In what ways does your Thriller use, develop or challenge forms and conventions or real Thrillers?
Our thriller “Immorality” was inspired by other films such as “Layer Cake”, “Essex Boys” and to a lesser extent “The Black Dahlia” and “The Third Man”. The first two films are both British Gangster films and we used a mix of the familiar locations and identifiable male from “Layer Cake” and the lesser known locations and situations from “Essex Boys”, we decided to use aspects of both thrillers because they are equally conventional elements of thrillers.
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As shown in the first picture, “Layer Cake” employs familiar locations and British landmarks to identify the character with the audience, even though the narrative is not something they would come across in everyday life. Familiar locations being associated to crime is very surprising to the audience and creates interest as crime is both unlawful and immoral, this also bonds the audience to the character as they are sharing his secret and being brought into his trust. Similarly the second picture, from “Essex Boys” is another well used convention of thrillers; a bleak and isolated landscape is thought of as the most common place to commit crimes as there is less chance of being caught, this is also a different way of drawing audience attention because the secluded element of the location means that the audience become witness’s to any criminal activity to takes place and makes the audience criminal-by-association and draws them into the action. These two methods utilized by the two films both attract the audience’s attention from the beginning and so we decided to use both methods for similar reasons. In this way we keep to the conventions of thrillers, however, how we draw on the locations aspects deviates from the conventions, both developing and challenging the norm.
In our thriller opening we use the familiar location in the beginning in much the same way that “Layer Cake” does, but we do not associate the criminal activity to the location specifically, we associate the criminal activity to the main protagonist in the voiceover and so the location itself remains somewhat ‘pure’ which we visually show by the children’s toys and homeliness of the house. The protagonist washing his hands in the bathroom is also a visual marker of him trying to ‘clean his hands’ of the immoral tendencies that he talks about in the voiceover which is why we used it for the transition between the locations to imply that this self purification did not succeed.
The second location of the abandoned warehouse is based on “Essex Boys” however we used the isolation and bleakness of the setting to signify his seclusion and depressing lifestyle. The protagonist states in the voiceover that the antagonist is after him and while this associates the location with criminal tendencies like conventional thrillers it also makes the remote spot a refuge for him which gives the location a double meaning depending on whether the audience thinks about it from the point of view of the antagonist or protagonist. The use of the location in this way shows the main characters vulnerabilities and therefore humanises him, this humanisation of the protagonist challenges conventional thrillers as many mainstream films such as “Layer Cake” want the main character to be the be victorious in whatever they do which sometime gives them the surreal element of being perfect in their role. In contrast to that our thrillers protagonist is shown to have flaws very early and thus makes him more real as a character.
“The Black Dahlia” and “The Third Man” had a lesser impact on our thriller choice, “The Black Dahlia” creates many enigmas in its opening and in a way it makes it seem like the audience has been dropped into the proceedings at a point through the film which creates questions that the audience feel they should already have the answer to and this is what hooks the audience into watching, enigma is a common convention of thrillers used to draw the audience and create suspense. Our thriller used some enigmas to catch the attention of the audience and we used a similar method of dropping the audience in at a point where they would normally know what’s happening, but instead of just that one part to draw the audience we showed the very beginning of the film. In essence we gave the audience the beginning and near end of the film to create enigmas of what happened during the time lapse between these two scenes which is a conventional norm of many thrillers.
“The Third Man” uses clips of the area and history of the location to create the setting with a voiceover to lead the audience into the film while still being friendly and seemingly approachable, in our thriller we use a voiceover with a middle class voice because our target audience would either be middle class or aspiring to it, a middle class voice also is quite familiar in Britain and would relax the audience while also drawing them in using familiarity to form a bond between the character and audience. The film also uses highly contrasted clips to create anticipation for the audience and to connote the meeting of law and criminality. In our thriller we used contrasting scenes to create a similar feeling within the audience and to connote the protagonists’ inner fight between decency and corruption. The contrasts in out thriller was mostly between the two parts of the opening, the first part the when the protagonist was outside the lighting was bright but there were moments of shadow to show his slow corruption, but the house remained bright the whole time to show that his corruption had not reached his personal life, in the second part of the opening most of the scenes were dark and gloomy to visually represent his corruption. Contrasting light is very conventional but we developed this to relate it to the character and if we had made the full film the lightening would have most likely darkened as the film progressed to show his downfall and to continue our theme of corruption, making it a subtle clue throughout the film.
