1: In what ways does your media product use, develop

or challenge forms and conventions of real media

products?

How the opening sets up the thrillerI got the idea for my opening from the film ‘The Third Man’, a thriller from 1949. The opening stills set the scene but also build up an enigma and so I thought that they would in mine too.

I got the idea for the low angle shots of the killer’s legs from the films ‘Usual Suspects’, ‘Strangers on a Train’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’ The obscured view is enigmatic and unsettling - you get the sense that he is the one you should follow in the film and that he isn’t a nice person!

Link to clip

Genre and how the opening suggests itI think that the photos are the first real indication that it is a thriller, the children shown in them are quite clearly dead but the photos don’t suggest in anyway how they have died, and so that sets up the first enigma. Other thrillers have used photographs as narrative devices, such as ‘The Third Man’ which I have just mentioned and ‘Memento’

When we see the first shot of the car come into the courtyard we cant see straight away who the characters is, whether it is a man or a woman even. Other thrillers feature cars in the establishing shot, such as ‘Casino Royale’, ‘Strangers on a Train’ and ‘The Shining’. The enigma is established – who is in the car, where are they going and why?

Continuity editing- Casino Royale

Link to actual clip

In continuity editing everything is filmed so that the viewer thinks they are seeing continuous action. You need to ensure that characters’ appearance, the set and the lighting (colour and direction) remain consistent from shot to shot.

In my narrative sequence I have followed the rules of continuity editing like the 180 degree rule, the 30 degree rule, eye-line match and shot reverse shot, but I have also unsettled the audience by framing the character so you cannot always see his face.

Props are a vital part of my thriller as they feature mainly at the end of the opening when everything becomes clearer. We get the idea of what he has done when we see the tools come out of his bag. We can tell that he has done something with them when he takes them out and studies them. The over the shoulder shot observing what the killer is doing is a classic shot – like the one on the right from Syriana.

Intercutting credits and actions

I got the idea for intercutting from a number of thrillers such as ‘Syriana’

CreditsComparing the credits with the film ‘Speed’ we have similar crew title like Director, Producer, Composer and Editor.

The title of the film ‘Speed’ does move like mine but it has been made to zoom in ‘at speed’ (as the title suggests) whilst my film title clicks on like a camera shutter.

Title font

For the title of the film itself I looked at typewriter fonts, like Courier, which would convey realism, but thought their lines were too clean and precise.  I thought that the look of this typewriter font was best, as it has splodges and looks untidy which gives the viewers a sense of unease. I only have a blank background when the title comes up because I didn’t want it to distract away from the film and it gives you time to think about what has just happened in the sequence before hand.

For the rest of the credits I used ‘chalkduster’, a different font from the title of the film. This is still a sans serif font which has connotations of realism. I got the idea from the film ‘Seven’ where only the names of the crew and the actors of this kind of font.

I was inspired to put the titles on a black background by ‘Usual Suspect’ but it is also in the thriller ‘No Country for Old Men’. The black has connotations of mystery, death and realism.

Link to ‘Seven’

Production company logoConventionally in films they would open with the production company logo as some kind of branding, for example:

I made my own production company, ‘Hopping Mad’ , which I decided would have been co-producers with New Line (part of the Warner company). Co-production is needed in order to fund films. New Line also act as distributors.

Thriller films from novels I decided that my film would be an adaptation of a novel. Producing thrillers from existing books builds on the marketing and popularity of the original novel and often carry the book-reading audience with it. This boosts the viewing numbers considerably as the world are reading books less. Examples of books turned into films are:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Sin City Hostage

My film ‘Capture’