Thriller Rough cut

Please bear in mind....
we have no soundtrack.
we need to do titles.
we still need to film more footage
and we haven't arranged clips or done any editing.
Thank you and goodnight.

In today's lesson all other groups viewed our rough cut and this is some of the feedback we received...

STRENGTHS:

• Good variation of cinamatography
• The low angle shot was well thought out
• Good use of props
• Good use of close ups
• Good setting and scenary
• Looks like it would be good when finished

WEAKNESSES:

• No audio
• Un-clear narrative
• no titles
• no sound
• unsure of what is happening
• clips move too fast
• need parallel editing.

We're soon going to make an action plan...

In This Lesson

This lesson is the deadline lesson for our rough cut.

Seeing as we only have around half an hour of unedited footage, we will certainly not have a totally clear view of the final product, but it will give a good idea.

If there is enough time after we have produced the roughcut, we will go out to film some more.

new plot synopsis

a police detective is sent to investigate a number of dissappearances from gant city, all of which seem to be directly involved with the nearby nature reserve, greenhill forest. all of the people now missing were last seen in that forest, doing everyday activitys that would seem to have no apparent risk attached. yet for all of them its heralded their dissappearance.

detective sandra blake now needs to establish the link between the trees and the women that vanished from them. on her first visit she discovers an abandoned hut with a door concealed under the timbers on the floor. as she opens it, sandra is struck from behind and knocked out.

she then awakes in a new part of the woods, alone, frightened and weak. she needs to escape before anymore harm is done to her. as she runs, she realises that the forest huge, and she is being followed from behind. a masked man grabs her and starts clawing wildly at her skin with huge claws, causing considerable and deep wounds to her arm. sandra is able to fight him off and runs for her life, as the masked man pursues her.

as sandra is running she spots more and more of the same gaunt men, who follow chase with the other man when they notice her. there are so many of them all chasing her, trying to grab at to kill her. as sandra runs she notices rotting carcasses on the ground, almost certainly the people who had been reported missing.

sandra stops running when she notices that the beasts have given up the chase.

part 2 to follow, when we have some more ideas!!

Filming

Lucy and Dom have been out today filming and are now being critised for a lack of impressive footage.

To make up for it, when the other two members of the group have seperated the clips, we will all go out together and try and get some more shots from interesting angles, and we will think about a USP.

New location stills

In today's lesson we went out and took photos of our new location skills.

New idea..

Since filming in Ely on Monday we have decided to scrap the Greenhill idea as Anna's house looked too 'happy' and we do not have enough time to record more footage.

Our new idea is a basic thriller set in a forest with somehting evil there stalking the group of peolpe there.

We are basing our new idea on a film previously made called 'Haunted Forest'

Credit List For Thriller Opening Sequence

Greenhill Production presents:

A EyeInfection Film

Dom Vickers
Lucy Goodchild
Anna O'Hanlon

Costume Design by Flick House

Art Direction by Philip Tom

Production Design Scott Dody

Casting by Simon Bailey

Film Editing by Matthew King

Cinematography by John Phillips

Produced by Grant Sullivan

Directed by Steve Thorne

13 O'Clock

Today's Lesson

With 47 minutes of footage, and a problem with the iMac, today seemed a little bit of a waste.

We're running out of lessons and struggling slightly.

We plan to make up for today's lesson tomorrow and the next day.

First Day of Filming

In our opinion, today has been extremely successful. We have 47 minutes of footage, of course, not all useable, but including a few good ideas. a video montage of our day, and some of the outtakes will be posted later on tonight.

We did not stick to our storyboard/animatic exactly, as there are other locations to shoot and some shots did not go to plan. We didn't expect them all to though, so the group wasn't entirely let-down.

Today was very fun, and has proved that once again, our group can work very well together and be able to finish the work in hand whilst having a laugh too.

Recently in lessons, members of the group have been very distracting/distractable, but the seriousness of the task is settling in. We are quite proud of the footage caught today and we really hope that the teacher/the class will be too.

Location Shots (2)

In today's lesson we went to look at potential locations for the hospital scenes. We used the college's medical room to creat a realistic effect and we also used to sports changing rooms in order to get a similar effect. The medical room was most effective for the hospital scene whereas when Simon sees the white light the light in the changing rooms are more suitable.



