Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The definition for thriller is a film, book or performance piece that has the audience on the edge of their seats, and there is a constant build of tension and excitement.

A sub-genre is an additional part of the genre; in the Thriller genre there are a lot of additional sub-genres. You have:

These are just some of the sub-genres that are associated with the genre thriller. We decided as a group that we would add sub-genres to our thriller; we decided to make a good thriller and to get the audience hooked and what to carry on watching the film. So we decided that we would base our thriller on psychological, action and crime- thriller. This was some of the sub- genres that we found in films we looked at like Psycho, Shutter Island and No Country for Old Men. This we found out by our questionnaires we handed out was the most popular sub-genre people enjoyed watching. We used these sub-genres as a way of building tension as well as grab their attention, we did this by adding images at random intervals in the thriller, and we did this with a picture of a doll that would be in the frame of the thriller. We wanted the audience to try and work out why we would keep showing this image- it made them worry and overthink what this has to do with a girl. We developed our skills and made our thriller opening so the audience do not suspect that this girl is about to get shot at the end of the opening. This is another good way of building tension; if something happens in the opening then the audience will be drawn to carry on watching.

We decided that we would call our thriller opening ‘The Revelation’ because revelation means to reveal something a secret or a story. We thought that this would fit really well with our opening because the girl –throughout the opening- is trying to discover something about someone she knows. Also there is a section in the bible that is ‘Book of Revelations’, this represents a religious side to our thriller as well as psychological. This also links to the torn up bible in our opening that you see later on.

We used a panning shot to look across a room, this is a key room and we wanted the audience to see all of it and get a full idea of why this room is so important to the opening. With this shot the audience were able to pick out different sections, using a panning shot it meant that they didn’t have to look at the whole frame in one go if we just did a long shot of the room.

We used a close up shot of The Girl’s hand and the bracelet on the hand was in view of the shot. We chose to do this shot because we wanted the audience to see that the bracelet was there even if they didn’t before. This was the key shot that would introduce that this prop is a key part of the opening, even though it wasn’t at the beginning.

This is a screen shot of the beginning of the panning shot. This shot will show the audience that there is something wrong about this room.

This is the key bracelet close up shot that introduces the audience to one of the key prop.

To come up with the narrative we all sat down and discussed what we wanted our narrative to be, we decided that we would make a pitch of our ideas. So we all came up with an idea each in our group, then presented it to the class.

We came up with the idea to use a darker effect on the clip to make the opening seem more unreal. This was because we didn’t use any lighting other than natural. If we had used extra lighting in the house then it wouldn’t have made any sense to the audience. So when we found the effect that could make the whole of our opening darker and more mysterious we used it on all of our clips and pictures. With this editing we, as a group would be able to make the whole of our thriller opening a dark setting. We wanted our audience to feel like this is a scary feeling to it, we wanted them to know that something bad was going to happen before it actually happens.

These two screen shots are of the main room we filmed in quite a bright room, the sunshine was always shining into the room. So by adding the darker effect it means that it isn’t too noticeable for the audience that it is lighter than the other rooms were.

When we was discussing as a group where our location for the thriller opening would be, we decided that we wanted it to be in a really old building. Red Hall was suggested; we had all been there before and knew what it looked like. We decided that we would email the committee and ask their permission. What appealed to us about the Red Hall, were the stories that people have been told about it, it is meant to be haunted by a woman. We thought that with this idea of it being haunted and also with our storyline, we thought it was perfect. The Red Hall emailed us back a couple of days later and said that they had had a meeting and we could film there on Thursday 21^st November from 9am till 4pm, the only condition that had that they wanted to have a copy of the opening when we had completed it. Our setting is convent to our thriller opening because we wanted to add to the mystery.

For our thriller opening we wanted to have a female to play the main role, this was because we could show that this is a vulnerable girl. This is a normal thing to find in a thriller, it is very stereotypical.  We chose to use Mia because she was in our group but also because she was blonde as well. Being blonde helps to show that vulnerable side and that she is ‘helpless’ to anything that might cause her harm or discomfort. As her costume we got a white knee length dress for her to wear. We chose white because this represents purity and innocence’s. It also didn’t have any dirt on it or any other colour or stain, so this shows that she doesn’t get dirty or goes to place like this because it isn’t in her comfort zone. When we covered to dress in blood, the red really stood out and was very in the audiences face, so much that also on the verge of gruesome. This really added to our constant build of tension we were aiming for. We decided that we would have this venerable girl, because it would also have resemblance to ‘Psycho’ the film we have taken some of our ideas from. 

