-We need:
  -Props
    -4 guns
      -Shotgun
      -MP5 rifle X3
    -Wrist tag from hospital X2
    -Fake blood
    -Fuzz light
 

For our thriller, we are going to cast Sophie Jackson. We picked Sophie as she looks the right age for our protagonist and she is a good actress and would fit in well with our narrative.








For our police man we are hopefully going to use Phil (media teacher), Adam (media teacher) & Chris (theatre teacher). We are using teachers as in most media nowadays, older characters are used to play younger characters, therefore we cannot use our peers as police officers as they would look too young, so teachers seemed the best option. We used two media teachers as they are likely to be available as they have been used in other thrillers before and as they are media teachers, they are likely to be willing to help with the thrillers.

For our detective, we are hopefully going to use Mike, we wanted to use Mike as one of our detectives, however, he has long hair, therefore, he wouldn't look like the stereotypical policeman, so we suggested that he be a police detective, as he would be able to look more causal.

Our group needs to get 5 guns for the scene. We need to get 4 police issue rifles for the police officers, this will help add to the identification of the character for the audience so that the audience will easily be able to tell that they are police men, however, we need to set the scene in England so, there will be no pistols and only the police issue rifles. The girl will have a shotgun as they are common place in England, either this or a hunting rifle, as many people in the UK go hunting.

My final storyboard for my thriller coursework. The frames were photographed on my phone, then edited together on my laptop.

Storyboarding is drawing out frames of the film before production begins. Doing a storyboard means that on the shoot day, their is a set of almost 'instructions' for the scene that they are shooting. Having a storyboard speeds up the production process as the director roughly knows which shot and the duration of the shot.

Detectives in the U.K. wear suits. Usually they are Dark blue or dark brown, We as a group want to take inspiration from the BBC television show 'Luther' (2010) which centres around a detective called Luther. His costume is a brown tweed suit, he wears jeans as well this makes him look more casual













The other piece of costume inspiration we have been thinking about is detective inspector Lestrade from another BBC television series 'Sherlock' (2010)

As a group we decided in getting a police 'wallet' that we can show in the opening scene when they arrest the girl, this way we can show the location of the filming as the badge changes from country to country and this badge represents that it is in the UK

I want to do quadrant filming for the thriller. The filming type is used to shows social anxiety and difference in character. The main character having mental illness is a perfect excuse for the filming to be used as she is different to the other characters so it will show a difference between the characters, a good example of the use of quadrant filming to show what I described is the tv show 'Mr. Robot' (2015) and the film 'Drive' (2011)

The entire film will not consist of many cuts hopefully, I intend to do a few mini 'oners' in the film, however, we will film all of the cuts even if they are unneeded as it is better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them, the 'oners' will not take too long to film
, maybe there will be a couple of takes of each and then refining them into the best in post, however, for the shots that will be static or hand held, we will need to film each one multiple times each with a different lens as for the same reason for filming the static or handheld shots, it would be better to not need them and have them than to need them and not have them. The problem with the static or handheld shots is that they will be time consuming as each shot will need to be shot multiple times with the inclusion of lens changes.

The only foreseeable problems will be weather and actors. The weather could be a problem as we are filming on-top of a multi-storey carpark out of school bounds and we are filming in January. If it snows we will not be able to get to the location, and the drone shot will be out of the question. Also if it rains there will be the problem of getting the camera equipment wet. If it snows we will not use the drone shot and use a location in school added in with the green screen to create the sense of being high up. If it rains, we will use the second to top floor of the multi-storey car park so that there is shelter from the rain and will not use a drone shot, or if the weather clears up towards the end of the shoot, we will film the drone shot last or vice versa.









The problem with actors is if they are ill on the day of shoot, which is possible as we film on the first week back from half term, which could lead to a winter cold which could make them unavailable on the shoot day, this can be avoided by having back ups. We had different actors that we considered for the role of the characters, and we could use the other actors on the shoot day, the other option is because there are 3 other groups filming at the same location as us, we can use members of the other groups in our thriller.

There is only one location for our thriller. Our thriller is set on-top of a multi-storey car park in Guilford. The setting is important as it is set somewhere high up so that there is a feeling of vertigo and makes the scene more intense which will add to the genre conventions of a thriller. Being high up also adds to the story in the film as the girl wants to kill herself after she has killed someone so creating the sense of vertigo makes this more obvious and makes what is happening on screen easier to understand.

