Survey

We decided to do surveys so that we could establish a target audience. It also enabled us to understand and enabled us to realise what thriller our thriller came into, and who it was most popular for. The way we did it to make sure that we had an even number of each catergorie, we split it up so that one person did 5 males 15-18 etc..

Wordle for female 15-18

This shows that Thrillers are the least popular out of the majority of females of the age 15-18. This concludes that this wouldn't be wise to use as our target audience.

Wordle for male 18+

This wordle shows that for males above the age of 18, thrillers are the most popular, therefore this would be quite a wise target audience to use.

Wordle for female 18+
Here is the wordle for females over 18, this shows that thriller is quite majoritively popular. This could be quite a good target audience.










Therefore for our thriller we should maybe aim to use a target audience of males and females over the age of 18.

The remote control submersible.

When looking for submersibles we googled remote control submersibles, and this is what it came up with. It mainly came up with submarines, which will not do, as we aren't having it in a submarine as they are too big, and we want to create a claustaphobic feeling, and more suspense.

The problem that we've had with buying the submersibles is many of them look like toys, and they would not look realistic. The white one for example has windows which look very fake and this would not look ideal underwater for our submersible. However with it having a torch on the front of it is really beneficial as we need to have a torch at the front of our submersible for many of our shots. The grey-blue one is the one that we are liking the most and thinking that we will use.

Costume

Heres a picture of the costume we were hoping to use for our thriller, it is a blue boiler suit. We think that this is what they would wear in a submersible and is quite a practical outfit that can be used for the costumes of our men.

Costumes are so important in making any film. In our thriller inparticular we must make sure that our costumes are perfect, because if they at all look not right, then this will detach the udience from the sequence as they will just be thinking to themselves, 'well submersible men don't wear that', and this will make it unrealistic. We need to make sure that we are correctly representing the men in the submersible, and if we do not do this then our thriller will not be very good at all as the whole effect will be lost.

We've been looking at places we could buy these from, and this is one that we've looked at which would be ideal to use. Heres what we found on the internet, but in the clip from Submerged we can see the man underwater wearing a short sleeved blue boiler suit. So we've been also looking for short sleeved boiler suits, which is prooving to be quite tricky.  

Heres a screen shot of the trailer Submerged. It shows the costume of the men, which we are hoping to use. Also it shows the kind of thing we want the inside of the submersible to look like. We want there to be controls everywhere, and TVs so they can't see out of it, but can just see out using technical devices, this will help with the costraphobia aspect too.

Script

The script has proven to be one of the hardest jobs. At first we thought that we could make it quite brief about what they're down there for and have as little dialogue as possible. But there needs to be some information for the audience to grab onto and to be able to understand some parts of it otherwise they won't feel involved and therefore that'll get rid of the suspence. So we came up with the idea of instead of them saying about what they are trying to find, they will have a folder full of laminated sheets of paper which have pictures of what they are trying to find. This enables the audience to have an awareness of why they are down there, but also makes the audience ask questions about what it is and why it is so important for them to be getting this from underwater. We've decided as a group that they will be trying to find some silver from a shipwreck, we got this idea from a news article that we found talking about men that went down in a submersible to find some silver.

•  To make this sequence realistic we needed to use some technical words and/or include technical devices (e.g cameas).
• We've also included the base above ground with dialogue through a walkey talkey so this enables to audience to understand that there is a base (group) of them involved in seeking what they want from underwater, and also gets the audience familiar with the voice of the man on the walkey talkey who is going to become the main character of the film.
•  Through the dialogue we have created suspence, we wanted to include that they could see something (we will also show this will camera and mise-en-scene, but also we know that people are usually vocal about problems that they are aware of when they are with people/friends.
• So by incorporating the fear of the two men and base into the speech the audience see how afraid the men are which creates suspense as they are the ones who are supposed to be in control.

Presentation 1

Above a presentation which shows pictures of underwater, and people creating the underwater world. Although we cannot use these technologies, its good to look at them for improvisation. For example we are thinking of getting a 6ft tank, which we will fill up with water and this will create our long shots as we will put a mini submersible in this, this will enable the audience to establish we are underwater. It will be dark (low-key lighting), and you can only really see the torch at the front in the middle of the screen at the beginning. By the use of darkness it will create the constraphobic sense for the characters and audience.

We decided that instead of showing the base aswell as underwater, we'd just show the underwater in the sequence. By having the base above aswell it would take the audience out of the suspense, and letting them have a breather, but I think by purely focusing on underneath it keeps the constraphobic element! So this is why we're going to just show that there is a base through dialogue and props (walkey talkey).

Here are some of the controls, of what we'd like to be in the submersible!

Music for the Thriller

In our thriller sequence we want the music to be suspenseful but not scary. Here's a video which has inspired what kind of non-diegetic sound we would like to use. This music builds up but also has quiet moments and something like this would be perfect for our thriller idea. 

How will we create suspense?

We wanted to use a technique which gets the audience to look out into the distance, then gets shocked by coming popping up close to the screen. The way we'd do this was having a extreme long shot of the ocean so that the audience look into the distance, juxtaposed to big close up of something which will scare them. This is scary as it creates suspense and makes the audience jump. Here are two videos which are examples of this technique: 

Thriller Idea Outline

We've been discussing our Thriller ideas in class, and here is what our ideas are so far... 


