Final Treatment

'As a young boy, Thomas Crickly was left traumatized after his older brother was brutally murdered in front of him by a group of corrupt policemen. Thomas vowed that he would avenge his brother’s death. He obsessively studied criminology and gradually worked his way into police system, enabling him to satisfy his hunger for violent revenge undetected.'

We have read over this and we think that it is the best treatment as it has provoked the most ideas in our group.

The bit we are going to focus on in this treatment is: He obsessively studied criminology and gradually worked his way into police system, enabling him to satisfy his hunger for violent revenge undetected.''

We think that this will be a good part to base it on, as there are a lot of oppurtunies for symbolism which will intrigue the viewer.

Lesson Plan

-Decide on final treatment
-Work out which bit of the treatment to potray
-Work on some shot ideas
-Start storyboarding

Dreamhouse

I thought this could be linked with the treatment. The story outline of this is Daniel Craig has psychological probelms which stops him to live a normal life.
I like the way they show the audience see exactly what the victim is seeing also unaware that all this is a dream created by the character. The audience also feel what the victim is feeling. This helps the audience sympathise with the character. He is haunted by the past hence why he creates this idea in his head which relates back to our treatment.

Hable Con Ella (Talk to Her) (2002)

I have moved on from the Coen Brothers to Pedro Almdóvar's films, and I am really enjoying them.
I particularly like the titles sequences in his films. They are quite unusual and very creative.

The opening sequence to Hable Con Ella is an animation, and I really like the way they have created a flickering effect by having paint smears across some of the frames.

As well as the animation being visually appealing, the text is also very well executed. I think that we need to dedicate a lot of time to the titles because when they are well planned and look good, it makes the rest of the sequence look really professional.

Questionnaire Results

Gender: The gender of the respondents was significant as it lets us have a clear idea of what they like and how they differ. We have more female than male as we gave out the questionnaire around school and it was hard to find a lot of males.

Age: In this particular case as it is a major influence of the choice of favourite genre of film/mus

ic/TV programme and preferred method of communication.

Religion and Ethnicity: These also have big influences on the choices that individuals make or views the have.

Genre of film/ Genre of TV programmes: although we have to do a psychological thriller we thought it would still be important to ask what genre is preferred by our audience as we can still have some elements of other genres. TV programmes also link with genre of films. For example if we was to figure our that our audience was interested in cooking programmes we could use some elements of cooking in it. (Dexter)

Preferred mode of transport: We included this as we want the audience to be able to relate to our film opening. Therefore if we are aware of their preferred mode of transportation we can then learn to work around that and make sure we use the popular method of transportation if we include that in our opening.

Genre of music: We want the music used in our thriller opening to appeal to our viewers, therefore knowing their most enjoyed type of music will help us do so.

Audience Research: Questionnaire

We have created a questionnaire to find out who our target audience are.

There are basic questions (age, ethnicity, gender etc) as well as questions about their favourite actors/ musicians/ type of music/ genre of film.

We need to find out if our audience are mainstream or independent so we know how symbolic/ arty to make the opening.

We also need to find out what their general interests are so that we can try and incorporate them into our opening.

We may have to make our opening a hybrid with another genre if we find out that our target audience like genres other than thriller.

Treatment

We were given a stimulus to base a 60-70 treatment on, which gave us more practice in coming up with ideas for narratives.

We might use this treatment as a stimulus for our final video, but we are going to modify it slightly and bring in inspiration from some of the films we have studied previously.

A Break in the Case by William E. Blundell
‘Eight stab wounds, eight corpses, zero clues’ sighed the inspector, driving through the rain. ‘He’s neat, efficiant’

The criminologist polished his glasses. ‘Yes. Also slight, left-handed, myopic. Loves Beethoven. And I know his whereabouts.’

Screech of brakes.

‘Where?’ cried the inspector

‘Here’ said the other, grinning hugely as he slammed home the blade.

Our Treatment:
As a young boy, Thomas Crickly was left traumatized after his older brother was brutally murdered in front of him by a group of corrupt policemen. Thomas vowed that he would avenge his brother’s death. He obsessively studied criminology and gradually worked his way into police system, enabling him to satisfy his hunger for violent revenge undetected.

Preliminary Task: Conversation

Today we filmed and edited our Preliminary Task. Although we didn't have a lot of time to film it, we are still pleased with the results.


When we edited it we put a black and white effect on it to make it seem like an old Alfred Hitchock film, and this also meant that the money we used didn't look out of place.


We also separated the clips of me (The Assassin) from the other clips and made the pitch lower on them so that I sounded like a man, and this actually turned out to sound quite realistic.

Money Money Money....

We used Google Images to find a picture of a £50 note which we then printed off lots of times. Due to a problem with the ink we had to print them off in black and white, but this turned out to be a serendipity as we now think it would be a good idea to film in black and white for our preliminary task so that the colour of the money won't matter.

