Audience Research- Interviews

Here is the video of our audience research.

Music

During class we looked at websites such as Moby Gratis and Sound Cloud to find original, non copyrighted music to use in our thriller, however we couldn't find the right sound so we thought of musicians we know that could help.

After listening to one of our mutual friends original songs, we think that the backing 'beat' would be suitable touse in our thriller. However, because he is rapping/singing over the top, we would have to remove his lyrics to make it fit in. Below is the song 'Casual Casualties' written and performed by our friend Michael aka Mythical.Shelby inboxed Michael on Facebook to ask his permission to use his work.

Audience Research

On Wednesday evening we planned to go to the local cinema to interview cinema go-ers and staff what they think makes a good thriller, what they like about thrillers and why.

We chose Wednesday because alot of people go on that day for the Orange Wednesday 2 for 1 offer, and evening because thats when people arn't at work or school and want to go out and socialise. We hoped to get a large variety of age groups to interview so we would have a wide range of information.

However, we realised we could only go during the day with our camera and equipment, plus we had all made seperate plans for that evening, so we chose to interview people in our school which would still give us a great range of people, and teenagers are the most frequent cinema visitors.

We chose to ask fellow students at school what they like and look for in a good thriller.
The questions we asked were:

• What is your favourite genre of film?
• What is your favourite thriller?
• What do you look for in a thriller?
• What was the most recent thriller you watched?
• Did you enjoy it? Why?

Researching Title Sequences

Looking at other film title sequences and television series, we noticed that the order of which the certain job titles appear, is more or less the same:
"_____" Presents
A "_____" film
Names of the main actors/actresses
Edited by"____"
Music by "____"
Costumes Designed by "____"
Producer(s) "___"
Director(s) "___"
Film Title

The opening titles of the film Se7en, In The Cut, Panic Room and many others all follow the same trend.

Cast and Crew

Cast
Police woman - Shelby-Jane
Murdered Husband - Ricky Brigden
Victim 1 - Drillan
Victim 2 - Emma Sofianou (Me)

Crew

Directors - Ahmed and Myself
Producers - Ahmed, Myself and Shelby
Cameramen - Ahmed, Myself and Shelby
Costume/Make up - Shelby and Myself
Scriptwriters - Ahmed, Shelby and Myself

Target Audience Research

Our target audience would be for teenagers 15+ as they are the age range of the people that visit the cinema most often. So to find out what our target audience enjoy about thrillers and why they watch them, we created a survey on SurveyMonkey and asked friends and family to complete it. We also advertised our suvey on social networking sites like Facebook and Tumblr so we get more results.

Examples of Psychological Thrillers

Nothing can beat the heart racing anticipation of  the next move and these films don’t need to be filled with gore and blood to shock and frighten. These are films that involve the brain and not just the senses. We want to reflect aspects from all these thrillers in our own.

The Talented Mr Ripley 

Anthony Minghella, 1999

Fatal Attraction

Adrian Lyne, 1987

The Game

David Fincher, 1997

American Psycho

Mary Harron, 2000 

Les Diaboliques

Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955

Bryan Singer, 1995

Se7en

David Fincher, 1995

The Usual Suspects

Consideration of a Target Audience

For the thriller, Me, Ahmed and Shelby wanted to make a thriller classed as a 'psychological' thriller. An example of how we would do this is that we reveal the protagonist at the beginning, there will be mind games and deliberate suspense and misconceptions. It also involves a policewoman and murdering suspects, as well as trying to divert her co-workers away from the real criminal which is in fact herself. I think our thriller would be classed as a 15 because there will be violent  scenes and could be too much for the younger viewers to handle.

In our group we decided to create a storyboard which shows our collected ideas for a thriller opening. Here is a short animatic showing the step by step  images of our storyboard. 


We changed some of the plot as we came across certain problems with our initial idea. 
The main issue we came across was for example, if a policewoman or any other member of the 'forces' has an accident, or if the spouse of a member of the 'forces' has an accident, they have life insurance and wouldn't need to worry about paying for an operation to save a life, which was the idea when we first brainstormed ideas for the plot. 
We then thought about making the policewoman's husband a murder victim as this would be more plausible and makes sense in the 'real world' more so than our original idea. 