Dom Vickers and Anna O'Hanlon

Medical Gloves

Taps Running in the Medical Room

The Fold-Down Bed

Contraption For Lifting People (Looks Scientific, eh?)

Light in Medical Room (In Our Opinion Not 'Laboratory-Like' Enough)

Anna O'Hanlon Wearing Medical Gloves (Antagonist Will Wear These For the 'Experimentation' Scene.)

Scary Alley-Way at College (Could Be Used)

Changing Room Lights (More Laboratory-Like :D)

Location Shots (1)

These pictures were taken for 'Simon Greenhill's' neighbourhood and home.
This blog is really showing the other group member's my house and city to gather feedback on whether it would be suitable or not.

Shooting Dates

We have arranged the date on which will film. We plan to collect a lot of footage, which will cover the most part of the sequence on Monday 18th.

The camera will be in our posession from Wednesday 1pm - Tuesday 9am.

Influences/Inspiration

Today we looked on youtube.com for videos we thought set an impressive cinematographic example. We found this, a video I remember from childhood that has always stuck in my memory due to it's shock-tactics.


While the character 'Terry' tells us of killing a girl in a drink-driving incident, a montage of gruesome and chilling footage flashes.. the footage is hard to decipher, which makes the audience curious and somewhat tenser. The micro features and the thrilling macro features (narrative and genre) work together to enable us to identify and almost empathise with the protagonist.
The group agrees with me that this is an inspiration and we will think about the cinematography and compare it with our other influences'.

Conventions of a Traditional Thriller

Today I have been researching the characteristics of a conventional thriler. I found an item on wikipedia.org (not always a reliable source, but in this case I believe we can trust it.)

There are select piece of information we have jotted in our Media Studies 'orange books' from this article:

Thrillers often take place wholly or partly in exotic settings such as foreign cities, deserts, polar regions, or high seas. The heroes in most thrillers are frequently "hard men" accustomed to danger: law enforcement officers, spies, soldiers, seamen, or aviators. However, they may also be ordinary citizens drawn into danger by accident. While such heroes have traditionally been men, women have become increasingly common.

Thrillers often overlap with mystery stories, but are distinguished by the structure of their plots. In a thriller, the hero must thwart the plans of an enemy, rather than uncover a crime that has already happened. Thrillers also occur on a much grander scale: the crimes that must be prevented are serial or mass murder, terrorism, assassination, or the overthrow of governments. Jeopardy and violent confrontations are standard plot elements. While a mystery climaxes when the mystery is solved, a thriller climaxes when the hero finally defeats the villain, saving his own life and often the lives of others. In thrillers influenced by film noir and tragedy, the compromised hero is often killed in the process.

In recent years, when thrillers have been increasingly influenced by horror or psychological-horror exposure in pop culture, an ominous or monstrous element has become common to heighten tension. The monster could be anything, even an inferior physical force made superior only by their intellect (Saw), a supernatural entity (Dracula, Christine books, The Amityville Horror, The Ring), aliens (H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos books), serial killers (Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Psycho), or even microbes or chemical agents (Cabin Fever, Richard Matheson's The Last Man On Earth, 28 days later). Some authors have made their mark by incorporating all of these elements (Richard Laymon, F. Paul Wilson) throughout their bibliographies.

Similar distinctions separate the thriller from other overlapping genres: adventure, spy, legal, war, maritime fiction, and so on. Thrillers are defined not by their subject matter but by their approach to it. Many thrillers involve spies and espionage, but not all spy stories are thrillers. The spy novels of John le Carré, for example, explicitly and intentionally reject the conventions of the thriller. Conversely, many thrillers cross over to genres that traditionally have had few or no thriller elements. Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes, and Brian Callison are best known for their thrillers, but are also accomplished writers of man-against-nature sea stories.

Thrillers may be defined by the primary mood that they exhibit: excitement. In short, if it 'thrills', it is a thriller.

Also, there was an article on the site about sub-genre.

We have the main synopsis, but I'm going to discuss these options before I confirm the sub-genre(s) on this blog:
Action thriller
Crime thriller
Disaster thriller
Drama thriller
Eco-thriller
Horror thriller
Legal thriller
Medical thriller
Political thriller
Psychological thriller
Spy thriller
Supernatural thriller
Techno-thriller

In all honesty, after having read the explanations of all of the sub-genres, I'd love to involve as many of the themes from all the options as possible, not forgetting that the opening sequence is a mere 4 minutes long!