Thriller Questionnaire Results

For research for the thriller we have done a questionnaire to find out what our target audience would be and what they would want from a thriller. The results are as follows:

1.Male or female?
Male- 6
Female- 4

2.How old are you?
10-20- 6
21-30- 3
31-40- 1

3.Do you enjoy watching thriller films?
Yes- 4
Sometimes- 4
No- 2

4.What is your favourite sub-genre?
Action thriller- 3
Mystery thriller- 3
Psychological thriller- 1
Crime thriller- 2
Medical thriller- 0
Sci fi thriller- 1

5.Where do you like opening scenes to be shot?
Woods- 3
Abandoned buildings- 4
Streets- 1
Rivers/lakes- 0
Unrecognisable places- 2

6.What should an opening scene consist of?
Crime- 1
Murder- 3
Mystery- 2
Abduction- 3
Other- 1

7.What type of shots do you like to see?
Short and fast paced shots- 4
Long and slow paced shots- 2
Action filled beginning- 1
Calm beginning- 0
Combination- 2
Other- 1

From our questionnaires we can see that our target audience is Men aged 10-20, only 2 of the people didn't enjoy. Our audiences favorite sub-genre appears to be Action Thriller or Mystery Thriller, based in abandoned buildings or woddland areas. Our audience also would like abduction or murder in a thriller. We also researched about the camera shots, more about pace but our audience want something face paces and shocking.

Thriller Planning and Storyboarding

Monday 7th 2011

Today we decided our groups for the thriller task, as Rosie, Daisy and Myself worked well together, we have decided to work together again. We started doing minor research into thrillers, looking for codes and conventions within the genre. We started to map out ideas and storyboard. We had decided on our final idea by the end of this lesson and also talked about locations for filming.

Thriller Research

 Seven

The opening sequence for 'Seven' (Kyle Cooper) has an eerie feel to it from the start. The music starts off soft and seems to build up as the sequence continues. The music is a series of electronic or machine-like sounds that makes the audience feel uneasy. The constant beat in the background gives the whole thing a clockwork feel as though the piece of cinema is going somewhere and is going to climax. About 58 seconds in the machine-like sounds are lost and sounds resembling wind are used, when this is done the same drum beat is still kept in the background. At 1:10 this drum beat fades further into the background as the music comes in harder and has more of a rock style to it over the top. This gives the audience a feeling of fear, as they feel they feel they are being attacked.

The images and titles in this scene also portray the eerie feel that the music does. The images flash between books, disfigured body parts and a man playing with machinery. This explains the music from before. Over this we have distorted text for the titles, as though someone has scribbled them on. Later we see a pen hovering over a book and certain words being crossed out, this is an unusual thing to do, and by doing something out of the ordinary an audience would feel out of their comfort zone.

Orphan

The music for the start of the 'Orphan'(Jaume Collet-Serra) starts off hard hitting and eerie. The music does not build, but rather keeps the audience at a constant state of worry. The change in the music is with the changing title, as titles change the transition matches with a noise. An almost flickering sound to go with a flickering transition pairs the two and takes the audience away from the normality of the child's drawings they see. Over the 'normal' children's pictures we see flicker things that are not seen as normal, such as the people are suddenly on fire, or are being stabbed with scissors. This makes the audience feel uneasy. Later we see a house full of people, that suddenly with the flickering sound is up in flames with the people dead. I think this opening shows a thriller perfectly, because it takes the normality of a child's drawings and turns them into something sick and twisted.

Preliminary Editing

Editing Lesson 1 

In this lesson we started to upload our film and edit it. Our first problem was that yet again one of our members was missing so we had to figure out who would do what with editing again, this was time consuming. We had decided to split it evenly and take it in turns to play around with transitions, titles and positioning.  After we had figured out who was doing what, we had lost our tape containing all our footage, so we spent part of the lesson finding this. Luckily we found the tape, but it was very time consuming.

After finding the tape we started to edit, this didn't take very long as we had decided as a group what we were going to do already.We had sorted out our transitions and cutting of clips in this lesson and only had titles and credits left to finish.

Editing Lesson 2

In this lesson we were yet again missing one member of our group as they have been failing to turn up for most of the preliminary task. Luckily we had nearly finished the editing. Between the 3 of us we played around with the different kind of titles and credits and how to use them. We also made slight changes to the footage such as, cutting parts and changing transitions.

In this lesson we didn't have a lot left to do, so we spent the majority of the lesson making changes and perfecting the preliminary task. This is our finished piece.