Analysis of 'Brick'

Brick, 2005- Rian Johnson

The opening scene of Brick was very simple, but effective. To draw the viewer in from the start, the director used: the conventions of a thriller, camera work, editing, sound, and mise en scene and I will be discussing these aspects.

Conventions
Straight away, the audience begins to wonder what happened, and how these two charactors ended up in this situation. A common convention of films is to show the ending at the beginning, and then show the eveents leading up to this situation.
 
Camera
The whole of the opening is filmed using close ups and midshots.

Editing
The edit at the end of the scene foreshadows the next scene which builds tension for the audience. The slow edits also raise tension and suspense as it makes the audience ask questions.

Mise-en-Scene
The actors in this scene were wearing scruffy looking clothes, quite casual wear, in an underpass. It arouses suspicion and makes the audience worry and feel concerned as to why they are in such a secluded place.
Sound
There is only non diegetic sound in this opening, only music is heard and there is no diologue. This makes the audience feel a sense of unease as the music is calming and yet pschotic.

Production Meeting; Possible Problems

Today we began our storyboard for our thriller and came across some possible flaws we might have in filming certain shots. We tried to work out how we could create a 360 degree camera rotation around a person sitting on a chair. At first we thought that simple walking slowly would work, but it wouldn't be a smooth shot so we discussed the idea of putting the camera on a 'Scaletrix' track or train tracks, but then noticed that it would be difficult to get the camera stable and even if it did work, there would be background noise as the car or train went round the track.

 

We decided to try out as many different solutions as possible to see which one would work best. We could use office chairs and push the camera and cameraman slowly round the chair, or use an industrial sized wheelie bin and sit the camera and cameraman ontop of it and push that. We will also try just walking around the chair to see if, with a steady had, that would work.

Analysis of Past Students Work

I have been watching examples of past students work, to observe what aspects I could prehaps use in my own thriller.

I partricularly like this clip is called 'The Night Walker' which was produced by last years media students.

The clip starts with close up of a pair of hands playing an old, broken piano, bandaged up and bloodstained. The music starts off slow, creating suspense which entices the viewer in. The music then changes and becomes more frantic as the clip shows someone cutting eyes out of people in pictures. The fast pace editing creates a sense of unease.

There is limited diologue in this clip because music is most prominant throughout. It helps build the tension and create a cinematic atmosphere, where the audience are practically sitting on the edge of their seats. Diegetic sound is used as we hear the protagonist's footsteps as they run, breathing heavily and squealing.

There is also good use of camera shots, mainly filmed using a handheld rather than a tripod which creates the impression that the protagonist is frightened and doesn't know where to go or what's happening. We can tell that she is panicking as the edits are fast and the handheld camera shots are shakey.

 

The audience also never sees the face of this person, which makes them  question: Who could it be? Why are they cutting out pictures? Why is there blood on there hands?

Photography for Props

Today we met co-actor Ricky Brigden at our local park to take 'couple shots' as him and Shelby were pretending to be the policewoman and her husband.

At first we were worried it might rain, but we were lucky and it stayed dry, although very windy. While Ahmed and I decided what type of photos and what positions they thought would look best, Shelby and Ricky posed and tried to stay focused without laughing too much.

We then looked back over the pictures and got rid of the blurry ones, and ones where Shelby's hair was covering her face and the ones where they were laughing and pulling strange faces.

After cropping some and editing some into black and white, we decided on the ones we will use. Here are a few of the photos that we will put in frames and use as props for our thriller.

 

 

 

Props

Today, Shelby and I started to think about what props we would need in our thriller film. We decided that we should start taking photos of the policewoman's murder victims/suspects that we would put on the 'Wall of Victims' and we used some people from our class to take photos of. 
We also thought about taking pictures of her and her husband when they were out together, as well as typing up fake newpaper reports from when her husband was murdered.


On Friday (tomorrow) we plan to go and photograph the 'couple shots' of the policewoman and her husband. Web are planning to do this in our local park so we decided to check the weather report for Friday midday. As it could be raining, we will use an umbrella over the camera, stay near shelter and will not stay out too long incase we catch cold.

