Audience Feedback of our Thriller

Georgia Angove, 17, 6th Form Student
"I like this particular film because it offers something different than other thrillers. It's creative and the music works well with the images. You really create tension well and it gave me goosebumps!"

Carole Robertson, 49, Receptionist
"I'm not a big fan of thrillers but I thought I'd watch the opening sequence of my daughter's AS level coursework, and surprisingly I enjoyed it. It made me want to watch more and it's something I'd like to see in the cinema, just to see what happens. The villain is very believable and is played well by Harvey."

Anthony Wilson, 16, 6th Form Student
"It was much different from any other thriller in our media class, I was very impressed by the acting skills and the range of shots used were effective. I liked the continuity editing when Harvey picked up the bat and walked across the room. It scared me."

Ryan Rogers, 15, Shenfield High School Student
"The music is what really built up the tension. I liked how it was silent at the start and the music suddenly kicked in as the scary images appeared. Paige's scream added well to the effect and the part where Leila appears in the light was especially scary. The ending image of Paige lying dead was a great way to end the opening sequence as it makes you want to watch more."


Leila Robertson

Our Final Product

Below is our final Product:The Boiler Room


Tom Payne, Mollie Duncan, Leila Robertson and Paige Brooks

Evaluation Activity 1

Evaluation Activity 2

Leila Robertson

Evaluation Activity 3

Tom Payne

Evaluation Activity 4

Leila Robertson

Evaluation Activity 5

Mollie Duncan

Evaluation Activity 6

What Have You Learnt About Technologies from the Process of Constructing this Product?

This is a video to show all the different pieces of technology we had to use when making our opening thriller sequence. We explain what we used, and how we used them.



Leila Robertson

Evaluation Activity 7

Mollie Duncan and Tom Payne

Film Poster

Tom Payne

Psycholographical System

1: Belongers. Traditionalist, cautious and conforming conservatives. Known as “nest builders”. They are susceptible to advertising of pension plans, insurance and DIY products.

2: Emulators. A smaller more impressionable group, these are often young they seek an identity. They are lacking in self confidence and are confused or vulnerable. From an advertising standpoint any insecurity are preyed on as they offer role models.

3: Emulator achiever. Materialists; stereotypically like the yuppies of the 1980’s they favour designer goods as a show of accomplishment and good taste although they often do not have a large income. It all for positive face.

4: Societally-conscious achievers. People who are concerned more with personal that financial or professional fulfilment. They are against conspicuous consumption and are sceptical of advertising.

5: Need-directed. Minimum wage earners, often on welfare benefits. More concerned with survival than mass consumption in an advertising sense. As far as advertisers are concerned they scarcely exist.

Mollie Duncan

The Demographical System

A: Upper middle. These are people who are high up on both the economical and A- Upper middle. These are people who are high up on both the economical and social ladder. They are generally people in higher management are fully professional and usually involved in solely administrative work.

B: Middle. These are the next level of people they have a good amount of money and power within their field of work. They are generally at an intermediate level of management and are also fully professional and primarily involved in administration.

C1: Lower middle. These are people who are towards the middle of the scale. They have enough money most of the time but are not overly wealthy. They have jobs in junior management, supervisory and clerical fields. They are full time professional and have a role in administration.

C2: Skilled working class. Have a low level of income but have a transferable skill they use. They are either involved in low-level management or manual labour of a high quality. They can be fully professional but usually work on more of an on demand basis and are usually absent from administration.

D: Working class (Excluding Skilled). These are part time workers with a very low level of income. As they are unskilled they will be involved in retail work and some simple manual labour. These will often be a younger generation

E: Lowest level of subsistence. These are the bottom level of the scale. Are often unemployed occasionally work part time and live unsupported. These are state pensioners or widows.This system is flawed in that money and level work are what are used to attempt to guess what people want to watch.

Mollie Duncan

Questionnaire

We came up with a range of questions about thrillers to help us create our opening sequence of "The Boiler Room". So we knew what our target audience wanted / expected to see.
We also found out that overall, the most popular genre for people to watch is action adventure. However one of women's favourite genre is also romantic comedy. People are most likely to buy a DVD than go to the cinema to see a new film, as they think it's worth waiting a few months so they get more out of their money when paying around £10 for a film they can watch anytime they want.
Here's the questions and the most popular answers we got:


If I said the word “thriller” what would you expect to see?
- gore
- an unexpected twist in the story
- death
- a chase scene / fast pace

How often do you watch thrillers?
- whenever there's a new one in the cinema (once or twice a month)
- weekly, on a night in

How old were you when you started watching thrillers?
- fifteen / sixteen was the average age

What’s your favourite thriller?
- Se7en
- The Strangers
- The Godfather
- Saw
- Psycho

In terms of audience are males or females more likely to watch a thriller?
mostly males watch thrillers however there isn't much difference in how much females watch them

What type of plot developments do you expect in a thriller?
- a twist in the story
- a secret villian who may / may not be revealed at the end
- a lot of tense moments / fast pace seens

In the opening sequence of a thriller what do you expect to see?
- nothing that gives away the story too much
- earee music

What type of props / setting is expected to be seen in a thriller?
- normal conventions, a city scene, policemen, investigators, bad weather, weapons etc

What genders are the typical villain / hero in a thriller?
both normally male was the average answer

What do you think an average age group the audience of a thriller would be?
most people answered 16 to 25
the average age for people watching thrillers is 19

Leila Robertson

Title Sequence

I did some research on www.artofthetitle.com and looked through pictures of many thrillers opening title sequences. After a while, I found the film "Ginger Snaps" (shown below) and our group agreed that we liked the title sequence for it. Which is why it's our title influence.

