Well known examples/ producers/ directors

Examples:

• Pulp Fiction (1994)
• The Dark Knight (2008) / The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
• Heat (1995)
• Inception (2010)
• Run Lola Run (1998)

Producers:

• Darryl Frank
• Justin Falvey
• Nora Ephron
• Fran Walsh
• Howard Kazanjian

Directors:

• Martin Scorsese
• Quentin Tarantino
• James Cameron
• Steven Spielberg
• Alfred Hitchcock

Animatic Editing

Today i spent my time editing the part of the animatic we have ready, this will be presented to an audience when ready.

Industry regulations

The BBFC age restrictions guidelines to show what age is acceptable to be watching a certain film, the age categories go from U to R18, this shows that any age can watch a U film, while an R18 film is for 18+ only because of the adult content.

While researching age ratings i have found out that the majority of thrillers are age rated 15. This is because of violence and strong language included in the film. There are some 12A graded thrillers out there, this means that 12+ can watch but 10/11 year old can watch it with a responsible adult so this will be the adults choice whether or not to take this child. This will help us pick which age we are aiming for our audience so we are not picking and/or showing the wrong audience the wrong things. We think that 12A is too young for our film for our task so we are thinking of picking age rating 15 for it.

Industry reseach

This website showed us various aspects of the production/ distribution process. It help with this because it showed us what roles various people do in the industry and what they do for different jobs in planning and making a film. This will help because it will help us understand what to do and what we have to do while planning, filming and making our film. When we get to the stage of filming and editing our film we will know what areas we will have to use for certain areas of the work for the production of it.

Our company name idea

       

Creation of animatic from storyboards

Yesterday my group found an actor for our main character in our task and took him out to practice some shots to get a feel of what we are doing in a location quite similar to the location we are going to use for the film. We are planning to take some more shots tomorrow then we will put the images together and upload them on to here.

Flash Practice for Flashbacks in our task

This is me practicing some Flashes and sound effects to use in our main task, this would be perfect for what we have in mind and will be very useful to know during this time.

Initial ideas for task

Plan for remainder of our time on research and planning (from 26th November)

Tuesday:  Develop our ideas in an online mind map/ plan our storyboards

Wednesday: Storyboard/ film the storyboard and turn it into an animatic

Thursday: Present initial ideas to class

Saturday & Sunday:  Tom (audience theory applied to textual analysis/ other theory analysis/textual analysis) Dan (institution research/Secondary research (aka film review and Internet review)

Tuesday: Target audience, Company and brand development

Wednesday: Plans for shooting (i.e. lighting, costume, time, location etc.)

Thursday: Go into more detail with planning

Memento: (textual analysis)

A convention of this thriller opening is that it is mysterious. It doesn’t reveal very much to the audience, only hints of a whole message. For example clues are left around the room to give you an idea of the situation, the narrators voice acting over the top of the extract tells the audience a great deal about the character and what he is dealing with and the camera movements hint at his general disorientation. Mystery is something that many thrillers contain and so we think that it may be a key aspect of our thriller opening eventually. Overall an active audience is best suited to thrillers with this element. Especially with this extract because it is very complex and sophisticated, but also because the information is almost thrown at your in bits and pieces by the narrator and so needs an active audience member to decipher it.

                 Low saturation of colour is used in the extract. The effect of this makes the sense of disorientation and confusion in the extract bolder and makes the clip seem even more mysterious. It also makes the characters life seem even more bland than it already is with the lack of colour. The use of this in our product may have a emphasising effect on the mystery and horror aspect of it, but just in case it turns out to be ineffective it may be worth editing the colour on one version of our product and not doing so on another. Then we could compare the two or even get feedback from outside our group on which is better.

                An extreme close up on the male protagonists face is used to start off the extract. This shows his empty facial expression really well and creates a good starting point in the process of understanding the character.  We may be able to make use of a shot like this at the beginning because we plan to use close ups of our characters facial expressions in our product as well.

                The camera movements are very slow throughout the extract, the effect of which is the emphasising of the characters slow perception of his surroundings. Another way the extract uses camera movements to effect is when there are POV shots of what the character is looking at in his room. In Memento this is used to show the characters disorientation and overall thought process, justifying what is being said in his head through shots of what he is looking at. The way that we would use this technique in our piece is for the effect of this same disorientation, but as we are not using narration the way that this, we can’t use it to the same effect that Memento can.

Video of reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bragrpm50k

Audience Research

Questions:
 Do you like a thriller to be easily understandable or not and why?
Give an example of a feature in a thriller opening that you like to see?
Through what means do you watch thrillers?

From these interviews I have learnt it varies what people want from a thriller and we have to keep this in mind when making our film.

Brief history of the Thriller industry

Thriller and Suspense Films: These are types of films known to promote intense excitement, suspense, a high level of anticipation, ultra-heightened expectation, uncertainty, anxiety, and nerve-wracking tension. Thrillers are often hybrids like for example action- or adventure- thrillers,  sci-fi thrillers (such as Alien (1979)),  crime-caper thrillers (such as The French Connection (1971)),  western-thrillers (such as  High Noon (1952)), film-noir thrillers (such as  Double Indemnity (1944)), even romantic comedy-thrillers (such as Safety Last (1923)).

In the 1950s Hitchcock added Technicolor to his still-brilliant dark and moody films, now with exotic locales and glamorous stars. He reached the peak of his career bringing out classic thriller films with this Technicolor on.

The spy film was most popular during the 1960s when the Cold War was in evidence, and audiences demanded more action/thriller-suspense pictures. The start of spy thrillers then went into James Bond in 1962. Beginning in the Cold War 60s (after restrictions on violence and sex were lifted somewhat), the slick, escapist Bond action/adventure spy films were appealing to large audiences with their exotic, travelogue locales, tongue-in-cheek humour and dialogue, nifty gadgets and ingenious toys to combat evildoers, fast-action suspense and audacious stunts, and gorgeous, scantily-clad sexy women.

More modern, complex, high-intensity political thrillers with paranoiac political atmosphere, double- and triple-crosses, threats to entire countries, spies, assassins, conspiracies, and electronic surveillance were then introduced in the 60's and are still going on today.

All information got from: http://www.filmsite.org/thrillerfilms.html

Analysis on Title's

The motion tracking on the titles are a very useful thing to use to make the title fix onto an
edge of an object/head and when it moves the title moves along side it.
The video ripple effects can be show with a gun shot or something tragic like an attack, this
would be really good for a shot during an attack.
Another thing that would be useful is the titles fixed to different objects like walls and
stuff like that to show the titles in different places and to make it look like it's supposed
to be there.

Practice Of Shots

                                    This is a video of some of the shots my group are thinking of using in our main task in AS media studies.

Planning our research and planning

Today during our lesson in media studies we decided to plan what we are going to research and how we are going to plan for our main task.

The types of research, planning and presentations we are going to be using:

• Textual analysis linked to theory
• Storyboard our ideas using a comic strip
• Mindmap of locations
• Framing of shots with www.sketchfu.com
• Initial ideas scrapbook
• Link to youtube
• Evernote the pictures for the location
• Brainstorm what ideas to use
• Stop motion animation for intial ideas 

My Group For the Main task

For the main task in AS media studies i will be working with Tom Flaxman. We both don't have much experience with this sort of work but we will make it work.

These are my storyboards for my AS media studies preliminary work.