Thriller Script

Scene 1: Steven’s conservatory                                                                3 characters total

                                                                                                                   John- Jake

1, multiple shots of Ryan working                                                                 James- Lorry

                                                                                                                   Ryan- Steven

Outside shot

Inside shot

Kitchen window shot

2, character appears fine, normality, quiet

First flash back

Second flash back

Third flash back

3, first flash back

Running through the woods, high speed, multiple angles

Over head

4, cuts back to conservatory,

Character begins to look distort, worried, phased

5, Second flash back

Running, first person shot, breathing heavily, looking about frantically

6, Cuts back to conservatory

Close up of Character, eyes, book, losing focus

7, final flash back

Side angle, branch brakes beneath feat whilst running, trips falls, close up, fade to black

Scene 2:  wood Ponds? Cold, bright, normality

1, pan shot of pond, fishing, camp

3 characters sitting around camp, fishing, quiet, peaceful

2, second character reveals a small bottle containing unknown pills

Script:

James - (revealing bottle of pills) I picked these babies up off a friend up In Stamford

Ryan - so this was the little surprise you were talking about earlier

John - What surprise, what are you guys talking about!?

James - (shows john the bottle) now I’ve been told they got quite a kick, so if your too much of a pussy john, u can fuck off now

John - (hesitant, cautious, looks at Ryan) Ryan, a.a.are you sure we should be doing this?, I don’t like this at all

Ryan - (grabs the pills of James) quit being such a little fag john, u gotta try everything once right? (opens bottle,  hands James one, holds another out to john)

John - …

Ryan – You gunna take it then? (john reluctantly takes the pill from Ryan)

James – atta boy, guess you’re not such a massive fag after all…

Close up of the three characters hands, with a small white pill in each, camera rotates around the three characters, they take the pill

3, Cuts to black

4, first person shot, vision blurry, Ryan laying on the floor, looks about

Ryan sees john with a fishing knife held to James’s neck against a tree, fades to black (losing consciousness)

5, ( Ryan regains consciousness) first person shot, camp is destroyed, no sign of James, blood in the water

John walking over slowly, close up of knife by his side covered in blood, Ryan’s vision begins to blur and fade again as he losses consciousness)

6, Ryan back in the conservatory, he looks down, and reveals a clean shiny knife, runs his fingers along the blade, a single tear rolls down his face and hits the blade, cuts to black

The END

Final idea- Thriller Opening

Me and Steven both had different views on what would make a good thriller as you can see from our ‘Pitch PowerPoint’; my idea was mainly based around using enticing shot types and a psychedelic environment  to catch the viewer’s eye. Steven put a lot of thought into an interesting idea to combine with these ideas about a young teen who is suffering from a mental trauma from a horrific event that he witnessed whilst fishing with his friends.

Ryan (Steven) is the main character in this and he is the one who is having severe flashbacks due to witnessing the killing of one of his friends. The whole reason his friend was killed is because James (me) gave everyone a psychedelic drug at the lake which caused John (Conner) to have a ‘bad trip’ and think that James was his enemy so he grabbed his fishing knife and lunged at James.

Steven is working in his conservatory (Ryans office)  when he collapses and begins to have flashbacks of this terrible event the rest of the opening is flickering between real time and the past also any point after the drug is taken is emphasised appropriately.

This is only the opening and after this the idea is that Ryan (Steven) continues to have these flashbacks and it drives him to insanity when this happens a whole range of strange events begin to occur and the viewer will feel true sorrow for this unfortunate character.

Rational

We thought it would be best to both approach out final thriller pitch by each creating our own idea and concept of what we personally would like to have seen included in our thriller. By individually creating an idea from scratch it allowed us to clearly present our idea in detail and then compare, contrast and most importantly understand what we each wanted the thriller be. This is exactly what we did and for good reason, we were able to see clearly what each other wanted to be included within our piece. After hearing both ideas we picked out what we liked and disliked and from that were able to combine the best from both, which eventually built up to create our final thriller pitch. 

My idea focused mainly on the effects of drug abuse. I decided this would make for a good thriller as I could use typical thriller conventions such as flash backs and black outs to help create the atmosphere and build up tension and suspense, effectively killing two birds with one stone.  A simple idea that could incorporate a wide variety of shot types and angles very easily and most importantly effectively. Lorry’s idea was more typical to the thriller genre using common conventions such as a dark, shady killer, cold dark surroundings and victim casually going about his day unaware of the terror about to unfold. Although the idea was simple, he had included some very unique and clever ideas and after a ten minute discussion we decided to go with the main plot of my idea with the addition of different points of suspense creating moments in his. Doing this allowed  us to create our final thriller pitch and both be satisfied with the end result evenly contributing to the piece... smart thinking as any issues we may have had could have proved disastrous on the set filming days.

It is because of this we were able to come up with a clever and effective plot that we hoped would keep our target audience engaged.

Audience Research And Production

After giving out questionnaires, verbally discussing  and reviewing previous results we have built up enough knowledge to make a positive input on the thriller we are going to create.

Our target audience is the younger generation (mainly teens 17-19) this means we will need to take this into consideration when creating our Thriller to ensure it is interesting enough for that specific age group.

Our audience research has made us want to go idea 2:  the teen who is having severe flashbacks of a horrific event he witnessed whilst on an unknown drug.

The verbal research has made us realise that as age 17-19 is often the age of experimentation that this idea would be very suitable and at the same time will have a positive impact on society as it outlines the possibilities of what could happen if you take random drugs.

Questionnaire Results

What do you think makes a good Thriller character?... The majority could not answer this question, as there is often a range of characters.

Q9

What do you think makes a good Thriller... main response: A good storyline (9/11)

Q8

What would be your favourite sub-genre of a Thriller film?

Majority said: Psychological

Q7

Would a Thriller appeal more to you if it was set in a local area?

Yes: 4

No:7

Explain why... main response: The local area is too boring (7/11)

Q6

 What age group do you think a typical Thriller is ?

Q5

 Q4

 Q3

Q2

Q1

We handed this questionnaire to 11 people in order to get some decent feedback of the Thriller genre and this is the results we gained. We soon found that our last question was not an easy question to answer as characters can vary from film. Nearly all of the subjects of our questionnaire were within our target audience range (17-19)  which made this task very productive as we now know what the two most popular sub genre is Psychological. This information has made us want to use the psychological aspects of Idea-2.