How does your Thriller represent particular social groups?
The thriller’s characters are both white males, the protagonist represents a stereotypical British business man while the antagonist portrays the business underworld. The main character is a white male to support the image of the male-dominant business world, he is British which is shown by the location of his house and the voiceover is an upper-class British accent. In the opening the protagonist changes from a rich business man to a man on the run from the antagonist, this demonstrates the corruption of the business world and our main character acts as the catalyst in the sequence of events that leads to his own downfall. The antagonist is assumed to be British but there is no definite proof as he doesn’t speak, although the voiceover of the main character implies he is. The antagonist is a stereotype of what people believe criminals to be like. The protagonist mirrors many of the Film Noir and British Gangster genre males where they wear suits and have good jobs, we chose to keep to this stereotype because many males in our target group will aspire to have such a life and the narrative also serves as a warning to them in the same way fables have morals to their stories to teach life lessons (which also links in with our title “Immorality”). We decided against having females in our thriller opening because females are very easy to stereotype in a bad light if we make them the antagonist (femme fatale), protagonist (dominating woman that goes into situations with ‘guns blasting’) or sidekick (innocent partner with no idea about the trouble they are in) which are the types of female that are shown so often in mainstream thrillers (For example: the distressed victim, the sexy sidekick, the strong female that actually has weaknesses and ends up in love with the protagonist, or the evil antagonist). Because we only had one main character with the second character remaining quite mysterious, we had the chance to expand on his character and add more realism to him such as the vulnerability that would not often been seen in business men.
The antagonist is the well-known ‘silent assassin’ type which is one of villain stereotypes, we decided to try and give little clues about the man through his costume and how he acts towards the protagonist. His clothes are smart yet practical and he has a torch to help him search for the main character which implies that he is a well prepared person and this could mean that he is organized to the point of slight paranoia which would be sensible for his line of work as a criminal. The thriller shows him walking slowly and taking his time and this shows that he is a methodical person or perhaps that he isn’t worried about not being able to find the protagonist which would mean he either knew the other man well or is very good at locating people.
The protagonist talks about the antagonist in a familiar way and speaks about him like he was a friend, yet the antagonist never speaks a word to him, nor does he seem to show hesitation in trying to find him which implies that he may have never been his acquaintance and that the antagonist may have tricked the protagonist into thinking so which shows he is manipulative. These are all traits of typical criminals of any social group, although if he had been friendly with the protagonist, even if only for his own personal gain, it would mean that they would have to have been at a similar social standing which is middle/upper class British. Middle/upper class is where many of the male and female target audience would hope to fall and again this serves as a warning to be careful of people in that social class, the thriller shows the extremes of what businessmen can be like and desensitizes the audience to the ruthlessness of business.
What kind of media institution might distribute your Thriller and why?
As written in the Prezi presentation, the target audience tend to watch TV later at night and spend a great deal of time on the internet, so having advertising in these places would spread the message better using viral marketing and, as my audience research suggests, our target audience would prefer to watch films in the cinema with friends so it stands to reason that advertising on a social networking site would appeal to groups of friends. Vue, Universal and Vivendi would most likely be a part of our distribution because they are well-known in Britain and have connections to British companies in all parts of film distributiona dn exhibition. After exhibition on the cinema in Vue or other mainstream cinema's the best place to show the film would be online to widen the catchment area for the target audience, putting the film up on specific TV channels that our target audience favour would increase the chances of the thriller being seen by our target audience.
Who would be the audience for your Thriller?
