Evaluation

M e d i a E v a l u a t i o n

We got the inspiration for our thriller opening from a number of films including Leon and Memento and our storyline was inspired by mainly by these two thrillers. Leon shares similar narrative aspects to our film in that it deals with the effects of dealing drugs and contains characters of a working class background. Furthermore, Memento’s opening is shown through a series of flashbacks which we agreed would be a very exciting and refreshing way to structure the shots, also it would create an interesting and challenging viewing experience for the audience. Moreover, Memento has shots in its opening that rarely exceed 2 or 3 seconds per shot, we chose to learn from this technique as we felt it added further excitement and was effective in engaging the audience. In addition to the length of the shots Memento also uses a wide variety of different shots which add auxiliary suspense and excitement within the narrative structure. In our Thriller we tried to achieve as many different shots as we could so as to ensure that our opening was appealing and engaging for the audience as we aimed for a gripping opening of our film.
We used Leon to research potential target audiences as we thought it was one of the most influential of the films we researched.AverageMales 112,655 8.6Females 14,959 8.6Aged under 18 2,130 8.8Males under 18 1,681 8.9Females under 18 446 7.9
Aged 18-29 84,562 8.8Males Aged 18-29 74,736 8.8Females Aged 18-29 9,505 8.9Aged 30-44 33,491 8.5Males Aged 30-44 29,576 8.5Females Aged 30-44 3,561 8.4Aged 45+ 7,180 7.9Males Aged 45+ 5,788 8.0Females Aged 45+ 1,324 6.9IMDB staff 26 8.3Top 1000 voters 793 7.6US users 35,671 8.5Non-US users 91,649 8.7
From the table we discovered that the age group which enjoyed this film the most where males under 18 and females aged 18-29. Leon being our focal influence, we decided that our own thriller would attract a similar target audience and so we decided it to be around the area of 15-29 year olds as these are the ages that have enjoyed the film the most. Also on IMDB this film was voted 10 out of 10 by 36.7 voters which was the highest percentage overall, this shows that the film was largely very popular. I found it useful to look at the audience demographic for this film being one of many similarities to our own, especially as our film is very main stream and this information would relate to our film.
The soundtrack used in our film was something that we left until last to decide, originally we wanted to use the song ’Safe From Harm’ by Massive Attack until it was made clear that copyright laws would not allow us to use this song without permission. Our alternative plan was to, ourselves, compose the soundtrack for our thriller, this opened opportunities such as being able to mould the song around the narrative action on screen and being able to create a sound appropriate to our film.'Safe From Harm', the title of our thriller opening, is one that contains many conventional thriller aspects. The most profound element that we felt we had to include was the staircase shot, which we included a few times. This was inspired by the Luc Besson film Leon when Matilda is sitting at the top of the stairs with her legs hanging through the banister railings and, again, when Leon pulls one of the 'Gangsters' over the banister to kill him. As both of these were most definitely key scenes we set out to use this convention more than any other. Furthermore stairs connote danger and suspense, especially when being chased up them, and this is how we brought our own take on the convention. The young boy sees his mother get shot and runs towards the stairs to hide, avoiding a bullet, he then runs up the stairs and is chased shortly by the murderer.
Our costume choice, especially for our male character, was thought about carefully. Whilst wanting to create a conventional thriller character our actor was fairly young so we had to chose a costume that would be believable. We chose to use a 'thug-type' theme to the costume and one that would ultimately hide his identity to connote a mysterious and guilty personality for the character. Eventually we took inspiration from films such as Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Adulthood and chose to use a costume compiled of a green hooded jumper pulled up over the head, a grey and black scarf wrapped round the face under the eyes, dark jeans and scruffy trainers. This helped to connote the working-class background of the youth and the conventional behaviour expected of him.
The killing of the protagonist, Alice's, family in our opening was something that we felt was necessary and we, again, took inspiration from Leon. This occurs towards the beginning of Leon when the group of gangsters break into Matildas family home and kill all of her family, we felt that this reflected the typical shock-educing aspects of thriller films and gave real contrast to the other elements of our film.
Our location, especially at the beach, was one that we put a lot of thought into. Not only did we want an isolated setting, to add suspense and further conventional attributes , but we also wanted one that would look striking on camera, this is when we decided to chose Holkham Beach on the North Norfolk coast. This beach has been used before in films such as 'Shakespeare In Love' and in an All Saints music video which swayed our decision towards using the setting in our opening. This definitely the ideal setting for our 'present' scenes as opposed to the 'flash-back' scenes shot at the house. We chose this coast-line in particular because it has a vast, sweeping beach surrounded by pine forests. We felt this was ideal to reflect the isolated feeling of the girl and to add a sense of misery and loneliness. Further reasons for choosing this beach in particular were that it was fairly accessible and a place that all in our group had visited and enjoyed.
I think that our character representations are very stereotypical, for example, our protagonist Alice is very much the female victim. She shows no signs of strong emotion and she is a victim of peer pressure and bullying. Throughout the opening she is perceived as being weak and shows no kind of personality, all of these are very typical of female roles in films. Furthermore, our male character (the murderer) is a very stereotypical working class youth. He is troubled and has probably committed many offences in the past. He uses bad language and is rude to people he doesn’t know and he wears sports clothing of bad quality. Typically, the male is the villain and the female is the victim this was not a conscious decision but was just the way the narrative structure took form.
In our film we have used conventional thriller characters to show the genre of our film, this helps the audience to identify the thriller genre. The female in our film is quite a typical victim apart from the fact that it is her own fault that her family have been killed. We took inspiration from Leon as the girl played by Natalie Portman also experiences her family being killed so we decided that this would be a good conventional aspect to have in our film. The villain in our film is also quite conventional as you don’t see his face in the film and he wears clothes that make him appear very anonymous . We also have a voiceover at the beginning of our thriller of the man who leads the girl into drugs talking to her; he could be viewed as a conventional character as most “villain” type characters are usually men for example the gangsters in Leon. We also decided to have a young boy in our film; this is also present in Leon when Matilda’s four year old brother gets killed, we chose to use this aspect in our own film, Alice’s younger brother gets killed, as it is quite a shocking aspect.
To open our film we decided to have a voice-over-black because we felt that this was effective in engaging the audience and providing an initial interest in the plot of our film. Also speaking to people who have viewed the film they found that the flashback style of the film intrigued them and that it made them more interested in the film as it instantly grabs your due to its fast pace.
Our film would ideally be distributed into multiplex cinemas such as Odeon and Vue in Norwich as it is a main stream thriller with a big plot and conventional characters. Then it would go onto DVD to be sold or rented in most outlets for audiences who enjoyed the feel at the cinema and to attract further audiences once the film is out of cinemas. Similar to films like 'Leon' and 'Snatch' it would be shown after watershed on Channel 4 if it was ever shown on television.
When I began doing A level Media Studies I knew very little about film making, in the first few months we were introduced to digital cameras and equipment like tripods. Using a digital camera I can record footage and watch it back, zoom in and out on the desired objects. I understand about camera angles and shot types such as high/low angle shot, tilted horizon, medium/long shot, extreme close up, close up, two shot, over the shoulder shot etc. I know about camera movements like zoom, tracking, panning and single-shot-cinema. This has all been very useful and has definitely had a great effect on the quality of our film.
The editing was the most satisfying part of creating the film I discovered, this was mainly because you got to put all the shots together into the correct sequence and you could watch the film being built. It was, however, the most important and crucial procedure because the continuity had to be perfect otherwise it would disrupt the viewing. This meant that we had to cut every shot down to the last mille-second to make sure it was smooth. Regarding the fact that we had flash-back shots in our opening made it even harder to make the narrative structure clear to the audience. We left small spaces in-between the present shots and the flashback shots to allow a small flash of black to divide them like someone blinking.