Another thriller I looked at was "The Thing" which also had a similar style to this. However, their pictures in the background weren't clear and they've made it look quite old fashioned by the font they've used. Which isn't what we were looking for as it wouldn't be appropriate for our target audience that way.

We liked them because it's very similar to the openeing sequence we had with different images flashing up on screen. So we thought if we had the credits flashing up with the images, it could look very effective. As the background of our images are quite dark, we're also going to use white font. The font we've used is called 'pristina' as it suits the thriller genre. We have the actors and directors name coming up first then "PLMT Productions" which is our production company. It stands for Paige, Leila, Mollie, Tom Productions. At the end of our sequence is when the title of "The Boiler Room" in red. This is colour coding for blood and danger as the rest of the film would continue.

Leila Robertson

Music

When we first had our finished storyboard for our thriller, our initial ideas for our music was to have circus music. As in our thriller we have pictures of clowns on the walls and balloons on the floor, we thought it would add to the effect. We decided that if we had the circus themed music, we would slow it down to make it more scary, and this would've been contrapuntal music.

However, once we had filmed and edited our thriller, we didn't think the music would be as scary as we'd hoped. So I did some research into different music and went through a lot of tracks on freeplaymusic.com. There was circus music on there, but by this time we were against the idea so I looked into the categories "Soundtrack - suspense" and luckily the first song in that category, "Abducted" went really well with our thriller.

Leila Robertson

Editing Diary

Once we had finished the main part of our thriller, we decided that we would get some of the editing out of the way, so there wasn’t a big rush at the end to finish and edit an opening thriller sequence. The main problem we had when we were editing was how to darken the scene, because we filmed in a well lit boiler room, without no lighting it was impossible to film in, so decided to film with the lights on and edit it on the computer to darken the scene. We all decided to edit at one time to put our ideas together to get the best out of the thriller. Leila especially was the best at editing and knew a lot about it. The other problems that we confronted was that the editing suite was sometimes busy so we couldn’t always edit when it was suitable for us, so when we had free periods two of us would edit and the other two would work on the blog. To start editing we put the camera on the dock, which was connected to the computer and uploaded the footage to the editing software. The software we used was Pinnacle. We filmed each scene a few times so we could choose the best parts, these either had to be ‘cut’ because they where too long, or it didn’t flow with the next scene. The boiler room was very noisy with all the machines and pipes, so we had to edit out the sound and introduced it when dialogue was use. Before we even started to film we didn’t want to have any dialogue, only screaming has been involved. As we are now at the end of filming our thriller, all we need to do is finish editing, and put the credits on. We will spend a lot of time at lunch and free periods and some lessons to finish it. We will watch some past thrillers to see how their credits are in the film so we can get some ideas and apply it to our thriller. Once we have found our legal music that we want, we can add that to the thriller and cut it to where we want it to be played.

Tom Payne

Shooting

Once we had decided that we were going to base our thriller in the boiler room and had completed our story board we began to shoot our thriller. When choosing which shots to make in the boiler room, we always wanted to make sure that the victims vunerability was constant throughout, whether it be a long shot of the whole room or an
extreme close up off her face.

When shooting the scene at the end our thriller we wanted to have a quick shot of the victim once she had been murdered. After shooting our other scenes in the boiler room we decided to search the school grounds for a place to take this shot. We found a hole that had already been dug in the ground due to building work on the school site and decided to get a shot of Paige (playing the victim) laying inside the hole. It worked well as the hole looked like a partly dug grave, a good place for the body to be hid in.

We also took shots of Paige laying front down on a flower patch but we thought that this looked too typical for a thriller and we wanted something quirky and original for our last shot.

We then moved onto the playground where we came up with the idea of having a shot of Paige in the middle of a target painted on the floor. Not only does this symbolise the fact that she is a target of murder but also represents her vunerability, as these sorts of details are featured on a playground to attract children.

We made other shots of Paige in various positions such as laying amongst a net we found on the playground, on a bag of sand in a building site setting, underneath a tree, amongst bushes and on a mound of grass and mud.

Out of all these shots we found that the one of Paige face down in the mud was the most sucessful and decided to use this in our thriller.

Mollie Duncan

Costumes

The victim in the first scene will be wearing normal/casual clothing as she is at home using the computer. Her outfit will then change when she has been abducted to a males shirt. This shirt actually belongs to the villian, which suggests she has been abused and is now under his control. The only other thing she is wearing with this oversized shirt is a pair of pink socks, we've used colour coding as it portrays her innocence and shows that she is naive.

