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.

We started off by looking at T.V drama sheets and analysing them to get an idea as a class what T.V drama were and what sub genre were in TV drama. We gathered the key factors that explain the popularity of T.V drama is that people find stories enjoyable and satisfying to watch.

Sub genre T.V drama
Soap E.G Eastenders
One off dramas
Dead set

Legal
Ally Mc Beal
Action E.G lost
Science fiction
Dr who
Cop shows/crime
The Bill
Risqué
Diary of a call girl
Hotel Babylon
Medical dramas
· house

We looked at lots of different crime drama’s the n labelled which one was which to see how well we knew our crime dramas. There was another sheet for teen dramas and we watched an extract from skins and had to construct our own representation in groups.
Then we looked at narrative, structure, production, target audience, viewing pleasures and mise-en-scene. We watched an extract from life on mars to analyse the mise-en scene on a big A3 paper.
In the next lesson we started to look at representation and we watched extracts from shameless. We filled in sheets about location, community and regional identity of the soap extracts including shameless so we could get a better idea of representation. In pairs we had to write down soap stereotypes of characters
Ethnicity E.G. black or white
Religion
Aggressive men
Old person
Strong mature women/ sexy man
Teenagers
Sluttish mother
Villain man etc.

Soap visual techniques
Soaps have their own particular style of camera work. We identified what camera shots were and how to establish when it is being used and why.
Some camera shots
Close up to show emotion, tension, drama and true feelings
Two shot is used to see characters relations with each other
Long shot is used to establish a scene, such as the front of a café or character’s house
During conversations over the shoulder shot is often used and gives the audience a sense of realism.
Point of view shots are used so the audience get to see what a specific charater is looking at
To show power relations between characters or to empathise people’s feeling, high and low angle shots are used
There are also other shots such as big close up. Extreme close up, medium shot, medium long shot, long shot, extreme long shot and medium close up.
After looking at camera shots we talked about editing in T.V drama. We analysed shot extracts from soaps and thought about
What pace is the editing? How does this effect the viewer
How does the editing a show communication between characters?
How does the editing help the audience to focus on a particular character?
In another lesson we wrote a short essay on how all the aspects of the mise-en-scene create mood, atmosphere, place and time on life on mars?

All this was a warm up to prepare us for our thrillers. In the next lesson we talked about cinema audiences and we were given a list with films and if male or female predominantly go and watch the film to see the importance of audiences. we then brainstormed what thrillers were with sub genre.

Thrillers
Murderous passions
supernatrual
action
spy
crime
Sci-fi
Acquired identity
Innocent on the run
Psychological thriller
kidnapping

We watched short extracts from thrillers in the U.K and USA including 28 days later, Arlington road, what lies beneath, the shining and collateral. For homework we had to pick one of the several clips and analyse one of them looking at all the things we looked at in previous lessons but mainly the way the director uses sounds and camera angles to create suspense, I picked collateral because i felt it was not necessarily scary but created fear and suspense for the audience.

Collateral clip

The next lesson we analysed previous student work on thrillers looking at setting and location, camerawork, editing, diegectic and non diegetic sound and lighting. By doing this we were looking at mistakes we should not make in our thrillers and taking ideas from the professional thrillers to student thrillers.
In the three hour lesson we watched Bourne supremacy which is acquired identity thriller, innocent on the run, psychological, crime, action thriller. The lesson after that we started planning for our practice thrillers. We were given two task to make someone reading a newspaper look interesting and character A is sitting a room then character B comes in and sits opposite character A and they exchange a few lines of dialogue so we planned in groups how to do this. My group decided our plot was a women; whose face was never shown in full, walking from outside a building in a room with the newspaper always in camera view for the first task. Then keep the storyline for the second task. We were given a film storyboard to help plan the character A/B synopsis.

When we finished gathering all the footage we started editing to minimize it to the bits we need to accomplish the tasks.
Editing for me at the moment is one of my weaknesses so I found that part of the task harder to do but the group helped me to edit and I think the final pieces were good but could have been better with more time but we were given time from our first task to the second and by the second practice film I felt more confident with filming and editing because I learned from my mistakes in the first task. The lighting was quite bright for the second one because we had to do it in a classroom wheras the first task had a mixture of lighting from bright to dime. I felt it was slightly more easier doing all the filming n just one room which is what we did fort he second task because we mainly had to think jus about the camera angles/work and editing afterwards. The first one was outside and in a lift and various other places so it was a lot more load. we kept the idea of the classroom with book and bags around so it didn’t jus seem like we didn’t think whether bag were there or not. For the first task we tried to use the stereotype of a mysterious sexy woman with the way we moved the camera up and down her body and the way she crossed her legs when she sat down.
We did not fully finish the character A/B situation but I felt it was slightly more of a success. With the practice filming it gave us all a chance to see what our strengths and weaknesses were so we can help each other get stronger and so we know what each person would e allocated to do for the thrillers. We tried to do too many match cuts in the second task but not all of them worked, I think the over the shoulder shot was the most successful when the two characters exchanged words which we didn’t get round to and when character A was waling over to character B. We attempted a point of view shot but it didn’t really work and didn’t look as professional as we would of liked it to look.
On Monday we started to think of ideas for our thrillers and plan them out to make a pitch for the class on Thursday lesson. We did a shot list exercise to warm us up. Then we started to think of what to do and say in our pitch. At the end of the lesson we thought about what each person would be best at to talk about in the pitch. I wanted to plan and talk about music and lighting. We meet up as a group out of media time and started to plan for next day lessons because we were doing the pitch.
On Thursday’s lesson we had one hour to finish off or start talking about what we would say in our pitches but my group had already done that so we just practiced and spoke about target market as a group. Then we starting having doubt about our storyline because we were told its too complicated and long for the limited time we have. We decided as a group to take a few bits out and make the storyline more simply. We kept the main idea but changed it to suit time. When presenting our pitch we kept the storyboard and other ideas but changed it to suit the new shorter storyline. We were also given a filming schedule to talk about in our pitch.
in mondays lesson we did a soundtrack tutorial to familiarise us on how to use sound in our thrillers. we listened to the soundtrack editors of casino royale and watched short clips from casino royale and used our own different sounds over the clips, then we went back to our character A and character B short opening and put sound over it E.G a door opening for someone entering the room. i found this really helpful becasue we need sound for our thrillers.
Thursaday lesson my group used the three hours to start filming our thrillers.