Thrillers are characterized by fast pacing, frequent action, and consist of villains and heroes. A successful thriller story must contain suspense, red herrings and cliffhangers, without these literacy devices the thriller movie will not be successful and would be very dull and not as interesting to watch.
To help me and my fellow group mates to develop ideas for our thriller, as a whole class our teachers showed us some thriller movie such as: “The Flight Plan” “What Lies Beneath” and some small clips of the last year’s As thriller. This has helped us as it has shown us a lot of variety of areas we can choose from; different camera techniques.
In ‘What Lies Beneath’ we was showed the bathtub scene where the editor uses emphasized sound really well because they only used loud mysterious sound e.g. when she was taking out the plug and her screaming was very high pitch.
“The Flight Plan” was a very successful thriller as it include many cliff-hanging moments, the used of camera angle was good as they make the thriller look real and the music that was edited made it more interesting to watch; keeping the audience on the edge of their seats.
For the opening scene of the thriller we used the establishing shot to establish the friendship of the two main characters, which is totally opposite what a professional director would do to his/her film. This will challenge the forms and conventions of a real media products as it will be more interesting to the audience as they have never seen a movie like this before, where the movie start of with an establishing shot which establish the friendship of the main characters.
My media product does raise questions like the first scene where we established the friendship of the characters; this would make the audience question themselves, “what does the friendship shown on the screen got to do with the story?”
In my thriller story the typical social group that is aimed at is people from 15 years onward who are interested in a story lines that have so much suspense, and is thrilling.
This social group will be interested to watch the thriller as the characters that are in the movie are based on teenagers and young adults of different types of background, therefore it would make it easier for them to relate themselves to these characters.
For examples, the people that star in the movie are British Asians. Therefore, it will help to lure in many Asians watchers because the story line of the movie is base on teenager’s life, it has realistic dramatic story to it; the characters’ personality will be some what like a normal teenagers; they like to mess about, have fun and enjoy there life, this sometimes lead to trouble. In the media product, you will witness two friends messing about and having fun, however I wanted to take the “taking revenge” to the extreme, plotting a twist to the story where something has gone wrong in the relationship leaving one of them to come back for revenge.
From a parents prospective, from watching this movie they would be expanding more on parenting skills and would be more aware of their children’s safety, this would then give them the opportunity to have a sit down with their kids and talk about the dangers that they could face
The film company that I would distribute my product will be Paramount Film Company, because it is a very big company. Therefore, this will help my movie to sell better, because it is popular and have a high standard of viewing audiences as paramount have made award winning films such as “Godfather”, “Indiana Jones”, “Titanic”, “Transformers”, “Mission Impossible”, “Forrest Gump” to name a few; all of these film mention above have been distributed by paramount.
Paramount Film Company will be interested in distributing in my product because it has a strong story line, and have the potential to win awards and Oscars.
To successfully attract the target audience, I had to make sure that my story line is interested and thrilling with characters that would enable them to relate back to and to help them think through about where they like to end up and what they like to become in future. To be able to do these I have to find out what interest the audience, what is happening around the world, and match my movie to a real life issues or problems; making the movie dramatic with different types of emotion involved. We presented it by using slow music to add emotion while having image flask-backs to establish the friendship between the two characters. In one of the film where the character played by Samah Ibtes she was looking at the mirror while rubbing out the writing on it, we have slow motion it so that the audience can capture what was written. At the very last scene where some one kidnapped Samah was originally from a Taiwanese drama called “The Clue Collector” we thought it was a good idea to add this into the movie as it will raise who the kidnapper is and why did he/she kidnapped Samah.
A picture from the drama
A picture from my own movie clip
After finishing the product I have present it to a sample of my target audiences to see what they thought of it. These feed back were that, it did raise up some questions, it look mysterious, the used of sound was very good as it set the tone to the film, however, the sound was a bit off as it was to loud. The establishing shot was well presented as it set the storyline right from the start. The media product is successful at reaching my target audiences as the movie appeal to them; catching their interest and high demand on movie, as well as having small trailer on website such as “www.youtube.com” to gain more audiences.
To attract our target audiences we would used media techniques and freebies to intensify our film’s interest and appeal; we could sell merchandise such as:
• Excitement
• Action packed
• Bags
• Posters
We could have billboards around London, TV commercial, magazines to name a few; to attract their attention; informing them that there will be a new movie coming out very soon to the big screen.
Primary and secondary schools have been so attach to the movie, that they have started changing school rules and regulations. The government has been so wary of this film that they have injected funds into schools to upgrade security, safer facilities, more staff and more protection for the children.
Through out the years, technology has improved, now days there are lot of equipment used when filming a film; which are the key features towards developing an entirely successful movie. In the media products, due to the shortage of professional equipment, only the camera, tripod, and lighting kit to name a few, was available to use. The cameras helped to get footage, tripod help to capture a still or straight image or footage as well as holding the camera at a specific angle without any movement or shaking.
Using final cut pro was very hard but useful as it helps to add adjust and add special effects to create suspense creating a great movie. However, I found this process hard, as I have never used it to an extreme. Editing the film was a very long process as you have to log and capture the footage you have filmed, and then have to cut and edit it into a smooth footage that matches with each other making the shot were shot impeccably. It is extremely important to do this it will ensure that this movie would be a huge success.
In contrast, I have learnt how to use different media equipment, expanding on my knowledge of the variety of camera angles to make a movie look more interesting and how to use final cut pro when editing a product.
The limitations of this process are that we have to plan our storyline, film it edit it, in such a small amount of time. The “blog” part of the process was a bit too long, as we have to write out the film plan, and keep note of what my group and I did each time we filmed and what we filmed that day.
In conclusion, making a film is a very hard job to do, as you always have to have a specific idea in mind of what genre would the target audience prefer and how would you make it successful, you have to have the perfect storyboard and planning to create a dramatic and interesting movie. Producing a movie, come with a lot of concentration, patient, good imagination and creativity.
If I were given another opportunity to produce another thriller movie, I would use more camera shot, better sound track with a better planning than the one I had for this thriller, as it will help me to speed up the filming process. Other then that I am very happy with my product as it came out better than I expected.
