Thriller Evaluation

There are various conventions to a thriller movie, there’s the image of a vulnerable woman or child, hidden identities, and so on. The typical convention that we used was that of a woman being placed in a vulnerable situation, being followed. We have shown her being followed in quite a busy public area. I feel that this creates a more thrilling sense because people often feel safer in a busy area. However we’ve shown that even in places that you feel most safest anything could happen and anyone could be watching, another convention of a typical thriller. For example the setting of What Lies Beneath is in her marital home. A place we would feel safest and think that nothing could happen. We also challenged the typical convention of a male following a female to a female following a female; however the follower’s identity is not shown in the opening. We felt that keeping their identity hidden keeps the audience wanting more, that they would want to carry on watching to find out who it is. It adds more intensity and excitement.
I see The Following as being a small independent UK release film. I think this because it doesn’t seem ‘glamorous’ enough to be a big Hollywood blockbuster, and I feel that would take away the fact that it’s a British film. It reminds me very much of the film Kidulthood, a low budget film based in the UK. I think that if Kidulthood had been a big Hollywood blockbuster it wouldn’t have had the same effect and reached its target audience. The characters in the film are like your everyday teenager and so the way it was filmed really reflected their life and situation. I feel the same with The Following. According to the director of Kidulthood the film only cost just short of £800,000 to make, however the film still went on to be a great success. Many short films are partly funded by the National Lottery; they have helped 115 feature films and over 300 short films. Even the well known Bend It like Beckham was funded by the Lottery. I feel that The Following would also be funded in this way or through a small film company.
The Following would be aimed towards your average everyday teenager/young adult, from the age of 15-22. A typical example of the type of person that would watch The Following would be Andrew. Andrew is 18 years old and is currently in his second year at college. He has a part time job working in a sports shop and plays football every Sunday. During his free time he enjoys, going out with his friends to the cinema, bowling, pub or just relaxing at home. Andrew is ambitious and wants the best life possible. He is very much a typical student, broke and struggling to get to where he wants to be in life and always wanting what’s better. The Following would appeal to both male and female viewers because it’s very in between and doesn’t sway more towards one gender.
The marketing of a film is very important, you have to know your target audience and reach out to them in ways and places you know they will see. The way in which you would advertise your film also depends on the amount of money you have to do so. Usually a small independent UK film doesn’t have such a large budget. In this case there are film festivals, internet campaigns and possibly even advertisements in magazine’s or newspapers. I see The Following being shown at a film festival such as the Edinburgh International film festival because, because one of the categories is British Gala. This is for a new UK film production that has a well known British actor or director. This leads me onto another way of marketing the film. Having a well known actor starring in the film can attract a lot of attention to the film which means less money needs to be spent on things such as magazine advertisements. The film can also be heard about through word of mouth which plays quite a huge part in the marketing of any film.
All throughout the filming process I have learnt so much, and am still learning. I thoroughly enjoyed working with the camera because it was a new experience that challenged me to begin with. My biggest challenge when first using the camera was being able to move it left to right, up and down on the tri-pod with ease. In both our preliminary tasks and final thriller there were scenes where the camera had to follow the actor’s feet. I must admit that I found it extremely hard moving the camera in time with the feet to begin with; I found that I would go too slowly. Eventually practice almost made perfect and I did get the hang of it. I think the thing I found the trickiest out of everything was the editing. I would say that is my weakest point about the whole process. Whilst editing, using Final Cut pro, I found the log and capture aspect quite easy to grasp. I found fitting the match cut clips together quite fiddly as you had to cut the clips down at exactly the right point or it didn’t look right. It could be quite time consuming but with the dedication we showed I feel that it looked quite professional. Throughout the whole process I have kept a blog, an online diary, of everything we have done. To begin with I wasn’t too keen on the idea of blogging after each lesson or after each time we had completed something. However I started to really get into it and enjoyed reflecting back on the work I had done. After each preliminary exercise we would place it onto our blog and evaluate it. I enjoyed putting these video’s onto the internet because it was a chance to show what we had achieved in that lesson. Once we had completed our thriller openings they were then placed onto Vimeo. This made me feel very proud because others were able to see the final outcome of our film. Also, by placing it onto the internet it has potentially attracted people that we may have originally thought would not be part of the target audience.
From our preliminary task, the ‘match cut’ exercise, to now I have definitely learned a lot and made good progression. Before beginning with this exercise I hadn’t realised how much preparation you needed to do before filming. To begin with we first came up with a rough idea of what we would do and then created a storyboard. Once we had our storyboard we had to construct our shot list, a list of every shot that you are going to film and at what angle. I found this at first quite confusing and slightly time consuming but when we came to filming our final thriller I really appreciated how useful a shot list is. Unfortunately when we came to filming our final thriller we didn’t have a shot list and we were making each shot up as we went along. This did have its benefits; we felt more free and less restricted however it was slightly more time consuming having to think there and then. I think that this was definitely one of the more vital things that I learnt. When filming for our preliminary task the camera was still quite ‘alien’ to me and I did find it quite hard to control and move. However practice did help and when filming for our thriller I had begun to improve. I found holding the camera harder to control than it being on the tripod because it didn’t always look professional when I did it. The only area that I feel I haven’t made a drastic improvement on is the editing. From the preliminary task to our final thriller I still struggled and found it quite tricky. I don’t think my editing is appalling but I feel it definitely needs improving. Overall this whole exercise has been a learning experience and I feel a quite successful one at that.