Thriller evaluation (The End)

Thriller opening: Our task was to make an Opening sequence to a thriller film, we had to insure that we had included a variety of shots and interesting (experimental shots) while making the opening. By our Group having these shots in our opening sequence, meant that we would get more marks later on and the sequence will look interesting to watch. We tried to take a different approach on what our thriller was going to be about, to do this we started off by doing a fairly large mind map of what thrillers would usually include. The idea behind us doing this mind map was that, once we thought we was done filling our mind map up, we would step back from what we was doing and look at the mind map and think about what hasn’t already been done or if one idea could be developed into a new and fresh idea. We really wanted to make sure that our thriller was different from the others that where going to be made by the people in our year.
The story line we came up with was about; a girl whose mother was killed by a man, the girl whose mother was killed tried to get her own back at the murderer by killing his wife (the one person that he loved and trusted). I think that our thriller opening looks professional, because of the way both sound and affects that where put onto the footage matched up and made sense when it was watched all together. I could imagine a proper film editor doing something like what we did with the footage that we had taken. Although many long shots showed just the two characters walking, we managed to use this and cut it up into pieces that we could later on order into an interesting fragment of the sequence. I think that the way that I have edited our film opening was simple yet very effective because we worked on fragments instead working on the whole thing. This way we could insure that every part of the sequence had as much attention paid to it as all the other parts. This also gave us an advantage of being able to have interesting and abstract material, perfect for a thriller film.
I think that we changed the conventions a bit by having both our characters as females (killer and victim). The reasons for this, as a group agreed the audience will expect to have the whole one male and one female character in a thriller film. In a normal mainstream film, the audience will be expecting to see a man attacking a woman. This way of plotting out a thriller will be very recognizable and familiar with today’s audiences. So instead we wanted to change the way the audience was seeing this situation, and feel as though there was something more to this attack that is happening in front of them. The sequence was to hold more importance to the audience because of this unconventional detail that we have created.

However we did involve some of the typical conventional aspects in the film. Such as; not showing the killers full identity, the only parts of the killer we did see where her eyes. By only showing her eyes it makes the audience feel intimidated. This adds to the tension that is slowly climaxing to the attack. We had point of view shots from just the attacker throughout the sequence, this was done to create the feeling that the main character was in danger and she was being watched by someone she obviously cannot see. But the audience know she is being followed because, we are showing them that she is being followed. These are just two of the conventional methods that we included in our sequence that shows the audience instead of telling them what they should be expecting to happen next. I think that involving these some of the conventional methods was worth doing, because it helped the audience understand the sequence more and that’s what we wanted them to do, making them understand the sequence enough but not too much would insure us that they are paying attention to the details that we have included in the editing process and also the filming process.
The preliminary match cutting that I had done earlier in the year, I feel that it was very use full when it came to making a rough draft of our whole sequence. Also it was useful in learning how to use the editing software, this benefited me a lot because later on when it came to doing this thriller opening we had no problems with trying to find tools on the program and we was able to get striate into putting all the cuts together without problems. The story boarding that was involved in this match cutting exercise also benefited our group because, we knew what key shots we should be trying to focus on; when it came to story boarding for our thriller opening, We was also able to fill in the text boxes provided with our ideas and how the shots that we had sketched would be interesting for the audience to see. The filming that we done for the match cutting, allowed us to experiment with the angles and ways we shot what was going on. We used different kinds of shot types for example; over the shoulder and tracking shot. These shots where all every interesting to watch, all the different types of shots that we tried out in the filming process made it seem worth while later on. Because the plot that we had wasn’t as exciting as it could have been. This fact helped us a lot later on because it was pretty much the same case with our thriller opening (the plot wasn’t that interesting or different). The match cutting also gave us advantage in choosing the kind of style that we wanted to shoot our thriller in later on. We also got to use the sound track pro program, this program allowed us to experiment with the different types of sounds that are on the program to create a sound track to suite the footage that was taken and the idea of how you want it to sound.

By looking at our thriller opening, we can clearly identify that both character where females and this factor I think, will definitely attract a wider range of people to come and see the thriller film because it is in some ways a way of breaking the rules a bit. This would attract people by interesting them with the fact that they are females and young also. I think that because we have quite a few unconventional traits our thriller film will be more suited and accepted by small independent cinemas that with releasing our film we will make it a small independent UK release. This will be distributed around a small number of UK ‘art houses’. By choosing to show our film like this we are taking less of a risk with how much money we could lose, although there is still a probability of losing money , it wouldn’t be as much money that could have been lost if we where to try and distribute our thriller opening to a big Hollywood blockbuster company. Another alternative that we have is, having the film released onto a TV channel and DVD at the same time. By doing this it will mean that our thriller will get a reputation on TV the will be brought by viewers when the DVD is released.
Our main target audience was young adults (14-26), but our full thriller film will involve a lot more parts to it where input from the audience will be needed for it to be understood a somehow justified. The film will be more for thought so that we have a specific audience viewing our thriller film and understanding why certain events took place and why the main character chooses to think the way she dose. The typical type of young adult that we have tried to aim for would be; someone who is into novels about revenge (English students), someone who is into seeing social realism and someone who is interested in new ways of filming and new types of narratives. So I think that having a specific target audience will be a bit harder for the case with our thriller film, but I would have to say that we aimed to make it suitable for young adults to understand and to be able to watch.