5th February - Initial Thriller Planning

Today, we started off by collaborating thoughts and views on what a thriller actually is, we discussed typical conventions, made mind maps and worked as a class to stick post it notes on the specific sections on the board like characters, storyline etc. Then we started planning our thriller and had various mind maps of ideas, story lines, locations, music, camera shots and extended ideas from people's opinions.
Sophie had this idea of photographs scattered over a carpet or side board and the camera pans over them as opening sequence. These pictures are going to be of us in specific situations (deepening on storyline which we haven't yet created fully) then the camera zooms in to one of the photos, which is going to be a still of the first scene of the opening sequence.

The picture above shows the initial ideas we thought of in the format of a mind map. We first branched off to "sub genres", such as Sci-Fi Thriller, Action- Thriller, Horror - Thriller. We decided as a group that "Sci - Fi Thriller" wasn't going to be easy and due to the limitations of time and equipment we couldn't make it look realistic. We liked the "Action - Thriller" and "Tradegy - Thriller", we we discussed ideas on how we could merge these two sub-genres. We also discussed the "do-not" elements of this course, which have been carried out before and looked predicable,boring or lost marks. We got 4 points for this. Firstly "predicable stalker sequences", we wrote this down because in the majority of pieces we had seen in the past, most of them took that approach and all filmed in the same way, by filming the "stalkers" feet and the prey, getting closer and closer, which we didn't want to portray in ours. "Get confused about thriller" was another aspect of the way in which people in the past lost marks. I said at the start of the course that "thriller are to make you jump", which isn't overly accurate, some do, however some don't have to. I saw "Wolfman" (Joe Johnston) over the February half term, which was described as a "Gothic thriller", this film was very jumpy, however the film we watched before half term in class, "Unusual Suspects" (Bryan Singer) wasn't, so it just depends on the way you want to go with it. Big "do not" is not to break the "180 degree" rule, which particular students have done in the past, including me in my preliminary task. A big "do not", advised by our teacher was not to have "unrelated titles" to the storyline and plot of the thriller.

We then discussed Music, obviously at this stage we hadn't got any ideas of our thriller, therefore we couldn't find, at this point, any corresponding music tracks. But we liked the use of silence as an ambient sound technique, which would hopefully add tension to the scene. Copyright music tracks, obviously have to be sourced and correctly applied for and agreed. So we thought as a group we would go for the un-copyrighted tracks, which I used for my preliminary task. After this we moved on to general possible ideas for camera shots. We thought if we filmed in the dark it would add tension because the audience would be feel as if they couldn't see everything in the shot, however, this would be difficult due to the lighting. We would have to make sure we had professional lighting equipment and it may be hard to organise and re-edit if it went wrong. Also the quality of the footage may be decreased due to the lighting. We liked the idea of using a range of creative camera paces and shots to develop tension make the piece seem interesting.

This mind map above was related to the sub genre combination we chose, which was "Action/Horror/Tradegy Thriller". We split it in to 4 sections "limitations/disadvantages", "ideas", "plot..." and "locations. Firstly we thought about the limitations, as I mentioned above, the element of filming in the dark could become very messy and difficult, due the fact of time and equipment. For the "ideas" branch, we came up with loads of themes like "psychological", "death", "car accident", "jealously", "murder" and "stalker". Some of these ideas where enhanced such as "murder" and "stalker". We had idea of the fact that there's a murder amongst a group of friends and one of them committed it. This was initially a positive idea, however then we thought it wouldn't be overly realistic and big childish. Then Sophie had idea of photographs opening titles, which linked to the "stalker" idea, so that is one we went for. (however we can still incorporate those ideas in to this final one).

I wrote a vague plot that a stalker would take pictures of male youth teenagers (due to the male:female ratio in the group and would take loads of pictures and have some kind of shine, which would link to Sophie's idea of the photographs across table. Then could result at the end of the film, a murder or rape etc. Lastly, we talked about locations, we decided seeing as it was a stalker taking pictures, scenes should take place on fields, houses and in town possibly. Obviously these areas would be different for each character who was getting stalked.

This mind map, above, just enhances the idea of the "opening credits, photography idea". We had the idea of it being a "scrapbook", "table" or "pin board" and for the camera to pan slowly across the them. The old fashioned photographs are going to be taken on a digital camera and then edited using "Adobe" or another photo editing programme then import it. Then after the slow pan has occurred the camera will zoom in to a picture of a location then start a moving scene from that still image. We may use gentle flashes to separate certain clips, obviously added in as an editing technique later in the process. The titles over the pan at the start have to be subtle, obviously legible but simple so that the focus isn't changed from the photos, because these photos are very important to the narrative of the story.