Tuesday, 10 February 2009

Preliminary Planning

For our preliminary task we chose to do a thriller to gain practise for our thrillier movies we would later be doing. For it we used a crime, credit card fraud, that is happening around us currently. This showed us how the idea would work on film.We made it so members of our group themselves were in it. Then we wouldn't be forever getting worked up about whether people were going to show up, or do things right as we knew when we had to be there and what we had to do.This way we had more time on our hands to film and edit it.

Thursday, 5 February 2009

Actor Evaluations For Our Thriller


The female in our thriller is a stereotypical femme fatale. She is the main character, she wears a glamorous dress with high heels and you even see her putting on the red lipstick. She has perfect hair and perfect make up to go with it. She goes into the toilets to change her look, this is so anyone who could have noticed her before doesn't recognise her now and she is in less jeopardy of being caught by her victims of whom she took their credit cards.
She gets in trouble at the end of our clip, as she gets caught out by a man whose wallet she'd previously stolen and then it ends, so you don't know what has happened to her, why she steals wallets, if its for her own benefit or not or if she's doing it for someone else. This could spark a lot of thought to the audience. Has she had a hard upbringing and needs to get ahead of life? Perhaps she used to be abused or bullied as she was growing up and wants to show them all she is better than them. Does she just like fancy, expensive clothing and accsessories and needs a way to pay for it all? Is she fed up of being perfect in all aspects and is looking for a bit of excitement, a bit of danger? All these questions could be running through the minds of the audience, which is good, great infact and would urge them to watch the rest of the film.



We used this actor has he looka like the type of person to be easy to robbed. He doesn't look strong, tough or harmful. Viewers thoughts would turn to 'vulnerable' the male actor. Did he really not notice her take the wallet? Was it part of a big plan to capture her? Is he really that trusting of people to just leave his wallet stuck in his back pocket like that? Supposing he is, is there a reason to be so trusting? Will he be in the rest of the film? Will he notice it's gone and have any suspects? Is he part of any gang or organisation? The audience will want to know so many of these answers that they will want to watch the rest of the film.



Our actor for this role has broader shoulders and is bigger all around to show toughness and doesn't seem like victim material. The audience will think about the second male now and think up different circumstances for him too. How did he know it was her? Did she steal his wallet at the train station too? Is he part of a gang or organisation constructed to bring down people like her? Was it just chance that she took his wallet and not the man standing the other side of the building than him? Was he deliberatly standing in her path? Was there something in his wallet, some kind of tracker that made him able to pick up her location? Did he know who she was anyway? Was he family? Was he her abuser? Was he her pimp even? All these many, many questions would need to be answered. The audience would have to watch the rest of the movie to find this out, making the introduction a great acheivement as it does what it's intended to do.

Audience Research Questionnaire Results

We handed our questionnaire out to 20 people, 10 males and 10 females, in order to make the results fair.

The most common age group we were able to pass it out to was the 15-20 year olds.

We gave them out to an even number of boys and girls.

Most of them were students who watch films at least once a week.

A lot of them would rather watch films at the cinema with their family or friends, but sometimes cant affort to or want to spend their money on other things. Therefore watch it at home on the TV, online or DVDs they already have.

Boys mostly wanted girls to have the leading role, though a few did choose men for the butch male action aspect of it. Girls are the opposite, primarily choosing male for the leading role, though a few wanted to see a girl in the lead.

The most common favourite genre that our results turned was action. Both girls and boys in there late teens like the thrill of action scenes, especially with a bit of romance mixed in.

All of the results showed that they preferred to watch films in colour.

Shot List - Thriller

Shot 1.
Shot of the back of the males head

Shot 2.
Female walks by, just behind the man and walks away.

Shot 3.
Shot back to the male, standing alone in train station. He's looking at train times.

Shot 4.
Cuts back to the female looking round suspiciously and slowly moving towards the male.

Shot 5.
Close up of her hand removing his wallet from his back pocket.

Shot 6.
Mid-shot of her walking away.

Shot 7.
Extreme close up of her hand and the wallet. She removes his credit cards and money.

Shot 8.
Close up of her putting the money and cards into her bag.

Shot 9.
Mid-shot of her walking away and throwing the wallet into a bin.

Shot 10.
She walks up to the toilets and looks around before going in. Door swings shut behind her.

Shot 11.
Mid-Shot of her in a cubicle in the toilets with the door shut. Audience can only see her legs and feet.
Just see her coat fall to the floor.

Shot 12.
Cubicle door opens. Audience see woman in a dress. She picks up the coat and hangs it on the back of the door.

Shot 13.
She walks over to the mirror and puts on expensive jewellery. Over the shoulder shot, as she looks in the mirror. We can only see her reflection and the door behind her.

Shot 14.
As another woman walks in, we still see her reflection but we can now clearly see a man in dark clothing standing outside the toilets.
Woman doesn't notice him.

Shot 15.
She walks out of the toilets and walks off.

Shot 16.
Long shot of the man, with the crowd all moving around him.

Shot 17.
He starts to follow the woman. He keeps his distance from her.

Shot 18.
As he gets closer to her, you see her stop and apply some red lipstick in a compact mirror.
He blends back into the crowd.

Shot 19.
He starts to move towards her again, as she moves off. (His identity is never revealed)
She's still looking in the mirror.

Shot 20.
She notices him staring and moving towards her. Her eyes widen, and she starts walking briskly.

Shot 21.
She stops again and looks around, using the mirror. She see's no-one.

Shot 22.
She starts to finish applying lipstick. A mans arm appears and grabs her arm.

Shot 23.
Lipstick is smeared across her face while the mirror falls to the floor. The end of the lipstick breaks off.

Shot 24.
Still shot of shattered glass on the floor.

Shooting Schedule - Thriller

We did our shooting for our film over two weeks. Overall we did about four and a half hours of filming, all done at the early evening time of day.

Week 1
Thursday - 1 hour
Friday - 1 hour
Sunday - 1 hour

Week 2
Saturday - 1 hour
Monday - half an hour.

We didn't know how long we would need to take so we planned out for 6 hours, but we stopped on the Monday after half an hour because we had shot enough film to make our thriller with. We thought, if we needed any extra parts we could of gone and shot a bit more during editing, but we haven't needed to.