Storyboards

Reflections and amendments from our original plan

As expected our original plan took some changes in the process of creation. Most crucially, we had to change protagonist actress at the last minute after finishing all filming at the terraced house location. This was due to the fact that our original actress was not able to film at the second location before our filming deadline, our only option was to find a second actress and start filming again. This ended up being a positive thing as we were much happier with our second filming at the terraced house and the shots produced were more proffessional.

Our second amendment was that we had to change our soundtrack as originally we wanted to use Safe From Harm by Massive Attack, however, we couldn't due to it being copyrighted. Instead, we decided it would be good to compose our own music and therfore mould it around our plot and ambience.

Finally, we decided against making our actress walk into the sea at the end of our opening as on the day of filming it was about -4 degrees. Alternatively, we decided not use the shot at all as it was not key in the plot.

Titles

We wanted our titles to be fairly simple so as to not distract from the other narrative present, however, we did want our titles to be noticed. We used a white font over the black voice-over at the beginning and over a black background after the dialogue has finished. Our titles included our film production company 'Reel Films Production', 'Directed and Produced by', 'Music by' and finally 'Safe From Harm' at the end of the opening.
Our titles are very minimalistic and are comparable to titles such as Alfed Hitchcock's 'Birds' or 'Pyscho' which also had very simple titles.

Shooting schedule

For our entire opening we only needed to use a total of two settings this made it easy to decided the shooting schedule.
Our settings were at a terraced house in the centre of Norwich and at Haulkham beach on the north-Norfolk coast.

20th December 12.00 noon-5.oopm - terraced house, college road, norwich, norfolk.

4th January 1.00 pm-4.30pm - Haulkham beach, north-norfolk coast.