Our group decided that our target audience for our thriller would be 15-19. We decided this age range as a lot of the people inside that range will be at school, this in tern means that they will get school holidays. School holidays mean that there is a few times of year when teenagers are at home and bored, this means that they will want to go to the cinema in those times. The age range also starts at 15 as that is the age when you can start to watch more intense films with action, violence and swearing in them, and those are many common traits of a thriller movie, this also doesn't limit gross income of the film as if the age range starts at 18 due to age restrictions, it stops a big group of 15 to 17 year olds being able to see the film which means that there will be less money generated for the film.

Our group did 2 test shoots, this is due to the first one not turning out very well. On the first test shoot we planned to do the fight scene that leads someone into dying, however, it came out too non-naturalistic and made the supposedly intense opening scene look comical so we had to entirely rethink the opening scene, so instead we went for the bit just after the murder had taken place. We chose to start it here so that we could have a stand off between the woman and the police officer, this is as many western films create tension through this method as having two people pointing weapons at each other, the audience wonders who is going to be killed first.

Test Shoot 1
For our first test shoot we got the storyboard that we designed and headed out to get some actors. One of our group members volunteered to be an actress and then we got another actress from the study room. we filmed the test shoot on my phone, this meant that all of our shots were hand held which was good for the thriller aspect of the film as the footage was shaky and this put more movement into the scene which fitted in well with the fight scene.

The footage came out nice, we used a high white balance, this made the footage look like we were filming in the evening, it also worked with the fact that we were filming in autumn and the orange tint the footage had looked complimentary to the colour of the leaves on the trees. The aperture and ISO were had to figure out as the backdrop of the countryside was very bright and we wanted to see the actress and the background but it was a struggle to see the background and not make the actress a silhouette, eventually however, we decided to use a low ISO and a higher aperture, this caused the light sensitivity to be lower and the aperture allowed more light into the lens, this combined with the lower light sensitivity allowed both the background and the actress to be seen.

Editing the test shoot however, was what made us need to redo the test shoot, our shots did not look right, in post and trying to fit them into each other felt unnatural and forced. The final product looked beyond average, the fight scene lasted about 3 seconds and the story/genre looked unclear, this wasn't only to do with the filming however, it was to do with the entire story of the opening sequence, so we went back to the drawing board to completely redesign the opening sequence.

Test Shoot 2
In our groups second test shoot we wanted to eradicate all of the problems that we had with the first test shoot, for the most part we did and we got a better end product which was a big achievement, however, when I was watching over the footage before editing, I noticed that one of our group members was in a considerable amount of the shots, this meant that I had to edit around them which made a few of the cuts in the footage a bit jumpy, however, it is a test shoot so it isn't meant to be perfect, and we were happy as a group at the final result.

We spoke to our media teacher and he suggested a new narrative for the opening sequence,
so we set out to try and film it, and then we realised how we could mess around with it and make it look appealing, the idea was that a police officer points a gun at a panicked looking woman and then the woman looks distressed and starts crying shouting that she 'didn't do it' and then do a tracking shot around thew characters and then it reveals a dead woman on the floor, the woman who is insisting that she didn't do it is holding a knife, after the officer convinces her to drop the knife, he cuffs her and walks away with her.

Filming the idea was good, it wasn't a dull idea, and playing with new ideas to change the idea around was interesting, this lead to the filming not being dull which was something we worried about if we were doing a scene without a fight scene, but, the footage came out well, we used the aspects that we liked about the first test shoot as building blocks for the second test shoot, so we used the same camera settings and the same handheld aspect. I also thought that it would be a good idea to put a oner in the scene so we filmed an entire version of the scene where it was just a oner which I personally would have rather used instead of editing together the clips, but we missed the walking away scene at the end so we couldn't only have one cut in the sequence otherwise it would have looked unnatural so we had to do a few cuts but we still managed to incorporate the oner in the scene.

Before the test shoot, we as a group didn't know what we were going to do, so we decided to story board a test shoot so that we had a rudimentary version that we could work from in the test shoot. We created the order of the shoot this way and let us work out what we would be pointing the camera at. We followed the structure very accurately and edited the clips in the order that they were shown in the storyboard, however, we did remove a few close ups of the weapon, as they seemed useless in the grand scheme of the story as you see the knife in the fight scene anyway. The fight scene was the hardest bit of the film to choreograph as it needed to look realistic as we didn't want to break the suspension of disbelief, so as a group we wanted to make the most realistic fight scene as possible, this eventually proved impossible to do.

