We started by brainstorming what a thriller is and the sub genres. We did this to help us get ideas for our own thrillers and get a better understanding of what thrillers are. In a lesson we looked at short film clips, we were looking at how the films build suspense towards the audience. I learnt that sound is a big part of creating suspense. For homework we had to choose from the many short films we watched to analyse as a way of getting more ideas for our thriller openings. I choose collateral to analyse. In the clip the sound was the key thing about the thriller so I used the idea of building up of sound in our thriller opening.
In our opening we have a black and a Greek girl in London so there are lots of different people round them who are from different background, so someone watching our thriller could tell it was set in London and possibly relate to the people in or around the shot. The girls starring in our thriller are both 16-17 but we wanted them to look slightly older because our thriller was aimed at a slightly older audience.
I would not want our film to be a big Hollywood buster I think it will be distributed by smaller companies in the U. K or it could possibly be a made for T.V because our thriller is about a girl being followed and it is an everyday thing that happens a lot, so we could use our thriller as a warning to girls and storkers out there.
Our target market is mainly young women. A typical girl that shops in Primark or New look, likes to go out with friends have a laugh, drinks occasionally, likes boys, goes college or sixth form, talks on the phone a lot, likes watching Eastenders and about 18 years old. 0ur movie is aimed at 16 plus because these are the main times you want to feel older, Start College and are at risk of a lot of things in the world.
We will market our film via billboards in the city, on the bus, in shops like Primark and new look. We could get someone famous to star in the film and mention that when we advertise to attract our audience. The main place I would want to advertise is on T.V because that is where the film will be shown. I would not advertise on the internet because I feel it will not be serious but on the other hand we could possibly make a site just for the film for our audience to find out more about the film and in a lot of ways it could widen the potential of our audience because a lot of people have myspace, you tube accounts which means there are a lot of people we could reach on the internet.
The filming experience has been very challenging but interesting for me because I have worked with cameras before but getting to grips with the five second count in was hard for me, as easy as it sounds. The easier part for me was setting up the tripod and putting the camera on it but my biggest challenge was final cut pro and soundtrack pro. I have never really used software like this so at first it was like I was learning a new language as time went on I began to enjoy using final cut pro and playing with the different sounds on soundtrack pro. I have learnt new useful skills. We used the internet to record our filming process on our blogs.
The preliminary tasks were a massive help because it taught us a lot of what we needed to know before we started our thrillers so as soon as we started our thrillers we wasted no time because we knew exactly what we were doing. We had a match cut exercise and we included a few match cuts in our thrillers. The storyboarding and planning took a while because we came up with an idea but we were told it was too long so we had to keep changing it but we split the tasks up on the planning part, so one member of the group would talk about music, lighting, the storyline etc. to the class for the next lesson. I learnt a lot about logging and capturing even though I didn’t do much of that part, I did more of cutting. We split the editing up as a group and everyone learnt something from editing. In terms of filming I think we all tried to film. I also learnt how to plug a camera into a computer via the hard disk. I learnt more about the software we used but at first I found it difficult and didn’t want to use the software but it has been another valuable skill. When I first heard we could not use copy right music I was not too happy but now I’m happy we used soundtrack pro because it made me be more creative because you think more about what sounds sound good together and why they sound good but I also thought at first having a variety of sounds to choose form was really good but when we were putting the sound together we found because there were so many sounds it was slightly harder to create because you feel like everything or nothing goes well with your opening. I also thought that the opening is a big part of why people want to watch your film and the sound has s big part to do with it, it sort of determines the genre and gives you a sense of the film.
If there is anything I could change I would of taken a more active role in my group and done more filming but sometimes it is hard when there are four people in a group to be doing something all the time.