Jamie's Evaluation (Rough Version)

Thrillers are well known to contain many typical conventions that everyone will recognise and be able to identify. The brief idea of our thriller is that there is a company that is looking after a briefcase containing something very important. Our thriller opening sequence begins with someone from the big organisation realising that the object that they are meant to be looking after has been stolen. We cut to a man very smartly dressed walking casually out of the building with a briefcase in hand. Later two thugs not very smartly dressed burst out of the doors and start running after the man in the suit. This starts a whole chase scene where they run through buildings upstairs where finally the man is cornered by the two thugs. He pulls out a gun. The titles drop down.
This involves the conventions of a typical thriller in many ways. Firstly, the questions we left our thriller very open and we didn’t answer very many questions so that it would keep people wondering about what’s going to happen?, who’s the guy in the suit?, who are the good guys? Etc. This keeps people on the edge of their seats. By having the screen drop down as he is pulling out the gun you do not know whether he shot both of them one of them or himself. Identity and who people are plays a large role in our opening sequence as you never get to know who any of them are. You never know who the good guys are and whole the bad guys are. You automatically think they man in the suit is because he is running away from two people and he looks the most formal but you never know he could turn out to be the bad guy. Another convention of a thriller movie that we have incorporated into our thriller sequence is how the whole series of events is sparked off by a crime of some sort. It all starts with something being stolen and like many other movies this is how they start off the action sequences of chases. By having someone steal something it is an easy way to get straight into the action and draw people in without having to answer any questions about what it is and why he is stealing it. An additional convention that has been taken from a thriller and then put into ours is suspense. The suspense is used when we have the two thugs corner the man in a suit into a corner and you are wondering what he will do. Building this up also he goes into his pocket to pull something out and the title of the film drops down and you hear gunshots. The viewer has no idea where they come from and from whom. This puts the audience on the edge of their seats at the very beginning.
The thugs in our thriller opening are typical working class, they are inn casual clothing and they will be doing all the leg work that their big boss can’t be bothered to do. This shows that they have a big boss and this shows as they nearly catch him their boss will be allot more powerful. This portrays the typical convention of the questions needing to be answered. The man in the suit is a typical middle class person because he strolls out with his head in the air and up until he gets chased no care in the world. He is wearing a suit this gets across his class and how he is more important than the others making it look, before they even get to the end of the chase, that he is going to always come out better. This follows the common stereotype that people in suits are better and allot more important than those that are just dressed in casual clothes. Also by having two of the two of the thugs rather than it makes them look lower down as they cannot do the job by themselves. There is an alteration though in who is in charge usually in normal society the middle class would be in charge of the working class, telling them what to do all the time and telling them where to go and when. This has changed in our thriller, the working class symbolised by the thugs are chasing the middle class symbolised by the man in the suit. This shows how he is scared of the working class making them more powerful than he is. On the other hand though you could say that the middle class man is still in charge because he can decide where he is running so that he is in control of where they run. However, the thugs do choose to run off in the other direction this may be because they have chosen to take an easier root or because they don’t like being led by someone they are trying to catch and kill.
The kind of media institutions to distribute this product would probably be big well known ones. This is because they will have lots of money this will be needed for movies like this because they usually involve many stunts and special effects to make the movies believable because if it doesn’t look believable people can’t get into it and then they won’t be on the edge of their seats. Also when filming a thriller you will have to have certain things done over and over until they are correct so people will have to be employed for longer. Also thrillers are filmed in a number of different areas full of extras as they are mostly based around real life. So people would have to be employed and places would have to be bought and closed for days while the film is being made in that area. This could add up to millions of pounds to make this movie successful and as realistic as possible it would have to be made by top Hollywood film companies.
The audience I think for the thriller would been teens up to about 40’s I think this would appeal more towards the teen end though. This is because they are mostly all action storylines with a few things to think about in between. One of the traits of a thriller is that extra-ordinary things happen in real life places. So teens will think ‘Wow if that happened to him and he was just a normal person it could happen to me.’
To attract the teens and over, the opening sequence has allot of action from the very start the questions are raised. So this will draw them in from the beginning as I said at the very beginning there will be someone stealing something. This is affective because you don’t need any explaining beforehand it can all come later. People will become very bored so to drag them in at the beginning will mean they won’t have to sit through allot of rubbish before there is a decent chase scene. Curiosity and impatience plays a big part in getting people to watch our film. We have the start where it jumps straight into a chase scene. Curiosity helps because people will see our opening and by the end they will have 101 questions that need to be answered and they need to know. This will entice them to come back and carry on watching the whole film.
There are many different things used in the making of the thriller. It starts with the story board this is where the sequence is planned out and all the ideas come together. It is important that the images you draw for the storyboard get across the camera movement, the scene and the person in the shot without making the frame too crowded and too confusing. This is because when you come to the animatic it flashes up. If these frames are overcrowded then you get confused and don’t focus on all of the essential things. The technology that we used to make the animatic was the digital SLR camera and the iMac’s Final Cut software. I learnt how to get the clearest picture using the focus ring, and how to import the images taken off the camera onto the iMac and then into Final Cut. The next stage was uploading the images to the thriller blog to do this we had to convert the video we had created on final cut using QuickTime converter then selecting the option from the blog menu selected the file we wanted to upload select ok. This took a while as we had quite a long video as we had many frames for our chase scene. The next part in the sequence of creating our opening sequence was the camera and taking it out to location and shooting. We already knew how to use the cameras from the preliminary tasks. When uploading and capturing our video from the camera we learnt that as long as while we were uploading the video the video on the screen of the camera was ok then the video would come out correct. We were told this because the video kept stuttering on the screen and we kept restarting the capture wasting precious editing time. Editing was another aspect of the process that we learnt a lot about. We first of all learnt how to change the aspect ratio from widescreen to normal. We had to change this back because we were editing the two videos together and it would look un-professional as the aspect ratio would change from shot to shot. The camera we found very easy to use as it was just point and click. But when we were filming we had to take into account if we had enough battery and that people weren’t going to walk into our shot.
I have learnt many things from the preliminary task. I have firstly learnt about how the storyboard frames do not need to be overly detailed and they don’t need to be followed to strictly. I have learnt that when you have your storyboard and you are out filming your sequence and something comes up that would look a lot better or work easier it is not essential that you stick to your storyboard. The story board is there for a rough guide. Other things that I have learnt from the preliminary task are that all the time you get with the camera is precious so you must not waste it messing about and filming anything. Now that I am doing a bigger task the aspect that most jumps out to me now is the continuity of everything. Learning from the preliminary task the continuity of it is very important it doesn’t have the same effect to the audience if the person in the shot is wearing something completely different in the next one. Another very important factor about the process of making a video is the saving of it. We learnt the hard way during our preliminary task that you must save it every five minutes because it could suddenly close for no reason and you could lose your work we have been using this in the making of our latest video and we now save it every five minutes and every time we do something bug that took a long time. Another essential that is needed in the video is lots of shots of the same thing over and over so you can pick the favourite. In our preliminary we had a few shots that didn’t work as well as we wanted so we wished we had taken more. We have taken this into consideration and now in our thriller video while filming we took a lot of shots from different angles so when we came to the editing process we had a few shots to play with and to see which one worked better. Something that we found extremely useful that we didn’t find out in the preliminary task was how to add sequences to the video project. This helped immensely as we could now edit cut copy and rearrange each section separately keep them organised and only drag and drop the sections that we needed one at a time. This sped up the editing because we didn’t have to search for clips they were always in one place or another.