Social Media
over the last couple of years, social media has been more prevalent and has been focused on as one of the most important things in modern technology, this means you can connect with more people that you do and don't know, a lot easier than ever before. On of the main applications for social media is tinder which puts you in contact with people you have never met before if you two like each other. One of my ideas for a thriller is about a murderer on the app who matches with a girl, they begin to talk, and he kills her. At the beginning of the beginning of the film, they match and start talking to each other, it will be edited to make it look like it is happening for a few weeks/days, they meet up and he kills her, in the rest of the film it is an investigation into the murder, and when they find out who it is and look for him, they research his past and find out about his poor upbringing and gets into a nature vs nurture angle. The opening scene will use parallel editing of the two using the app until they match with each other. This is to make it look like fate that they matched also it can show the different reactions to them matching, his being more sinister and hers being more happy.

Mental Illness
A man commits a very serious crime, he then decides to plead insanity so that he could get a shorter sentence, after, he realises it was a bad idea and decides to try and escape from prison with two of the patients. In the opening two minutes to the film it is him pleading insanity in court and him being sent to a mental institution. I wanted to focus on the angle of mental illness as it is a challenge to do and if done well it can be very effective and very thrilling as it is a very real world thing as there is a lot of cases of mental illness in the world and that means it is more real world than a kind of alien invasion thriller. In the rest of the movie it will be the man escaping from prison, and on their escape, he realises that it wasn't the best idea to escape with them as their mental illness makes it harder to escape and creates conflict within the group.

Technology
A man finds a USB stick out in the public on the floor, he takes it home and plugs it into his computer, he finds a file on the computer named 'Booker beta' he opens it and it installs a artificially intelligent personal assistant onto his computer. This assistant and him begin to get along and after a while Booker asks the man to allow him access to all of the mans personal emails, texts, documents, then Booker begins acting strange and the man realises it wasn't such a good idea, over the course of the film the man begins to fear the assistant and realises that letting the assistant into all of the information was't such a good idea. he opening scene will show an average day in the life of a working man, it will be overlaid with the sound of news reports talking about the advancements in technology in thew past years, especially talking about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Hypnotism
A man with a phobia of spiders goes to hypnotherapy in the hope of eradicating his fears, he awakes two days later not realising that he has missed a day of his life, he goes to get breakfast and hears a knock at the door, it is the police and they tell him he is under arrest for a murder, he has no recollection of it even though there is cctv footage of it taking place and there is witnesses of him entering the persons house, he works out that it must be to do with the hypnotist, and requests an investigation into it, the film then follows the police force looking into the hypnotist and realise that there is a pattern as many people where sent to jail for murder after seeing the hypnotist. The opening scene will be the mans daily routine, when he goes down stairs in the morning and sees a spider, he screams, puts it in a glass and throws it out of the window, then he goes out tells someone about it and they suggest that he should see a hypnotist.

In the second prelim task, we were told to edit what we filmed in the first prelim task. We got onto adobe premier, went into the rushes folder and started straight away. We decided to start with a long shot to establish the setting and get a feel for what the whole character looks like as we decided for her to be the character that the audience would side with, this was character A. We then went onto a mid shot of character B who walks through the door and goes up to character A and tells her to 'do it' the scene mainly consists of that, however, we kept shot duration longer on character A, her having more screen time shows the audience that that is who they should have sympathy for as more time on screen means that they are more important.

While editing we were told that we weren't cutting with meaning, we were cutting into clips that looked 'cool' this means that the clips we were cutting to didn't have reason or meaning behind them. To insure this doesn't happen, I will watch all the clips over and decide based on movement and on how powerful the character is which scene will go where, so if it was a scene where a character is feeling weak, instead of using a mid shot, I will use a high-angle mid shot to show this weakness through camera positioning as well as dialogue. During editing we didn't follow the golden rule of always save and the computer crashed, this caused our nearly finished edit to be lost forever. The computer crash however was a wake up call for our group and having to start again so we all learnt that saving was a very important rule and we will all remember to save in the future.

When looking through the footage, I realise that we should have got the actors to learn the script beforehand as when editing, they would always look at the script and we didn't want it to be shown in the edit so we cut it in a way that it looks like they're not looking at the script, however, this led to the problem that when we were cutting, it didn't have meaning, this was because we were trying so hard to get it to look like they weren't looking at the script pinned up on the wall. When looking through the footage, I wish we did more shots and didn't have to rush the filming as in some of the shots the actors would start laughing so sometimes in the footage we would have to cut the scenes too quickly so that the audience wouldn't see them laughing.

Our group did two different edits, in one we wanted the audience to sympathise with character A and in the other we wanted them to sympathise with character B. We used the same shots for each and wanted to see how editing affected the audience so by using the same clips but different lengths we were able to create a second scene where character B was the one that the audience sympathised with, we did this through different shot durations, so if a scene holds a character on screen longer than the other, the one that has the most screen time feels more important to the audience.

