Thriller Evaluation

Before we started our thriller opening, we watched some conventional thriller movie openings, such as the shining. At first sight of the shining’s opening sequence makes the film look innocent but as we watched it over again I realised that the high angle shot makes the car look like it is being stalked like prey. This is quite a deceiving opening which gave us an Idea of making the viewers assume that the girl is being stalked which soon gets flipped around to show that she is not the vulnerable character but the person who’s severed hand is in the toilet. We also watched thriller openings that were produced by people from the previous year. These also put some ideas into our heads. From these openings, we realised that our clips were not to be too long, as people would get bored quickly. We also realised that that we needed a good soundtrack to match our thriller. We also noticed that some of the previous work had the same sort of storyline as each other so we wanted to create the most original storyline that we could possibly think of. This was because we did not want everyone getting bored thinking they have seen it all before.
When I first started my work, it looked funnier than it did thrilling so I had to learn to create the scene to fit the genre. In the match cut lesson all my work seemed to look like we had produced a comedy, even though we had tried to make it serious. We realised that the way in which we had cut each clip together was not properly matched which made it look funny. In addition, the soundtrack we chose did not properly show the true genre of our short film. Because we had done quite poorly, it worked in our favour as we learned from our mistakes. When it came round to editing the final piece we made sure that everything was matched up properly and that the soundtrack matched the film.
Thinking about our thriller opening, we did go for a stereotypical woman victim. Because of this, our film would appeal more to a male audience rather than a female audience. I think this will attract men, as they will feel like they could be the hero of the film and relate to the male character. We also tried to aim for an age range of 15-30 year as they are the main ages that thrillers aim for. Because of the age range, we are aiming for students and working class, as they are more likely to want to see a thriller.
I would like to think that our thriller could be a Hollywood blockbuster but in reality, I think it would be more suited to the small arthouse cinemas. I think this because I believe it would be only targeting a small audience. I also think that it would be good to release it onto the internet, as it could become a big hit on websites such as YouTube, which in turn could give us a big break to produce more films.
Because we are targeting a younger audience we would advertise our film on websites such as facebook, bebo and myspace so are target audience are more likely to notice the film. I would also advertise in places like KFC, burger king and McDonalds’ where younger people go so they can begin to recognise the film and maybe start wanting to watch the film. On the adverts we would advertise the main star so that if people are fans they are more likely to want to see the film because of the star. We would put the stars name directly below the title in a large font but slightly smaller than the title.
While filming our thriller I have learnt to use so many different technologies, which will not only help me for media but for personal uses as well. When we first started filming, I was useless with the camera but over time, I learned to use it properly. I was taught how to fix the camera to the tripod properly and how to watch over the clips we had filmed on the camera. This would also help at home for video cameras that I could use to film personal occasions e.g. framing the scene right and getting good angles. I also learned how to use different software on the computer. I was shown how to use Photoshop properly, how to create title sequences that looked professional, how to use soundtrack pro and one of the most important ones, how to use final cut pro. I found this was the one piece of software that I picked up easily. Although it was frustrating sometimes, I got past that and managed to put some of the work together.
I was really pleased with our final result. I felt that we had all produced a brilliant piece of work that we had all put our best efforts into creating. Although at time it was tough and we had our disagreements we all pulled together and had a lot of fun making our thriller. I am also pleased that we had got a lot of positive reviews for our classmates and form others who had seen it at the cinema and overall I am ecstatic with me and my groups work.