Thriller Evaluation

Thriller Evaluation

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  Within our Thrillerstudies we analysed and noted features/conventions from many Notes 1 different texts. All of these have influenced our product but in different ways. Our most profound influence for the thriller opening has always been the ITV drama "A Mothers Son". This mainly influenced the location as A Mothers Son opens to the image of a young person running along a rural seaside area- we thought this image was extremely effective and applied it to our own thriller film. In our thriller opening there is a series of establishing, wide angle shots that mirror those in A Mothers Son. Here are two screenshots from our opening and A Mother’s Son’s: I have pointed out features that we were influenced by within these opening shots. In to white’s opening shot A Mother’s Son’s opening shot: We would have liked to Our location also matched We used the expansive horizon line have shot later in the this shot in the to emphasise the desolation and evening to get this In this shot we surroundings, the track we isolation of our character within stormy, atmospheric sky have included the chose featured similar this setting. but our technology vanishing point of reeds which swayed in a meant we had to film at the long path to ghostly way either side of a time with more light. add a sense of the path. We did however film on a depth and day with a heavy, seclusion into the brooding blanket of cloud scene. that provides some atmoshphere. The gender conventions we used in our thriller were predominantly male; but this was due to our opening featuring only two characters. Had we developed the film further, we would have introduced a wider range of gender into the plot. However, in the opening we chose to represent a young boy as an innocent, naive victim and an older male as a sinister, threatening character. We chose to use a young boy instead of the more commonly seen young girl to challenge this thriller convention. All the films we took influence from, for example the thriller “Hide and Seek” featured a young girl and we felt the convention needed to be changed as the audience have seen it so many times. The young girl from thriller “Hide and Seek” Our actor Thomas
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  Our reasoning fordressing our protagonist in white was that we wanted to represent the epitome of innocence and purity within this character. We also dressed our protagonist in this colour, as his costume was a coroner. Also we wanted the “colour of the film” to be white, featuring consecutively throughout the opening to link in with our title “In to white”. The title was also influenced by thrillers such as “The Walking Dead” and “Zero Dark Thirty” who use the three word effect as three words is a common amount to feature in a title because it remains memorable and effective. We also added a sense of mystery to the title as In to white leaves questions trailing as to what or how one would go in to a colour. The colour white also represents a sense of stillness or death, of pale skin and emptiness or blankness, a sense of loss- all images that link well into the thriller genre. When I chose the graphics for the film title, we were limited with our use of technology but decided we wanted the text and font to be simple and clean-cut, with white on black writing. I had been influenced by the very effective title of the sci-fi thriller “Alien” who’s title and font is spread out in white, bold letters. I spread the font so that there was maximum space between the letters to get this effect, also the use of a large dark space made the letters stand out and seem isolated against this vast and expansive abyss. In our characters we represented the difference in age in a stereotypical way, with the older character as the antagonist and the younger character as the victim. We wanted the audience to recognise the familiar convention of the age difference to secure the opening into the genre. Also we felt that this representation of age difference worked well within the genre and did not need to be challenged as it has proven to be effective throughout many successful thrillers, for example “The Killing”. Notes 2 In our planning production we researched the facts, figures and statistics on how our audience receives the media and what kind of media distribution methods there are available to us. We researched from the BFI’s Industry Statistical Yearbook which showed us that the highest percentage of film viewing was on Television. If we were provided with funding we would look into having our film shown on Television, probably on “Film4” or “ITV” later at night to reach this wide audience. Ultimately we will be only sharing/posting our thriller to YouTube and to social networking sites such as Facebook which will be viewed by 5.5% of the audience (Downloaded/Streamed).This is evidently a higher rating than the film would receive at the cinema (3.4%) meaning that ideally the film will gain more views from a wider audience. This research sufficiently aided our decision as to where to distribute this, also having the option of posting to the internet is extremely useful to us as it instantly connects us to the widest audience possible, and ultimately for free. Access to the internet also aided us to research the market- searching films in our genre that have already been released, analysing them and their successful/unsuccessful attributes, and taking influence from features that we could apply to our own product. We were also able to use websites such as www.blogspot.co.uk, to easily record the
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  process and uploadvideos, slide share presentations, pictures etc. Throughout the planning we have also used www.surveymonkey.co.uk and www.slideshare.com to aid the presentation of our work. Looking back to our preliminary task, I feel that our camera shots and use of angles have greatly Notes 3 improved. This is due to throughout this product we have carefully chose the individual shots we wanted, whereas on our preliminary task we aimed to just include as many different shots as possible, disregarding of how they looked as a sequence. We also chose shots that were conventional to the genre such as the establishing shot which emphasises isolation. Our choice of soundtrack has also improved as we spent a very long time choosing the two pieces of music for our final product. We looked at the tempo and style of the music and edited them in to fit the visuals and add the essential tension building. Our advance in technology between the two tasks (from moviemaker to final cut) meant that we were able to use advanced editing methods to create further complex effects. However this did create some difficulties, as we were unused to the software and struggled at first. Notes 4 We have all completed a survey to question our audience on their preferences in film. We used SurveyMonkey and distributed our survey via email, word of mouth and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. From this survey we learnt that; the majority of people questioned prefer a thriller with aspects of psychology or action, that lighting and location are very important, and that we should take influence from thrillers such as the “Bourne” trilogy and “Tinker, Taylor, Soldier Spy”. We have chosen to focus upon the areas of lighting and location heavily in response to this feedback, we also studied the two thrillers mentioned and produced our thriller in such a way that it will easily lead of into many different plots, e.g an action packed thriller or a more psychological thriller. Here is a screenshot from my survey that shows question one to three. Question three asked what particular traits/aspects are enjoyed the most. As this was an open ended question I decided to make a word cloud on www.wordle.net to show the most common words in the answers. This gave me a beter idea of the aspects my audience enjoyed the most.