Audience feedback

Apologies as i have only just compiled our audience questionaire feedback!

We produced a questionnaire which we handed out to 9 males and 9 females ranging from the ages of 16-35. As our brief is to produce a thriller suitable for a certificate of 15, it is not only 15 yearolds who would watch such a film, so to have a mixed age group was important to ouraudience feedback. Below i have made some statements from the questionare results, and i have highlighted the things which i think we have tried to encorpoate into our thriller/what the questionnaries have shown to be most popular in a thriller.

Out of the thriller genres; horror, crime, pychological, action and supernatural the male participants preferred to watch action, psychological and crime the most and females preferred psychological, then supernatural/horror then crime/action. It is clear to se here that the most popular thriller genre is pyschological.
90% of male participants like clues in thrillers which is also popular with 100% of female particpants agreeing.
100% of both males and female partcipants like plot twists and extreme camera angles in thrillers.
90% of male partcipants like fast editing with only 1% liking slow instead of fast.
Female partcipants liked fast/fast and slow editing 50/50- indicating an apropriate mix makes for the perfect thriller.
Male partcipants like film noir 50/50 as opposed to female participants preferring it 90/10. indicating film noir is very popular amongst our sample audience.
The male participants were most afraid of spiders, heights, sharks, little girls on swings and dark corners.
The female participants were most afraid of; spiders, darkness, small spaces and being followed. Indicating overall spiders, darkness and "being trapped" scares our sample audience the most.
The favourite thrillers of our male particpants were; usual suspects, seven, vacancy and sin city, where as our females particpants liked;fight club, memento and clock work orange
The general concences of what makes a good thriller by both our male and female participants is a good storyline with planty of twists to keep focus and to keep them "guessing" with a really good ending which explains everything.

Males wanted a thriller opening to have secrecy, action, cliffhangers and montages
Females wanted to see; suspence, mystery, and darkness. This indicates a thriller opening should have lots of suspence/cliffhangers and mystery.
Males wanted characters to be; secretive and have in depth personalities/histories

Females wanted characters to have; mystery and suspence, dark pasts, to be secretive "two faced". This indicates characters should be secretive, unpredictable and dark.

Idea for map

This is an example of what we intend our "map" to look like, this example is from the good old memento and the other is from hero's

We would like our map to have this kind of look, as it shows someone has been planing something for a long time with a lot of thought. In our opening the map will depict the antagonists sinister intentions- to stalk/find/kill innocent girls who all look similar. We feel this kind of map will be very creepy and thrilling, especially as it will be constructed during the opening montage by the "killer" who's indentity will be witheld from the audience. Only his reseidence/place of work will be known as we will enter the room where the "killer" is working away at the map through a voyeristic establishing shot,panning through the window, and down to where the room is located within the house!

Update

Just a quick post to let everyone know how it’s going. The three of us sat down in our designated thinking place (the children’s section of the library) today and came up with quite a few good ideas as well as finalising some. We settled on the idea of using a montage scene depicting the creation of a map, pin pointing areas of interest to an unknown character. The scene will open with an establishing shot of a run down building, slowly the camera will track into the building through a window and down a corridor and into a room with a map on the wall. We will then cross cut between the unknown character preparing pictures and information to be put on the map, and the map itself as more and more information appears on it. All of this will be cut quickly to create confusion and there will be close-ups of random pictures. The scene will end with a shot starting as a close-up of the main title of the film (to be decided), which will then slowly zoom-out revealing the completed map. Hopefully this will all be story boarded soon and we’ll be able to post that up some time.

Tribulation

Just found this short film, by students at a college given basically the same brief as ours and which in my opinion is just short of looking professional. Despite being just one minuet fifty in length, a good range of shot types are used as well as editing techniques and transitions.
The first shot (a long, establishing shot) is a fairly long take and is well controlled as it pans across to show the area. It is interrupted by about three extremely fast clips of which we can just about identify as scraps of paper with pictures on. This first shot is a nice contrast to the series of quick edits we see toward the end of the clip. I especially enjoy the rapid cuts which link shot together i.e. the knife appearing clean and then with blood on or, the pictures multiplying on the wall. An excellent graphic match is used to link shot together and show the passing of time i.e. the knife spinning and the clock turning. Mostly all the shots are in some dreary colour close to black and white, possibly the scene would have looked better on a whole if black and white was used through out for example, to match the titles. The music (although not scored) is extremely effective and fits the scene really well, creating a spooky atmosphere. Towards the end of the scene the shots begin to move much quicker (the knife spins faster, as do the hands on the clock) meaning that the end is almost like a crescendo, however, instead the scene fades and the title appears. Admittedly, a few shots could have been framed better but this is a small problem considering the rest of the scene.