Our props we used:

• ·      A silver bracelet- shows a link back to her past to what has happened before she has got to where she is now. Like Psycho with the money in an envelope.
• ·      An Old fashioned doll- Symbolises that someone is there other than her because the doll keeps moving from one frame to another, also from one scene to another. Like Psycho, but the camera/ shot symbolises that someone is watching her and following her.
• ·    A Tatty Bible- This bible was mostly used to send a message out, it had messages in say ‘I see you’ or ‘Turn around’ this was why we put this bible here. We also wanted to give a religious feel to it. Se7en one of the thrillers we looked at used bibles to give the audience messages also.
• ·      Images of the girl in the opening (stalker shots)- These shots were to signify that this isn’t an all of a sudden act, it shows that this person or people have been following this girl around for quite sometime how, because they have pictures of her.
• ·      Image of two dead bodies (Beth and Jessica)- These are to represent    someone’s past and the girl’s future. She has a feeling that these are somehow connected to her, they have the same bracelet on as her, they are both wearing white the same as she is. This all adds up to being girls like her, but the girl doesn’t know who they are our where they have come from.

These props are essential to our thriller; it helps to tell the background of the story. They have a meaning all to their selves, the bracelet for example telling us that someone has given it to her, that this is what links her to the other girls who she finds dead in a picture. ‘Psycho’ uses this idea of having a prop that tells or has a link to something else; it keeps reminding us of the link and why they have put it there. ‘Psycho’ uses the money that their female victim stole. Every time the camera directs a shot towards it, we are reminded why she is on the run and what it is that she has actually done. 

These were our key props that we really wanted the audience to notice during the opening, we also had props that we wanted the audience to see but they wasn’t that important to the storyline, but helped to build that tension throughout. And helped with the psychological thriller that we wanted to create and what the audience had said they preferred in the questionnaires we gave to the to fill out.

We used extra props in our thriller to dress the main room we were going to film in.  To dress the room we had to use things like litter/food wrappers, a bed, newspaper clippings and bible pages that have been ripped out. These were there to help give the room a strange edge, we wanted the audience to know why we had done this, what was the reason behind all of this. The reason was, we wanted to show that someone liked here and they have been for a very long time.

The sound effects we decided to use was a gun shot, so when Mia’s character got shot it was to almost make the audience jump and that it was the climax of the thriller and the tension. We also used knocking sounds so when she hears a noise the audience does as well; this makes the sound effects in our opening in diegetic.

We also put eerie backing music to go under all of the sound effects, we used music that had a high frequency sound, and this will increase the tension and put the audience on edge. This means that the opening is silent apart from the sound effects. It keeps the audience interested and wanting to know what happens next. We did this so the audience would feel uneasy, their emotions would follow and reflect the music, this was also done in Psycho, if the music would increase so would your emotions and feelings towards this scene would change with it.

The narrative of our thriller opening is a girl has an idea that there is something not right happening in this building, this is why you see the girl sheepishly enter in the beginning of the opening. The audience isn’t sure why the girl came to finding out; maybe she had an argument with someone, maybe her boyfriend? And this is why she goes to this building to get answers to why this place is so important to the person she has argued with, and why they don’t want her to go. This is they background to the opening, we don’t show this so the audience doesn’t see what has happened before, it makes you guess and come up with your own meaning for it. Shutter Island has also done this, they haven’t really told you the background story before they have got to the part you are watching.

The conventions of a thriller film is the constant build of tension, this was what we wanted to achieve in our thriller opening. We got the idea of constantly creating tension from some thriller films we had watched, we got the ideas from Psycho, No Country for old Men, Shutter Island, Se7en and The Hunger Games. From the beginning they constantly created tension. Shutter Island created a build of tension by the background music and having a steady flow of flash back of him and his wife. In Psycho when the woman is getting killed in the shower the build of tension leading up to that moment was how slow paced the actions and movements was from the woman, she was moving like she had all the time in the world, it makes the audience relax a little but also it gives them a unconscious tension in the back of their mind.