Wednesday, 18 January 2012

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.

Thursday, 12 January 2012

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.

Saturday, 5 November 2011

Thriller questionaire



Questionnaire

This lesson, we have been tasked with creating a questionnaire with the intention of discovering what interests an audience in a thriller opening to ensure our thriller will have the most impact and include elements that interest and entice the audience. We thought questions based around conventions, Mise en scene and general information on each person was required.

1)      What gender are you?

Male                                             Female

2)      What age group do you fall under? Circle your answer.

11 - 13                                             14 – 16

17 - 19                                              20 +

3)      What is your favourite genre of film?

Action                                             Comedy

Horror                                            Thriller

Drama                                             Sci-Fi

Romance

4)      Do you enjoy watching the genre: Thriller?

Yes                                                  No

5)      What age rating would you expect a typical thriller film to be?

U                                PG                 12A

12                              15                    18




6)      Would a thriller appeal more to you if it was set in a local area?

Yes                                                      No

Explain why…


7)      What do you think would be your favourite sub genre of a thriller film?

Political                                                Crime

Conspiracy                                           Psychological

Disaster                                                 Mystery

Legal                                                      Religious

8)      What do you think makes a good thriller?


9)  What do you think makes up a typical thriller character?

Friday, 4 November 2011

Prelim Evaluation

When filming our prelim there where a few points we had to ensure we included before we added our own creativity. These points were:

  • Movement/walking: We tried to make our transitions of movement as fluent as possible for example when Steven was walking up the stairs, walking down the hall and then the first person perspective of Steven approaching “the antidote”.

  • Conversation: For our conversation we included a close up of my face when I was talking and then an over the shoulder view of me pointing the gun at Steven when he responded to my dialogue.

  • Entering a different environment (walking through a door): When filming this part we had to ensure that we got the timing and positioning right for the next shot so that the transition remains smooth.

We used a fairly wide range of shots when filming but the prelim mainly consisted of wide, medium, close up and over the shoulder shots as we didn’t feel the need to include many other shots for our specific ideas.

Although we did consider the mise-en-scene and sound we felt quite limited in the school environment and had to complete this prelim within a small time scale so we did not have the time to move tables and chairs out of the room for filming. If we did have more time we would of completely suited the room for the prelim including a laboratory scene in which the antidote is found.

As our group only consisted of me and Steven it made filming very difficult. So when it came to the over the shoulder shot we called in a friend (Luke Doyle) to film that specific shot. Other than that me and Steven tried our best to get the most effective shots as possible to add hints of tension to our action-thriller type prelim but as this was the first time either of us had ever filmed in this way. Some of the shots were slightly “rusty” and shaky but we have learned from this.

If you look at my prelim planning at the bottom of the blogg you will find that our shots do not meet the specifications of our storyboard this was slightly due lack of costume but mainly because we did try film according to the storyboard but we used trial and error and thought that the shots/ideas we used where much better than what we originally planned.

In conclusion I believe there is a lot of room for improvement in our prelim for example mise-en-scene, improved dialogue and more fluent shots but I don’t think it was too bad for a first try.

Thursday, 3 November 2011

Uk Film Classification



The BBFC controls and classifies every film in the UK. The BBFC decides whether a film should be allowed to be broadcasted or sold in the UK if so the film will be classified in one of the following categories: