Thriller rough

This is the final rough shoot and edited version of our rough thriller.

Rough thriller shoot edit

Having gone out to shoot our rough thriller on my iPhone, I later uploaded these shots onto my Mac to edit on iMovie. I began by trimming each shot down to the desired length, then once this was complete I added sound effects, titles and credits.

Recky shoot for our thriller

We were given an hour to go out with our phones to film a rough draft of our thriller. This was done so that we could gain a view of how practical our Thriller idea actually is. I was in charge of filming the shots, while Kingsley and Tyler posed as my actors. In conclusion to doing this we found that our idea is fairly straight forward to shoot, however it is just a matter of finding the correct location to shoot at.

Prop list for our thriller

Thriller research- more props

With the he development of our new idea has come the need for use of props. So far the two most essential props that have emerged from our idea are fake money and a duffel bag. This links into the shot of the man packing money into a duffel bag just before he is leaving the house. 

As we developed our story board, we now have introduced the shot in which two policemen are chasing the man through the forest. As they are policemen we need to make it clear, therefore we are going to need two police officers uniforms for our sequence as well. I thought we would go for an authentic look to create the best effect. On top of this, we will need many other props. For example,

1. A safe, preferably with a number dial rather than an electronic dialling pad.
2. Fake money, either Euro's, US dollars and Great British Pounds to be inside the safe.
3. A hard drive to be inside the safe also.
4. A normal bedroom environment, e.g bed, bathroom, desk and chair etc.
5. Duffel bag for money to be placed inside.
6. Policeman uniforms.
7. Car (police car if possible), if not then an unmarked car.

This is our first list of props that we want in our opening title sequence for the time being.

I own a duffel bag, but none of us have fake money, so we did some research on ebay and amazon to see how much it was. Its not too expensive so we decided that when we need to we will order some, so we can make our scene look as realistic as possible. At first we were going to use pounds, but then we changed our minds to use Euros. We did this because we felt that Euros were more of an internationalized currency. 

What is a Thriller?

A thriller can take many different forms, for example, psychological thrillers, crime thrillers, erotic thrillers, mystery thrillers and action thrillers (however these usually involve crime). It often bestows a sudden rush of emotions, whether that emotion be sad, happy or an intense mix of both, which is driven by the story of the film. 

This is an important genre in the world of film because the many sub genre's allow it to be presented the an incredibly wide range of audiences. 

You would expect a psychological thriller to be mental and emotional, rather than physical. An example of your typical psychological thriller is Oren Peli's 2007 Paranormal Activity. This is an incredibly well done psychological thriller as it is a film in which not a huge amount happens but tension is built up so well that something as simple as a door slamming to break that tension would cause the whole cinema to become spooked.

A crime thriller is all about crime, which often begins with a failed crime followed by revenge. It contains murders, heists, car chases, shootouts and kidnappings. The target audience for a crime thriller tends to be your stereotypical, male adrenaline junkie. One of my favourite thriller's is Justin Lin's Fast and Furious 6, if not the entire Fast and Furious franchise. This film contains pretty much every aspect that a crime thriller contains, with particular emphasis on car chases.

As you can see the two sub genres that I have talked about are considerably different, which highlights my point about thriller's appealing to a wide range of audiences.

Location possibilities

We have decided to use a location rather than a set as we feel that it will fit our sequence a lot better. In our sequence we need both an upstairs and a downstairs of the house, therefore it is a lot easier and less time consuming if we use a location rather then a set. It gives us more time to focus on filming and editing of the final piece. Furthermore our sequence requires a Forrest and there is a natural one at Peaslake so that would be prime to use for us, also there is Adams house at Peaslake so we could consider using that as the house. There is no point in using the set for a Forrest when we already have one. For the forest we want it to look like the one below, so all the leaves and twigs will make snapping and crunching sounds which will help build tension and create effect in our opening title sequence. So far we think that Peaslake is the prime location to film at as it provides everything that we need. 

This picture is of forestry in the Surrey Hills which we will be using to shoot our forest scene

Character Development and Actor possibilities

Due to our opening title sequence involving a hard drive, my self and Tyler discussed what type of character that we would like. For example, is he a thug or an IT worker?

If we were going to have an actor who could play the thug then we would want someone big, maybe bearded and imposing. We then had the idea of using Ted Jackson.

Character List

In terms of mine, Kingsley and Tyler's character list we require only one or two different characters. At the moment, the only person we want in our Thriller is a man aged between 30 and 40, which is a very easy age range to find. We have a choice of plenty of teachers at Hurtwood House.

The three of us also contemplated using two policeman to arrive in the drive way of our location, but we feel that we can create more suspense and cause the audience to ask more questions by simply putting in the sound of the policeman knocking on the door, instead of showing the audience who is doing the knocking.

This picture shows two armed British policeman