We decided to target our thriller at late teens/young adult (16 – 25) audience of both genders. Our group is composed of that particular age range so we found that it was easier to make a narrative for that audience as we are a part of it and can actively input suggestions of what we would personally like to see in the film opening. Audience research could be completed with more ease as we could find people within the target audience in our school and ask for them to complete questionnaires, and they could also be asked on their opinions of the thriller as we were editing it so we could change it to suit our audience’s preferences. Many British Gangster films such as “Layer Cake”, “Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”, “Se7en” “In Bruges”, and “Essex Boys” that are in the same genre as our thriller have similar target audiences, this shows that this particular genre is focused generally on the young adult audience, perhaps because they are still at the stage where action and crime are interesting because of the ‘forbidden’ element that these films normally portray. I think that British Gangster films are exciting for the young adult audience and this is why we targeted our thriller at that specific area.
How did you attract/address your audience?
In the first few seconds of the thriller the camera shows location scenes of the area which is relatable to a British audience, when the first actor walks into shot the voiceover starts which is in a British accent and categorizes him as the protagonist of the film because he is identifiable to the audience. We created enigmas in the first two minutes of the opening to draw in the audience so they would want to watch the rest of the film. One such enigma is what the main character did during the time lapse to have changed his life so dramatically, another question is who the antagonist is and how he relates to the main character and story as a whole. These are two of the main questions we created in the thriller but there are other smaller ones that are made, for example: what is the immoral thing that he speaks about in voiceover, why does the main character hide from the antagonist, (who he speaks about in familiar a tone), and what is his job that brings him so close to the line of criminality. My audience research suggested that our target audience preferred dark and abandoned places
This is what our target audiences like so we put an abandoned warehouse in our thriller, however we wanted to relate to British audiences with a familiar location so we used both which also had the extra use of creating contradictory lighting, a very mild form of chiaroscuro which enhances the effect of a time lapse and the difference of the protagonists life. The warehouse and darker lighting help to show the audience how far he has fallen in both wealth and social standards. The audience also said that the memorable aspects of thrillers were the storyline, CGI, and the soundtrack.
Not many British gangster films have very much CGI so we chose to have an interesting storyline and soundtrack. The storyline has minor similarities to other British gangster films such as Layer Cake although in Layer Cake the main character is a criminal and gets involved with other criminals while in our thriller the protagonist is a good guy that gets involved with thrillers giving us the theme of corruption and we believe that would be a very memorable narrative. The soundtrack is not very memorable but it suits its purpose of setting an eerie theme throughout the opening. This is another hook for the audience as many of them stated that they liked horror thrillers for the suspense and unknowns of the situation which we used to our advantage in our British gangster thriller as the soundtrack creates suspense and the voiceover and action construct enigmas. According to the audience research on the characters most people liked the male to be the hero, helping for family or the distressed character.
We decided to use the distressed character persona for our protagonist because it added more interest to the plot and gave the character more depth and an identifiable personality as many people would react in a similar way if they were being chased by a criminal. The change from the confident man in the first part of the opening and the second part is very engaging to the audience and also gives the audience a visual representation of corruption. The whole thriller opening was based on what our target audience would find the more interesting and appealing to watch, we also used enigmas based on the storyline and protagonist to get the audience to relate to the character and engage with the film.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of construction this Thriller?
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
When we did our preliminary task, we had very basic knowledge of using the digital cameras and editing software so we found it hard to edit our films at first while we were trying to learn how to use Adobe Premier. We were very bad at planning our preliminary task, we planned how our camera would move using a shooting map but we didn’t think about the camera angles or the script for our characters. This meant that when we came to the filming we found it hard to decide as a group on what would be best for our task. When we did our thriller opening, we decided in our group to make sure that everything was done before doing any filming so that we would know exactly what to do on the film day.
Now we have finished our thriller production I can use Adobe Premier much better than when we did our preliminary task, I have learned how to change the brightness of the clips and how to and a filter to tint them. I can also use the extra spaces for audio to make the clip transitions seemless in sound rather than having pauses and different sound levels between clips like in our preliminary task. I also learned how to use the effects and transitions for the titles to put them over the video action which we didn't do in our preliminary task.
When we worked in a group in the preliminary task we didn’t expand on our ideas very much so our end product was quite simplistic, we learned that working in groups was better for our overall production as we could use ideas from each other and develop them. I don’t think we would have worked as well in a group if we had not done the preliminary task first, this is because it showed us how hard it is to make a film and edit it so we needed to work together if we wanted the thriller to be as good as it could be.