The villian is going to be wearing all black, with the hood of his coat up. He is also wearing a white mask which means his face will not be revealed, this adds to the mystery of the thriller and keeps the audience on the edge of their seats. The black of the outfit portrays his character as he is dark and mysterious. This character will also be wearing a medical face mask to add to the eerie effect.

The third character will be wearing a dolls costume which consists of long stripey socks, with a matching white, red and green doll- styled dress. This ties in with the theme of the thriller which relates to a circus/ childs party. This also adds to the weird and creepy atmosphere that we wish to create. This girl is a previous victim of the villian and has been put in this outfit to show that she is now under his control.

Mollie Duncan

Thriller Stroyboard

Drawn by Leila Robertson

Created by Tom Payne, Leila Robertson, Mollie Duncan and Paige Brooks

Conventions of a Our Thriller

In our thriller, we have to show stereotypical conventions so the audience would know it is a psychological thriller. The wierdness of the props / setting etc are all parts of the conventions. The music would be eary or slow sounds, perhaps no sound at all to create tension. There'll be low key lighting in mainly isolated places which are dark and make people feel trapped. Another convention would be that everything would be unusual, something that the world wouldn't understand. Our male character creates an inigma, as he grabs the audiences attention by not knowing who he is or what he's doing. He represents evil by his dark clothing, which also colour codes. There's two vulnerable teenage girls which one is dressed as a doll, which connects with the props. The props we're using are things like pictures of clowns, dolls and red balloons. These create a contrapuntal feel as they're meant to be connected with happy emotions. The red balloons are also colour coded with danger and blood.
Overall, it's a psychological thriller with some conventions of a horror.

Leila Robertson

Our Character Choices

The Ideal Villain

Intimidating
Big Build
Tall
Dark Hair
Male
Large Features


The Victim

Small Frame
Vulnerable
Female

Tom Payne

Our Location

For the first part of our thriller, we had to film an instant messaging scene, this was done easily as every member of our group was seen as a possibility, as we could film at their house. All we needed was a computer to film Paige on and a laptop / other source of instant messenger for someone to type messages to her. We decided to use my house because it's closest to school and we could easily get the train to and from there whenever we needed to. Also, as we wanted Paige to come across quite innocent we thought my room would be the best choice because of my pink walls in the background, so we incorporated colour coding into our decision.

We found our main location by help of Mrs Cookson as it's in our school boiler room. Once we told her that we wanted something along the lines of a pipe / pole Paige could be handcuffed too, she asked permission for the school boiler room straight away for us. We wanted this because we thought it would be effective for the main character to be handcuffed to poles to make it obvious she had been abducted. We thought it would be a good setting overall for a thriller, as it's quite dark and we used effects to make it look eerie. It's an easy location for us to get to, as none of our group can drive yet, it will be easy for us to film during school hours and somedays afterschool as well. We always checked we could film there beforehand.

At the end of our thriller opening sequence, we have a shot of Paige lying dead on the ground, this was also easy for us to do as it was also on the school grounds. To find the shot we liked enough to use, we walked around the school grounds shooting various shots of Paige in different places / different positions.

Leila Robertson

The Brief

Our opening sequence will begin with a teenage girl on the computer talking on a msn to a man she knows under the name of 'Paul'. They make it obvious that they haven't actually met yet but are planning to soon.
Continuity editing is used as it then cuts to a series of shots revealing different images from around the boiler room. During these pictures, our credits appear in a white font. Suddenly, there's a shot of the young girl handcuffed to a pole. We would slowly reveal her condition and also will build up tension with the non-diegetic music in the background. We will then introduce more conventions of a thriller that includes using children’s toys to create an eerie atmosphere.
Her hands are trapped as they're tied by handcuffs to a pipe. We see the man pick up a bat and walk past her, which implies that he's a dodgy character and it was the man she was talking to dangerously on the internet.
Towards the end, there's a shot of another girl who is wearing a doll costume, who has clearly been there for ages after being captured by this man.
The end shot is of the victim, Paige, lying outside.

Leila Robertson

Setting

We threw together a few ideas together for location and where we would like to film, we started off looking at field in the Brentwood area, and we found a good location behind one of our houses. We felt this was too common and a lot of people from previous years had used this idea. Our final idea was to film in the school grounds in the school boiler room; this would have had a great effect on the genre as it has the thriller feel. When coming up with our concept for our thriller, the film 'Saw' had a huge influence on our location choice. Saw used a empty bathroom for the majoirty of its setting and we liked this idea because its quite simplistic and you cannot see the surroundings, or how the characters arrived there, so it leaves the audience questioning. We have asked permission from the Care taker, Mr Piper, and we are ok to film in the boiler room. The conventions of the boiler room have sense of darkness which would need low key lighting, its gives a sense of mystery because the location isn’t familiar with the audience.

Tom Payne and Leila Robertson