Analysing thriller clips

After writing our film evaluation in the computer room, tony asked the class to go back to his class room, where we would be analysing thriller clips in our groups. Tony then gave the class a piece of paper and asked each group members to pick what part of the film we wanted to analyse ,this involved analysing the lighting, use of camera (movement, angle, distance), music, editing, setting and location. I picked to analyse the editing in the thriller clips, I found this easy to do because I noticed the two thrillers we watched had a lot of editing done to them like special effects to create atmospheric mood.

The first thriller clip we analysed was Arlington road, I didn’t really know anything about this film, but from the title I knew it was going to be a suspenseful story. When the opening to this thriller, I noticed that the directors had played around with the pictures, by using special effects like fades, negative pictures, black and white effect and solarised pictures. Using special effects created nervousness to the audience. After watching the clip twice tony asked the groups to share what they have collected when watching the thriller, my group said they he used a lot effects like flashing lights and dark colours like red and black, also they pointed out that there was a lot of shaky movement in the camera. Plus the use of shots like close ups, mid shots, zooming, panning and many more. In addition we thought the music was abnormal because it had sounds of screaming, mumbling, and heavy breathing. Overall I think this clip was scary because of the special effects used like the sound and flashing lights.

The second clip we watched was Collateral; this was different to Arlington road, because it was set in a different environment which was the airport. The collateral used fewer effects than Arlington road. In this clips the music and the camera movement was the most important. They used heavy based sound like beating music, also created a busy atmosphere by hearing people talk over each other while the music was playing. Furthermore the use of different camera shots like close ups, to see the characters emotion. Also a bird eye view shot to show a busy environment in the airport. I noticed that it was up tempo so the shots were really short and they have used slow motion.

We didn’t have the chance to watch the other three clips because we did not have enough time but they were ‘28 days later’, ‘The shining’ and ‘What lies beneath’.