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