Title: 'UNDER AND ABOVE'
The reason for this title is because its the life underneath and above that are featured in the film, the picture shows this.. 

Tag line: 'Is it best to know the unknown?'
Description of 2 minute sequence: Men in submersible are in contact with men above (in base). They are looking for an ancient artefact. But then something goes wrong with the submersible. Base loose contact, and the submersible never returns.
How we show the 2 minute sequence (through camera): Man in base (main character, most screen time) walks into the control room (tracking shot of his feet, then see him put in code – close up of hand - and open leaver). He walks into the control room, lots of computers and technical devices. Cross cuts to men in the submersible, establishing over the shoulder shot of window in the submersible, cuts to close up of driver of submersible. Cuts to the radar (diegetic sound of beeping). Then camera jerks, show men faces shocked and worried. They try to fix it. Try and call above base. (camera shot goes up) Cross-cuts back to base, diegetic sound of man saying ‘hello’ but it’s a fuzzy sound. Dialogue of main man, asking if the submersible people can hear him through walkey talkey. Fuzzy sound on walkey talkey, main man trying to fix it, fiddling with technical things. Dialogue of man in submersible asking if the main guy can see what the problem is. Then they think its calmed down, close up of the main man, hears in the walkey talkey a crash, tries to get attention of the submersible men, no-one replies.
Establish suspense: through the music something like video in other post, shot types (for example the juxtaposition of an extreme long shot to a big close up – shown in youtube videos on next post.)
The information given: the radar tells them they are trying to find something. Also the fact that they are in a submersible and the control base is in contact with that. They’re having trouble (camera and submersible jerking).
Information not given: The reason they have gone down there in the first place. And why hasn’t the submersible come back up? What is the uncertainty?
Main plot: One submersible is going down to find ancient artefacts, but does not return. Another is sent down to try and find this submersible but what will happen to it and will it return?

'Watching'

In class we watched a documentary called 'Watching'. This documentary was about film and how the beginning sequence of a film can be done in totally different ways and showing how the first sequence is the most important part of the film.
The first 2 minutes needs to grab the audience, it needs to get the audience onside as they decide quickly whether it'll be what they want or not. Thomas Sutcliffe says: “films need to seduce their audience”.
Director Jean Jacques Beineix says there are risks with 'instant erousal', these are that the film should grow. The audience should have questions of which they don't know all of the answers. By making it grow it raises the question for the director what do I do next? And the audience questions what will happen next.
“A good beginning must make the audience feel that they don’t know nearly enough yet”. The audience make an early adjustment to what they think the movie will be about. But it is important for them to not know everything. In the opening sequence they want to establish many things for example location, characters and also they have to understand what type of film it is going to be.
Critic Stanley Kauffmann describes a classic opening as getting the audience on your wavelength. One example he described of being a good opening is a close up of a building, then in the window, then to receptionist desk - this establishes the organisation of the world.







This video above is the title sequence of 'SE7EN'. It is so affective as it tunes the viewers into the movie, and fore-shadows what is going to happen in the film. It 'hits the audience on the head, and wakes everyone up'.









Here is the opening sequence of  'A touch of Evil', by Orson Welles. He wanted to plunge everyone into it, he wanted to shock his audience straight away and be original and different, but the studio were cautious. So the effect Welles wanted to create was lost, they made credits, so it wasn't like the beginning of the film. Orson Welles was obviously not happy so he wrote a 500 word lette asking them to reconsider but the studio won. So they decided to start the film in the more traditional way, instead of using Welles more drastic idea.
I learnt about the trick of opening with the ending, and visa versa, this is what's meant by the term 'a favourite trick of Film Noir'.





Heres the opening to 'The Shining'. It creates suspence as it is picturesque yet pursues the car as a preditor. We know that the people in the car are travelling in the wrong direction. The menacing music emphasises the suspence in this isolated area.

Powerpoint

We have used powerpoint to help with our thrillers. This helped us to talk and explain our ideas to our group and our class when we had to pitch our ideas. Above is one of the pages when we were creating this powerpoint, we talked about the location, main plot of whole film, characters in it and the 2 minute sequence.

This is our powerpoint that we used to pitch our ideas. When we were talking through our ideas I think it made it clear which ones we liked and which ones we weren't to keen on. Our first idea is called 'underwater'. One thing that we decided to do whilst talking was not to make it supernatural and just make it a psychological thriller. I was not keen on the supernatural idea at the beginning as I didn't think that that would make it a good thriller, and that it would be must more thrilling if it was to do with the mind instead of the supernatural super powers affect. Our second idea was to base it on the news story 'man jailed for faking own death'. When we were talking to the class we decided not to show the man walking past his own death as a) this would make it too obvious, b) because it wouldn't be realistic as if it was true he would not risk getting himself caught. Also by talking through the idea we decided how we needed to talk more about what the main plot was going to be as we had just focused on our 2 minute sequence instead of the whole film.

Our third idea was Human Artwork, this was an idea I quite liked but I feel we should have not shown the meat and that we should have just made it look like a normal artist but make it suspenseful by going really close to everything and have music quite has an eery and thrilling aspect to it. I think we could have done it not very gawry and more about the psychological problems of the artist. This would have quite a thrilling aspect to it. Our fourth idea was about a man collecting valuables from the women he has killed. We felt this was a good idea, but the eBay was not, as the reason a murderer would keep the possessions is to keep the power he felt when he took those womens lives.

Our Thriller Ideas ![1][1]