Filming in black and white will give the film a more mysterious feel which links in well with the idea of assassins and murder.

List of Requirements

I am going to bring the black trousers, black men's shoes, black jacket and possibly a briefcase, and I am going to borrow the plastic gun off of a friend

Marnie is going to bring a fedora hat.

We want the assassin to look dark and mysterious with his feet up on the table.

For the wadge of money we are going to print off lots of copies of £50 notes and tie them together.

Story Board - Preliminary Task

This is our story board for our preliminary task. We tried to stick to it but we made a couple of adjustments according to our group preferences of how other shots turned out. We took several shots from different angles so we could choose which shot came out better. That helped us a lot as we now know for the future to do the same because watching it over and planning it on paper is no the same, it might not come out as originally planned. This would cause problems with continuity if had to film again on another day. It is the best way to avoid them sort of problems. We also changed the brief case idea as we thought it would be more dramatic if she flung the stack of money on the table. We also didn't have a brief case in hand considering we only had a short amount of time to complete this in.

Preliminary Task Brainstorm

The other day we brainstormed a few ideas for the preliminary task and circled our favourites.

The idea we liked best is: 'Person bribes an assassin to kill someone for them'

We think this idea is the best because it doesn't seem too difficult and it will be fun to make.

I think brainstorms are the most effective way of getting your ideas down as you can easily add to the different stems of it when new ideas come into your head.

Prezi about the Thriller Genre

Using the online presentation tool Prezi, we created a presentation about the genre of Thriller.

We have decided to upload it to the blog for future reference/ inspiration.

Thrillers on Prezi

Group Lesson Timetable

We have collaborated our school timetables so now we know when we have free periods where we can work on our foundation portfolio. The areas in grey indicate periods in which none of us are free.

Early Preliminary task

Thriller Preliminary task on Prezi

This is an early preliminary task we did as a group as animations. I think this helped us as it showed us a little taster of filming. We had many ideas sometimes forgetting that we could only take pictures. This is again going down the symbolic route we would like to use in our finale piece. I thought it would be relevant to upload as it shows our early ideas.

Mirrors (2008)

Thinking back to the post about Black Mirror, I remembered watching this film a while ago, and I remember thinking that mirrors are a really good way to create really quirky and interesting effects.

For example the way they reversed the 20th Century Fox logo was a simple yet effective way to reinforce the narrative.

Response to Se7en

I just watched the video on Huda's post about Se7en and I really liked it.
I really like the dark lighting and the flickering images, and the way the director has chosen to go down the more symbolic route rather then clearly showing the actor's faces.
This kind of opening is just the kind of thing I had in mind for our opening.
There are some options on iMovie which let you create an old movie-style flicker effect but I think the best way to do this would be to insert very short clips inbetween the 'regular' clips. The short clips would be more distorted then the other ones.

Rear Window (1954)

It starts with a wide window, of which the first blind starts rolling up, and immediate fast paced background music plays. All three blinds roll up revealing the setting just like a curtain at a theater. We can see people moving around in opposite buildings on the pavement, or in cars which draws our attention expecting something to happen or explain the reason why this window's view is so important. This opening is interesting because it draws the audience in with the obvious violation of privacy into other people's lives. It doesn't introduce any characters which makes you curious of the unknown narrator and hints that he is hiding something. I would like to use this idea in my opening as i believe it interests the audience and creates mystery.

Strangers on a Train (1951)

This opening is rather plain, all that is shown is the credits in front of a background that introduces the setting of a train station with classical music playing in the background throughout. The credits end as a car comes into center shot of the area, introducing a character. It is plain but also a good example of how simple an opening can be to introduce the movie, setting and characters to the audience without giving anything away about the plot.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

It opens with an orchestra playing the drums and brass instruments, this creates a light, normal atmosphere but then starts the music starts to get louder and darker as the camera zooms into the band. It stops in front of a man who slowly picks up a pair of cymbals, and crashes them together. When it stops he holds them up and the a passage appears in front of them 'A single crash of cymbals and how it rocked the lives of an american family.'

This opening is interesting because of its use of simplicity and mystery, it reveals very little of the story and is hard to understand until the end. I would like to use similar aspects of this in my opening, because it creates suspense and intrigue.

Transsiberian (2008)

This film was on TV a few days back and I thought that the soundtrack was great in terms of creating tension and suspense.
This trailer gives a sense of what the music is like:

It starts off with atmospheric synths, strings, bells and cymbals and then drums are played once the action starts to come in.

When we compose our soundtrack I think that synths and strings would be good to include because they do create a sense of mystery and intrigue. I think that if we included drums then it would make it sound more like an action/adventure soundtrack.

The soundtrack wasn't the only interesting thing about this film. I really liked the way that throughout the film, Emily Mortimer's character takes photos which at the time don't seem that significant but then later on they are used as evidence. I think the idea of photos would be a good starting point for our opening.