week 3 planning

We now have a defined plot:

A camera ‘crew’ set out to explore and document the life of a psychopath that is located in a derelict setting. The start to set up and find him, psycho is found near the end. They try to document his behaviour, maybe ask him questions about his life etc and try and let him explain his condition. He answers but as the explanation gets into more depth and the questions get more personal he begins to explains something is wrong, he keeps insisting  they should leave and the are not welcome with his body posture, the camera crew think its all part of his condition, yet they shouldn’t assume. He states their ignorance should not be unpunished. The psycho starts seeing things the camera ‘crew’ cant see, again they think this is part of his condition, the audience start seeing how the psycho sees the location, with figures and shapes. They frighten him. He looks up at them. The scene cuts to black.

we felt this is a more suttle feel to a thriller rather than, death and torturing. we think this would be mroe effective for an opening so if the film was to be produced as a whole it would have a solid story line.

week 2 of planning

Shot Number	Shot type	Why
1	Establishing long shot	This shot would set the scene and allows the audience to become familiar with their surroundings. This would also give a sense of mystery and tension.
2	Close up of a significant or broken objects	This would set the mood that the place is decaying or what the secrets are behind the location. It would again add mystery and would heighten the dramatic tension.
3	Low angle shot of feet	To show the audience the camera crew are getting ready for their filming. Gives the audience a sense of mystery and adventure.
4	Point of view shot from camera crew	To show the audience that nothing is wrong and it shows them getting into their location by force showing that it is not easily accessible showing their vulnerability once their inside.
5	Mid angle shot of conversation and action	To make the audience feel involved and to let them know what is going on.
6	Reaction shots	To show the audience the characters reaction. It will give them feelings similar to what the characters are feeling at that time.
7	High angle shot looking down onto the documentary crew.	It will give the audience that feeling of vulnerability and showing them how vulnerable the camera crew are to any danger that may for come them.
8	Point of view shot from the psycho point of view	We have decided to put this shot in to show the audience what the psycho sees exactly through his eyes. It will give them a sense of involvement.
9	Pan shot of the psychos surroundings.	This will give the audience a sense of what the location looks like inside and his surroundings. It adds to the mystery and heightens to the tension.
10	Close up of the psychos face	This will show his emotion and we are using it as a shock tactic as we hope it will make the audience jump.
11	Tilt shot from bottom to top of a person	This is used to show dominance of the character and will make the audience feel intimidated by this character for the rest of the thriller opening.
12	Tracking shot	To show the movement of characters and objects. It helps to show the audience the bigger picture.

this is a shot list of my groups thoughts and ideas towards types of shots and why we will use them, this will help us stay on track and shoot a convincing conventional thriller opening. as our veiwers would like suspence and tension we feel planning the shots ahead will help us focus on creating this mood.

Start Planning!

So me and my group have chosen 'idea 1' from our media pitch and it is time to start planning, in these first few lessons we have sat down and discussed most of the story line and have reached a more solid opening, we have a location in mind of 'RAF upwood' in ramsey an abandonded  American RAF base, this is a perfect location to shoot our thriller to convey a gloomy,grewsome and dark place, reaching this just by setting will help us focus on more detailed conventions! here is a few pictures of the location.

Thriller Pitch

this was a pitch that me (Zak), jack and josh presented to put out our ideas, we had to make three ideas all having a thriller element. we included questionaire results to enhance our ideas and show that we were considering the audience's needs. the questionaire helped us to create our ideas around them.

the idea we chose was idea 1. we feel it has the most typical thriller conventions and that it considers the audience from our questionaire more.

Questionaire

 

After a certain lesson we decided to create a questionaire to find out what interested an audience in a thriller opening to make ours the best it can be, we felt that questions about conventions mis en scene and some information about each person was needed, our questionaire is as follows:

1) What gender are you?                      Male

                                                                Female

2) What age group do you fall under?

12-14            15-17           18-20            Over 20              

3) What is you favourite genre of film? You may tick more than one.

Comedy              Thriller               Action                  Horror               

Sci-Fi            Romance                    Romcom             Drama                     

Other             

4) Do you enjoy the thriller genre in films?

Yes                       No                       

5) What age rating would you expect a typical thriller film to be?

U                 PG              12A             12               15               18

18R              

6) Why do you think this on age ratings of a thriller? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

7) What do you think would be your favourite sub genre of a thriller film?

Psychological                Political               Medical

Conspiracy                    Crime                   Disaster

Legal                    Mystery               Religious             

               

8) What do you think makes a thriller?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

9) What do you think makes a good thriller opening?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

10) What do you think would be a good setting for a typical thriller?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

11) What do you think makes up a typical thriller character?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

12) Do you think a good opening is necessary to make a good thriller film?

Media institutions

in this lesson we decided to distribute our following thriller movie through 'castle rock' productions, a child of the infamous 'warnerbros.' we felt this would be a good choice of distribuition due to it producing films such as many steven king novels, so they would know how to create good suspence and atmosphere within mis en scene and music. this we felt was most important, as we are on a budget we cannot employ a huge institution like warner bros. so we felt the best idea was to employ one that had connections with them, this would still give us capability to reach a worldwide audience.

Preliminary task evaluation

So we shot our prelim and we had specifics to include within the short time span. The task include;

• Walking
• Going through a door
• A conversation

These were all to try show a wide range of shots, for example the conversation; this would need more than one single shot, for example; over shoulder shot and reverse over shoulder shot. We also had to think about angle of shot, mise en scene and sound.

The basic plot- the basic plot was that we wanted to convey a slight hint of mystery within the whole task, so this is what we decided; a mysterious character who’s face would not be shown through out the hole production, he would go and drop a product off to some sort of man higher up in the world of some work, then he would leave in a hurry.

Range of shots – I feel that we covered as many shots and we could within our prelim and composed them well; we used long shots, to extreme close ups just of the eyes. I felt the shot that was did best was the shot of the man looking at the cctv and it tracks along, as It passes the mans head it covers up the mysterious mans face in the cctv, I felt it was the most creative shot we had within the piece, I felt we could of included a tracking shot to emphasize movement. Also we did not use the reverse shot on the conversation, but this was to convey the man as a mysterious character. I also think the angle of shots to convey peoples power could have been put in place a little better.

Sound – I feel that the sound added all to the mise en scene, it created a mood of mystery and emotion, this is what we set out to do and I feel we achieved this. We could of made the music build to a final climax to improve the sound a bit better, maybe turned up the non diagetic sound on the short film so it could be heard a bit more but overall I felt that it was nicely done

Overall I feel that our preliminary went well, we covered as many shots as we could even a tracking shot to add to the sense of the unknown and music to create more tension, I felt that we could of done better with angle of some shots and felt that the dialog could of carried on more to show more camera skills, but other than that I fell it went very well.