Principles of a Thriller Film

Principles of a Thriller film 

In any thriller film, the producers do many different things to make sure that the audience of the film will know that the film that they are watching is a thriller film. They will do things like using quick jump cuts or cutaways between scenes; they do this so that the audience watching the film’s anxiety and tension will increase throughout the film. They will also usually use low key lighting to enhance the sense of darkness; this should most likely make the viewer have a suspicious feeling about the characters within the thriller movie. Diegetic sounds such as breathing can usually convey to the audience that the character is tense or scared, typically after a shot of someone breathing heavily in a thriller a jump scare tends to happen therefore the audience end up sitting on the edge of their seat and anxious because they feel or know that something frightening will happen. Changes in the shots are added to show the representation of characters feeling or what is going on within the scene, a lot of shots are used to represent the authority and power a certain character has, for example if it was the main villain then they would probably use a low angled shot to make them look bigger and much more powerful. Many principles for thriller movies are usually put in to increase the fear so that it will give viewers the thrill factor.

For example in the thriller film, The Purge, the producers use editing to make the camera shots look like security camera footage, they use low key lighting on the footage to convey suspicion and fear, so that the sense of what or who is lurking in the shadows feeling is set into the viewers watching the film, resulting in them being frightened and anxious, like what many thrillers have in them. I hope to have some of the techniques that were used in this film to be used as some inspiration in my short film.

Prop for Ghost Characters

Masks For The Ghosts

For our film their will be people dressed like ghosts. To get the effect of a ghost, the people who are acting in our film will be wearing masks like these, this is because we want them to have no expression and look blank, we want them to  have a 'death' like look to them. But also have a real person look to them. Therefore making them look like 'living death'.

Possible location for our film

Abandoned/Possessed/Haunted House 

This will be made to look a lot scarier, and the lights will be low to created a suspicious and dark atmosphere.

Tetual Analysis of Se7en

Preliminary Task

Analysing a TV Drama

Preliminary Task

Our Preliminary Task

For our preliminary task, we are filming a minor part of a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom the character then exchanges a few of lines of dialogue. This task will establish match on action shot, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule.

Match on Action Shot

The match on action shot will emphasise certain events within our clip which will make it stand out more. Match on action (or cutting on action) is an editing technique for continuity editing in which one shot cuts to another shot portraying the action of the subject in the first shot. This is not a graphic match or match cut, it portrays a continuous sense of the same action rather than matching two separate things.

Shot/Reverse Shot

Shot reverse shot is a continuity editing technique used in conversations or simply characters looking at each other or objects. A shot showing what the character is supposedly looking at (either a point of view or over the shoulder shot) is followed by a reverse angle shot of the character themselves looking at it, or of the other character looking back at them, for example.

The 180 Degree Rule

The 180° rule is a filming guideline that participants in a scene should have the same left-right relationship to each other, with filming only taking place within the 180° angle in which this is maintained in a conversation, for example. This allows the audience to have a greater sense of location in the scene in terms of what may be off-screen in some shots, for example in shot reverse shots.

Story Board - Prelimarey Task

This is the final storyboard for our preliminary task. We used a range of different camera angles such as extreme close ups, long shots, follow shots etc.

We have came up with the name of 'La Penna Rosa' for now, but that could possibly change in the near future.

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Post-Production

TV series 'Utopia' on Channel 4, is a sci-fi thriller that centres around a inequitable group of people who discover a global conspiracy in a comic book. But they do not know if they are living in the conspiracy.
In order to show connotations to the comic, they dress the sets in more yellows, cyans and magentas so in post-production they can make them bolder. Colourist Aidan Darrell carefully colour correct each shot in post-production.
I have learnt that Post-Production occurs after starting the filming of your movie.
Post-Production contains: editing, publication, and a short evaluation.

Throughout post-production, the producers, the director, and script writers can take a seat and watch their movie completed. This can permit them to see if the filming meets their storyboard and what they need out of their movie, that commendably meets their targetable watchers and that it gets the top results.