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.
For the opening sequence for the film about artificial intelligence, it would be hard to convey a long space of time and the evolution of technology in 2 minutes, instead, I could film it in the near future, so news reports about artificial intelligence in the real world and don’t use time lapses as that shows time passing, instead I could just use establishing shots edited in with shots of a daily routine to make the protagonist more relatable. Shots of someone making their cereal or toast and going out, while out he will go into a technology shop and buy a new UI for his computer, when he goes to buy it, he is informed about a new AI UI that is free for beta testers, he applies for the beta testing, uploads it to his computer and it says “hello” then the ending scene finishes, I want to make the scene slow paced as it will show normality in the man’s life, this will create a more realistic setting for a science-fiction film as to not break the suspension of disbelief, similar to the movie 'Her' (2013).
The other alternative for the opening scene is that the man developed the software himself as he is a software developer and then used himself as the test subject as the world is scared of the AI technology and he wants to show people that it is the way forward so he decides to live with it first. Then make the rest of the film to be a kind of modern ‘Frankenstein’ where the man realises that he was stupid to make it, then he leaves it and while he leaves it, it becomes corrupted, then it starts texting the man and threatening him, however the man doesn’t realise that it is the AI sending the messages, then the AI decides to start making fake social media accounts of the man posting racist and sexists posts then he gets fired from his job and loses his friends and everything and then he releases it is the AI doing it and then the rest of the film is him trying to shut it down.
Mental Illness
The opening scene is too slow paced, so I need to change it around, maybe start with the murder of the protagonist it may be hard to film but if done right it can be done effectively, for example, ‘Casino’ starts with the murder of the protagonist. How I could do this scene is the man being shot with a narration by the protagonist talking about bad decisions he has made in his life and then he gets shot, then he says “by far the worst decision i ever made was…” and it cuts to him pleading insanity in court and the judge sentencing him to 20 years in a institution for the criminally insane. This scene could work well or if you see the man getting killed, the audience could lose interest in the film as they know the ending, however, the rest of the film especially when he escapes with two of the other patients the rest of the film could be a guessing game of who killed him.
This scene is the one that the group is using for our final idea. We thought that the idea was the most practical to film and wasn’t a bad idea, we don’t want to show the murder taking place as that would make the scene unnecessarily difficult to film as the choreography would be a hassle, so we decided to start the film after the murder had taken place and then there is a stand off between the police man and the murderer, this stand off is shown as a oner moving up and down the two characters, and then moves to the other side of the characters and a dead body is revealed. This will be easier to film as there will have to be minimal choreography and special effects as the opening scene is just the suspense of either the girl stabbing the police officer, the police officer shooting the girl or the arrest, this is a easier way to create tensions as used in many 'westerns', it is the suspense of is the protagonist going to shoot first or die.
The first test shoot we did, we didn't have enough of an idea about what we were doing, the shoot was unorganised, and proved a hassle to edit as we got board of the idea very quickly and picked it apart until it no longer made sense. We edited the first test shoot and got the idea of completely changing the opening scene to the girl after the murder happened so the audience works out that she did it, but the rest of the film is based around working out if she did it or not.
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.
