Planning of Thriller- Part One (8th/ 12th February)

In today's lesson we started by discussing what we thought a thriller was, all writing any features we thought a thriller had. This helped us establish what everyone already knew and if our viewpoints were wrong. It is important to know what a Thriller is, and its features and style otherwise our openings would not have the correct style.

We then sorted out our groups for the project. My group consists of me, Sophie Neil, Andrew Tinley and Josh Curran. We chose to work in this group as not only are we friends, we work well together and have an understanding of how each other works. Many of us have worked together before to produce high level pieces of work and hopefully that can be achieved in this project. A further advantage of this group formation is that we all study AS Drama and have acting experience, this can be helpful as we can bring experience to the characters.

The mind map above shows the initial ideas we thought of in the planning process. We first discussed sub genres, such as Sci-Fi Thriller, Action- Thriller, Horror - Thriller. We decided as a group that "Sci - Fi Thriller" wasn't going to be easy and due to the limitations of time and equipment we couldn't make it look realistic. We could not make sets or have special effects so it would be very poor quality. We liked the Action - Thriller and Tradegy - Thriller genres, we discussed ideas on how we could merge these two sub-genres. We also discussed the do-not elements of this course, which are displayed on the mind- map.

The mind map above relates to the sub genre we chose, which was a combination of the Action, Crime and Tradegy genres. We discussed the limitations/disadvantages, ideas, plot... and locations. Firstly we thought about the limitations, as mentioned above, the element of filming in the dark could mean you cannot see what is going on, it is also hard to plan time to film in the dark. For the ideas part, we discussed themes like psychological, death, car accident, jealously, murder and stalker. Some of these ideas where developed upon such as murder and stalker.

Our initial thoughts on our opening is that we wanted it to be original but achieveable. We did not want to go down the route of predictable walking sequences that have litte thrills. Although there may be some walking sequences present we plan to film them from various angles to make them more interesting and music will create tension. We all decided that a killer or stalker plotline would be suitable for a thriller where if it were a full film a detective would try and stop the killer, this matches the conventions of a thriller as common stories involve this type of characters attempting to stop an antoganist. To add originality me and Sophie had an idea no one has done before in this project. We had the idea of having lots of photos scattered across a surface. These photos would be took by the killer of various teenagers who would become their next victims. There will be lots and lots of photos and we would take them so it looked obvious that the characters were being watched and oblivious to anyone being there. Although we do not have an full idea of a complete storyline as of yet we intend for each member of the group to play a victim in the photographs which would be took in several locations. We went out and practiced a few of these type of shots in the lesson. We discussed some of the areas we could take photos, these being shops, streets and even the victims house where killer takes pictures of them from afar when they are near a window. The mind map below shows our discussion of these ideas.

We also discussed Music. We liked the idea of the power of using silence- a common feature of thriller openings used in films such as 'The Lost Highway' and 'Blood Simple'. This builds up tension and creates an awkward mood. We would perhaps use silence but would also use some powerful, mysterious music that created a tense atmospehere. Towards th end of the lesson we started searching through variouys copyright free music sites. We found a track that all us thought was perfect- it was dark, mysterious, hinted bad things would happen and fit a detective story theme. The track was from http://derekaudette.ottawaarts.com/.