Alfred Hitchcock; Shadow of a doubt

Shadow of a doubt (1943)


People dancing in elaborate costumes, old fashioned, classical music
Industrial landscape
Establishing shot of a house, gets closer to a window
Run down boarding house
See money on floor, we can see that whoever owns it is rich and careless?
High pitched, frantic music
Beats in time of music
Moves camera around the room, highlighting certain aspects
He is lying on bed, looks lifeless
Dressed smart in a well cut suit, smokes a cigar and has more in his pocket, we know he must have an expensive lifestyle- so why is he in a run down boarding house?
His voice is calm
Talks down to the housekeeper-, thinks he's superior than her
Pulls blind down- enclosed in darkness, shadow reflects his dark personality, antagonist
Smashes glass- quick to become violent
He outwits the police, we know he is smart and resourceful

Risk Assessment

Risk Assessment Sheet

Film Title: Independent Law

Producers: Emma Sofianou and Shelby Jane Prentice

Directors:  Emma Sofianou and Ahmed Sayed

Date: Friday 13th January 2012

Major Issues:

Filming

1.     Finding a suitable location

2.     Check all equipment is working properly

3.     Making sure the equipment isn’t stolen

4.     Steep stairs going up to warehouse

5.     Safety in the warehouse

6.     Falling of the chair and injuring yourself or others or the equipment

7.     Making sure the person who is gagged can breathing through nose

8.     Make sure every one is safe at all times  

Solutions

1.     Shelby works at Iceland’s so we can use the warehouse to film in

2.     Check if the camera has full battery before starting to film

3.     Make sure there is more than one person around the camera at all times

4.     Go up the stairs slowly and carefully

5.     There a hot boiler in the corner to look out for 

6.     Practice falling of the chair on a soft surface then do the real shot

7.     Have some one who can breathe through their noise with ease

8.     Make sure parent and teachers both have contact details and also some one should have credit with them at all times while filming

Emergency services:

School phone number: 02082704200  

Local Police: 999

Local Fire: 999

Local Hospital:999

Music

The music that we include on our Thriller opening must be non-copyright music as we don't want to be sued by the music companies. The websites we can use to get non-copyrighted music are:


-mobygratis.com


-freeplaymusic.cm


-newgrounds.com


-unsigned.com


To get the music from these websites we are going to sign up for an account and email the company to ask if we can use their music, as it's "intellectual property" even though it's free to use.

BBFC

The BBFC is an independent, self-financing and not-for-profit media content regulator. They operate transparent, consistent and trusted co-regulatory and self-regulatory classification and labelling systems in the UK.

Their mission is to:

• protect  the public, and especially children, from content which might raise harm risks

• empower the public, especially parents, to make informed viewing choices

• recognise and respect adult freedom of choice within the law

• respond to and reflect changing social attitudes towards media content through proactive public consultation and research

• provide a cost-effective, efficient classification service within our statutory remit

• work in partnership with the industry to develop innovative service models to provide content advice which support emerging media delivery systems

• provide an effective service to enforcement agencies

Analysis of Memento

Today I watched Memento (2000) Directed by Christopher Nolan. It's about a man suffering from short-term memory loss, uses notes and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife.


Conventions
Enigma, he can't remember things yet he needs to sort a problem out, he has to leave himself clues. He is the Antagonist of the film even though he murders people.  


Camera
The opening starts with a point of view shot of a polaroid photograph. Whats special in this film is that it is filmed in reverse,confuses and intrigues the audience.

Editing
The opening has long clips to build tension and has slow edits to show the calm and non frantic atmosphere of it all.

Sound
The film opens with a piece of music which then is overpowered by the gun shot. This leads to the black and white flashback with which has narration over the top.

Production Meeting; Creating an idea

Our group went on to develop a single idea and started to 'flesh it out' and figure out important details such  location, props, cast, camerawork, etc.

Production Meeting; Spider Diagram

In our first production meeting, my group and I discussed ideas and possible storylines and plots we could use in our thriller. We brainstormed ideas and also wrote down some of the conventions we might want to follow.

Coursework Brief

Our task is to create the opening and titles of a new fiction film in the thriller genre to last a maximum of two minutes.