Evaluation Of Costumes

Jack Mullane (Drug Dealer/Murderer):
Green hooded top
Dark jeans
Trainers
Grey scarf

Jacks costume connotes conventional aggression,

potraying a typical thriller character much like those from 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' and 'Adulthood'. His scarf covers all of his face apart from his eyes and his hood is pulled up, this adds suspense because the character is unknown. The fact that he is trying to hide his identity suggests that he is a menacing character and may have caused trouble in the past. Furthermore, by wearing dark colours this also denotes a feeling of trouble and foreboding.

Katie Boyer (Mother)

Jeans

Yellow jumper

Casual shoes

Scarf

Katies costume was the least important of all of the characters. This was mainly because she had the smallest part to play. Her mundane attire implys that she is just an innocent victim and that she has nothing to do with the situation.

Meghan Summerfield (Alice/Protagonist)

White top

White Jeans

Blue scarf

Black shoes

Meghans costume was oen of the hardest. We wanted to connote purity but at the same time show her in her normal clothing.

Soundrack for our thriller opening

Initially, our idea was to use the song 'Safe From Harm' by Massive Attack however we later discovered that this would not be possible due to copyright laws. Instead we had the option to search the internet for appropriate soundtracks free of copyright or to compose our own music. Coincidently, two of our three group members are studying A-Level music and thus opened the opportunity to compose something completely original for out thriller opening. This will be very beneficial as it can be created to fit the emotion within the opening and we can convey the exact message and atmosphere we desire. Our soundrack will consist of string instruments, drums and possibly electric guitars to create an atmospheric yet modern sound.

Script for Thriller Opening First Shot

Boyfriend: [Annoyed] What d'ya want me down 'ere for then?

Alice: [Desperate] I can't do it.

Boyfriend: [Confused, angry] Do what?

Alice: [Begginning to cry] You, the drugs, everything.

Boyfriend: [laughs nervously] Don't be so stupid-

Alice: [Stubborn but still sad] No! It was only meant to be one time and now look at us, look at me. It's got to end...

Thriller Opening Treatment

Our first shot is of a 17 year old girl from behind. She is wondering down a beach (holkam beach on the north-norfolk coast, shown right) along the waters edge, the day is bleak, windy and cold. We chose this setting as, especially at this time of year, it is very isloated and the beach we chose is especially vast. The shot is in black and white and is in slow motion to emphasise the bleak atmosphere. The medium shot is moving along behind her and after 3 seconds begins to pan down and left around her body so that you can see her walking as well as the sea next to her. The camera is eventually situated at her feet from the front. It then pans slowly up her body revealing her distressed appearance, she wears black tights, but no shoes, they are ripped and dirty. She also is wearing shorts, because of the cold weather the audience will feel uncomfortable and already suspect something is not right. A black strap top underneath an oversized white shirt is all she wears on her top half and her make-up has run down her face as if she has been crying, her hair is down but unkempt. When the camera has reached her face it zooms in to a close-up as she is still walking, the frame is then disrupted by intermittent flickers of real-time shots in colour. As this is happening the girls face changes from emotionless to as if she is in pain, then the flickering shots cut over the image of her face and we are in the past. This, although is not the usual thriller way of doing flashbacks in black and white and real time in colour, connotes the girls emotion; when she is on the beach she is an empty shell, colourless and dispondent but in the flashbacks she is a fairly normal teenager living her life.

The flashbacks continue with breaks of the girl walking along the beach in between. The story is then revealed that the girl is a drug addict, born into the world by her boyfriend. Drowning in a world of debt the girl separates from her boyfriend hoping for the debt and drugs to dissappear. Unfortunately, without her boyfriend to keep the dealers off her they start to send threats which she ignores. When the girl is walking home one day, the audience see's a tall man dressed in black walking infront of her. He then turns left into the front garden of a house and the girl stops at the same house, it is then realised that the man is going to her house. The man walks up to the door and kicks it open, the girl's mother is in the kitchen with her younger sibling. The man starts screaming at the mother and pressing a gun on her neck, asking her where her daughter is. When the mother says she doesnt know and that she hasn't seen her for days the man gets angry and kills her. Meanwhile the sibling has run upstairs and hidden in its room, the man decided to go upstairs and look for it. The camera follows the man up the stairs, he has the gun down at his side, finger on the trigger. It then cuts to inside a cupboard slightly ajar, the shot is from the siblings point of view, the man walks into the room and is looking around (similar to the scene in Leon when the 4 year old boy is hiding under the bed). It then cuts to the girl still standing at the front garden and she looks up at the top window, it zooms in on the window (shot reverse shot) and there is flash and a bang that echoes as it zooms in on her face, her eyes are scrunched shut it fades into black and white and we are in back at the beach. The girl is standing still, wind blowing, alone. Her feet are in the water, the camera is behind her as she walks into the water and goes up to her waist, the frame then fades into complete darkness.