Question 1

A thriller is a novel, play, or film with an exciting plot, typically involving crime or espionage to create suspense and tension.

There are multiple sub-genres located throughout thrillers. These can include crime, action, psychological and disaster. The sub-genre that we chose was a psychological thriller. We chose this sub-genre of our thriller because it impacts the audience mentally as it can link to real life events.  We also chose this sub-genre because it has the biggest impact on the audience out of all sub-genres as it can be disturbing and messes with the audience’s minds mentally.  

The audience’s expectations of this sub-genre include being mentally scared and expect to see scenes of high amounts of tension and sadistic scenes.

We decided not to include many elements in our opening because we wanted to keep it short and slick and including different ‘suggestions’ of death. These included cutting open the egg yolk to show blood leaking out of a wound giving the audience ‘false’ impressions of what will happen next and if there will be a murder taking place. We developed the clips to connote death throughout the introduction such as having darker lighting to show danger due to the victim being blind because of the darkness to show his vulnerability and give the audience an idea of what time it is set in.

 

The conventions we used included different shot types. These included close up, extreme close ups. We used these to show emotions from the victim and connote chaos because the audience cannot see the victim’s surroundings off the screen. There were a few mid shots that were only used for continuity editing as they can see where the victims goes and to get a rough idea of his surroundings.  The sound we used included consisted of a non-diegetic soundtrack to be played in the background to build up tension and create atmosphere during the scenes. The non-diegetic soundtracks are used in typical thrillers to scare the audience by building up lots of tension over a long period of time as the speed and pitch of the soundtrack increases.  We also used diegetic sounds within the opening because this makes the introduction look a lot more realistic by adding realistic sounds such as the toaster going off or unlocking a door.              

 

The title of our thriller is very particular in thrillers. This is because of the colour of the title being red to portray blood which is used a lot in thrillers to raise tension and so the audience can clearly see what type of thriller it is just from the title. The font for the title is messy. This is because it looks unnatural which thrillers tend to be.

 

   The location of our thriller is set in a typical household which isn’t portrayed very commonly in thrillers. This is because they are usually set in remote locations such as an abandoned house or the woods far away from anyone else so we decided to change it to a more uncommon location to be set in a thriller film.

 

The costume we chose for the victim was a simple polo t-shirt and black trousers. This is because it is common dressing for a man in thrillers as he links to ordinary life’s of people and not dressed all fancy in unusual costume unless it’s the killer to stand out.

 

 

 

 

The camerawork contained a lot of close ups for the introduction. This is because it shows facial expressions clearly and to focus on a certain part of the scene. This is very typical as there are a lot of close ups on the victim during thrillers as they panic and look scared most of the time.

The genre of the thriller is meant to be a psychological thriller. This is common because it is used to show fear towards the audience and affect them mentally while watching. A way we showed this included close up shots of Mise-en-Scene being used to falsely predict a murder that’s going to take place.

 

After analysing a range of thrillers, we found that the majority included scenes of action and a lot of mystery to captivate the audience into watching the film further. We could also clearly see that the majority of thrillers contain a lot of jump cuts to add suspension and confusion. The thrillers also contained continuity editing s the film runs smoothly. An example of a thriller we watched was ‘Dexter’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We chose this thriller because it links very much to our thriller due to the mise-en-scene and the ideas it created inspiring us.

The conventions in Dexter that make it effective include:

The music in Dexter is effective because it is used to set the scene to the opening and it sounds like everyday music an audience member would hear. The beat of the song contains a slow pace to set the tension raise towards the audience by the slow pace it creates. It matches the actions of Dexter as his movements are slow and in time with the tune.

The mise-en-scene is effective because it gives the audience false impressions throughout of murder. An example is the meat slicing where Dexter slices open some pork in a close up shot. This was effective because it looks like a body he is cutting open and not his breakfast.  He cuts open the meat very slowly  which isn’t normal because of the knife he is using which is a lot sharper and smaller than meal knives people would use.

 

 

The opening uses a lot of jump cuts into different scenes showing the different stages of Dexter’s morning. This starts from waking up, shaving and eating breakfast to go out which is effective because it fits in the whole morning with hints of the characters personality into a very short clip.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=85114404&v=YyKMSisO4t4&x-yt-ts=1422579428