
The biggest difficultly we found when it came to editing was cutting the piece down to two minutes! But in the end I feel that this worked to our advantage as it made us come up with some amazing ways of cutting down certain scenes – such as the clock – which would not have been as effective if we had simply zoomed out slowly like we were previously going to. Doing this also gave us the idea of making the scenes flow to the music, which I think is the most effective and powerful thing of all.
I feel that I have learnt a lot from making our thriller opening, and I have loved every second of it, even when me and Beth got a bit frustrated at times when editing wasn’t going to plan, it was just because we wanted it to be perfect! And in the end, I think we managed to achieve something pretty close, which fulfilled the expectations and conventions of a thriller film incredibly well.