Memento Opening

Here is the opening from Memento, in my opinion a fantastic triller. What is not realy revealed during this openig scene is the serious messing of chronology and mix of black and white footage with colour sections which tell two different narratives, however these evebtually over lap, creating an amazing thriler twist.

what I particularly like about the opening scene, is the use of time reversal first presented through the tightly frame polaroid photo; and then much more cleraly througout the rest of the scene. Secondly I like the concelament of the man holding the photo's identity; which is continued for quite a period of the film. This is what I believe makes this film so engaging; the amount of enigma codes that are presented in the beggining of the film encourages the viewer to keep watching right to the end, although due to the mixed up narrative they may not have a clue what is really going on!

Elements from this openig that I would like to include in my own opening are;
the use of black and white, a chronologically mixed narrative, audience retardation and the the use of tightly framed POV shots.

Se7en

Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)

‘Se7en’ uses a montage of gloomy and somewhat creepy images during its introduction and opening credits giving little away to its audience. All of the shots we see within the first two minuets are close ups, meaning that we see only what the directory wants us to see and much of the background and surroundings are obscured. The use of close ups also puts emphasis on the objects we are shown, for example: the hands we see which we can only assume belong to antagonist (given the grizzly conditions under which we see them).

The same track is used for the whole of the montage scene, created with a synthesizer it used a basic atonal drone in the background with a number of other tense, strange noises over the top. At certain points throughout the extract the music changes slightly to reflect what we see on screen. For example when the unknown figure is cutting skin from his fingers a screeching noise is used, as if to make the shot even more cringe-worthy. At a certain point just as a line is drawn through a picture of a man the music becomes slightly quicker paced and more sounds are added, the track becomes more chaotic and the audience more disorientated. At the very end there is a single line of lyric, a strange line that possibly hints at the story line ‘You bring me closer to God’.

The titles are all in white, white being a basic colour. The credits are written in a freehand, hand written style font giving a ‘personal’ feel as if it has been written by the person who’s hands we are seeing. The names of the companies as well as the jobs of people (directors etc) are written in a basic block san-serif font in order to look official. Straight cuts are used, though not for usual reasons (for continuity) as they cut very drastically. For example cutting between a close up of a number of unrecognisable metal objects. Unusually, a similar amount of fades to black are used which (usually show passing of time) help to integrate the titles as well as making the audience more bewildered. The name of the film ‘Seven’ is written ‘Se7en’ to give the impression it is a code rather than just a name and causes the audience to wonder. The scene starts in black and white, adding to the confusion. About half way through the scene there is a shot of a photo being developed in red liquid which, given the shots we have seen so far looks like something slightly more sinister. Also, later on in the scene, just as the music begins to pick up, and after a fade to black, the scene changes to colour and basically replays its self in colour.

The scene opens to show the pages of a book turning, later on we see the same book being written in as well as see that it contains pictures of; a pair of hands (which we can link to a shot showing a faceless character cutting hi hands), photographs of various victims killed in various ways and a pair of scissors cutting up new photos to add.

Keeping things back from the audience in order to create a sense of confusion is a convention of the thriller genre along with holding back revealing the main threat or antagonist.

Bourne Supremacy Opening

I really like the use of this messed up montage as the opening to a thriller. The first minute or so of this clip has a really high pace and mix of fast forwarded and still images which create the sense of confusion presented. I like how it gives small parts of the narrative away, but not enough so that the viewer really understands anything.

The contrast between the vibrant flashes of street lights and the splashes of the rain give a harshness that is quite menacing, and adds to the confusion that both Bourne must be feeling and now the viewer! This is defo a technique I would like to try and use in my own opening; the amount of enigma codes that are produced here within seconds of footage in my opion makes a really clever and interesting thriller.

As for the rest of this clip the camera work and use of silence is very tension building, also the lightenig (although being at night-time), is very filmnoir, and echos the shadows that are the gaps in Bournes memory.