In the thriller, It will most likely follow the genre conventions of being fast paced, this means that I will have to make short and fast cuts, whereas in the prelim task, it is a scene of dialogue this means that it is slow paced even though the scene is about something bad, it isn't intense enough to be fast paced as nothing happening within the frame is intense enough.

I will approach my thriller differently due to the prelim tasks, the camera work is what I learnt most about through the prelim tasks as usually I would follow the shot list shown on the storyboard where as now, I will shoot the full scene in one camera angle and film the scene again with another camera angle, this means if you want to use the angle at a different point in the scene you are able to as the entire scene has been filmed from the angle. The thriller in terms of editing however will be a lot more difficult, will be longer than the prelim and also harder to edit as we need to incorporate music into the scene which will make the complications even worse but after the prelim tasks I think us as a group are prepared to do it.

 

In our group, we were given a camera and a storyboard and told to film a short scene. The scene is about a person (A) that wants the other person (B) to do something as they are in trouble, B refuses to do it, and A leaves. The first thing we did was go to the studio which is where we were told to film and decided where about in the room we would film. After we decided we would film in a pre-setup set of a living room, we set up the tripod, we extended the legs until the camera was about five feet tall so it could be close to the hight of the actors but not too tall, then we put the camera on the tripod and inserted the battery and made sure the spirit level was steady, then we were ready to film. We focused the camera by zooming as far as possible and then getting the lens to as crisp an image as possible on the actors so in some shots for example we could have the actors walk to their markers where we focused them and then we could have them walk into focus. We filmed for a an hour and tried different shots such as a high angle, close up, long shot, over the shoulder shot, etc. doing as many shots as possible was good to help make the editing easier.


The "standby", "rolling", "action" and "cut" rules were utilised a lot while on set. The rule is that when the director shouts "standby" is that the set has to go silent and the actors position themselves so that the scene is ready to start filming straight away. After "standby" is said, "rolling" is said to get the camera man to start recording, they say this and not action straight away so that no dialogue is cut from the scene due to the camera operator pressing record too late or the actors saying their lines too early, this allows all the dialogue to be heard and caught on camera. When "action is said, this tells the actors to start acting, this means that if the camera operator starts recording late, the actors won't already be acting, so they have a buffer zone for any mistakes and gives final moments for preparation. After "action", cut is said to end the scene. If "cut" is used, this means that either the scene is over or it is being ended prematurely due to a mistake in the scene, so "cut" signifies the end of the scene.

A problem we had as a group was focusing, this is because we did not use markers to start with, we realised that when character A walked into the scene, she would walk in different lengths into the room to start with as she had no guide lines on where to stand. To solve the problem of focusing we ran the scene without filming, and put markers on the floor where she would have to walk to in the scene, this allowed her to walk into focus accurately so that the footage didn't seem out of focus. Another thing that helped get a clean focus is that when parts of the frame are lit up and in focus, the bright areas are covered by green lines, however, if it is lit up but not in focus, the green lines won't appear

If I was able to do the shoot again, I would rather have spent less time on the shots that we had to do for the story board and spent more time on using other shots such as the high angle shot that I wanted to do for character B as she is represented as a weak character throughout the entire scene so I would have also like to represent her as a weak character through camera work and not just dialogue. On the whole however, I think the shoot went well as the camera work went well, we used the right settings on the camera so the brightness didn't have to be changed in post-production and we didn't have to do any colour grading either as the white balance was good.

None of the actors had the chance to learn the script before filming, this ended up meaning that we had to have the scripts on set all the time, so we had to tape them onto walls that couldn't be seen by the camera but the actors could see them, this grew into a problem as sometimes in the footage, it was noticeable that the actors weren't looking at each other as they were looking at the script, so for the thriller, I will give the actors the script to learn before the shooting schedule so that they can know their lines before they come on set and their won't be need for a script.

The thriller genre consists of many conventions all used to create tension within a film. The thriller genre is what we are focusing on as that is the genre of our final 2 minute sequence. Thrillers typically consist of short fast-paced cuts and handheld camera movements as they connote fast paced action. within the scene as well there are usually mise-en-scene elements that show action as well such as guns and other props that are associated with violence.

Genre conventions are things weather it be editing, camera work, mise-en-scene or sound that are associated with a specific genre. So for example a romantic comedy would have slow cuts, romantic sound over the video and the mise-en-scene would be flowers and smiling

Genres can have more specificities within them making them into a sub-genre, so for example, a film such as 'shutter island' (2010) is a psychological thriller and uses different elements of the thriller genre and tweaks them so it isn't all about violence and the sound is more used to create tension instead of the mis-en-scene and editing