Thriller Task- Planning

Lesson 7- 9/2/10

In today's lesson the class reviewed the conventions of a thriller to make sure that we understood what made a thriller different to any other genre of films. Some new conventions that I learnt was to include a narrative enigma which invites the audience to ask questions which may be answered at the end of the film, extraordinary events that happen in ordinary situations, tension and suspense is built, dark lighting, themes of identity and mirroring, vulnerable victim who is normally female (protagonist), a villain (antagonist), twist in the plot, complex narrative structure, the title sequence reflects the characters' psychological state and voyeurism.

Afterwards, we started to watch a few examples of last year's thriller opening sequences, with a few examples that was a good composition and some that were a bad composition. I learnt that these thrillers do not have to be fast paced as the slow paced compositions of the thriller achieved a higher grade. The thrillers do not have to be scary as this would make the opening sequence seem more like a horror.

We decided on our groups, this is the people who we would work with for the remainder of the thriller task, I chose to work with Patricia Sheehan and Shaneece Deep. We began brainstorming many possible ideas for our thrillers onto a mind map, we discussed the potential locations, characters, props, costume and music.

Next lesson we will finalise some of our ideas and complete a rough draft of our storyboard which will be detailed in terms of camera shots, mise en scene and the dialogue.