The three media texts that I have analysed all had one thing in common, and that was that they all were building tension as the film went on, this could have been done by music getting louder or speeding up, or it could have been done by other sound effects or dialogues which were leading to something. This is what I kept in mind when I began to make my thriller movie. I then went on to use this in my production.
When I was thinking of a storyline for my thriller movie, I had to think of who were the target audience that I was aiming at. The targeting audience’s age range was 15+, meaning that the certificate for my thriller would have been a 15 or 18 certificates. There was no particular social class or nationality that I was targeting, but I thought it would appeal to teenagers who are about to turn into adults. This is because if I was producing a whole movie I would make it into as murder mystery, if I had put the age range lower, the younger audiences may of found it hard to understand the storyline, this is just because of scenes such as murders, investigations, etc. I got my inspiration from movies such as The Bone Collector and Saw. Any audiences who like the films mentioned previously will like the film that I have produced.
Planning
My planning started off with me writing out a questionnaire. This questionnaire basically was helping get some ideas for my thriller movie sequences. I didn’t ask random people from the general public but people or were the age of 15 or above. This helped me to see what they were looking for in a thriller movie. The most votes from each question were put on a separate page (Appendix 6). I basically looked at this carefully and tried to see if I could get any ideas from it. I used some of the answers from the results but not all of them because I didn’t think that they all linked together and I didn’t think it would make a good thriller movie.
I ideas that I got so far were that I was going to have a murder victim in my movie who was going to be a girl, this I got from the questionnaire results. I also thought of the murder who was going to be a serial killer (also from the questionnaire results). Using these Ideas I then drew up a storyboard which showed me what was going to happen in the first two minutes of my thriller movie sequence. By using these Ideas I had so far, I started to get more ideas of how they could relate to what I had. The first thing that came into my head was the location of my thriller movie. Although the questionnaire results favoured the location to be an empty house, I decided not to go with his as I thought it wouldn’t build the tension as much as it would in a public based place. The first location that came to my head was at Burnham Beeches. This is because I thought it was a brilliant place to set a thriller movie because of its natural surroundings, its trees made the place dark even in the afternoon which gave me an advantage of shooting earlier instead of filming too late.
Couple of days later I went to check a spot in Burnham Beeches where I could shoot my film, as soon as I found the right spot, I immediately went home and search the internet for contact details of Burnham Beech’s Head Office to ask permission for filming. I went on to send them an email telling them what my project was about and why I needed to use Burnham Beeches as my location (See Appendix 7).
I received an email back giving me permission to film at Burnham Beeches at the dates I stated. After I completed my storyboard, I had to make a script for it showing what was going to be said in it. There wasn’t much speech in my movie because I won’t to get straight to the main point of the first to minutes (the victim being killed).
I then went on to write out my shooting schedule and what days and times I was going to shoot my movie. When writing this out I had to think of factors that could affect the shooting of the film, this was things such as the weather, when can the actors take part, etc.
There were three actors that I chose for my production. The first was a female who played the victim and the other was a male who would play the serial killer. I chose these actors because they both had experience in drama as they took up GCSE Drama and achieved a high grade in them. Also they were willing to star in it.
The costumes were just normal everyday clothes because I wanted the movie to look as realistic as possible. The extra features used were garden wire (weapon), Flash Light (Darker places of the woods), a mainly the camcorder.
I decided to call the film “From the Inside”. This is because I thought it would build the tension by just saying the title. It also went well with the murder mystery theme as it meant that somebody knows about the murders that are occurring, but will they tell?
Construction
The first shot we see in the movie is the first actor which is the murder victim, as soon as you see this, we hear the first sound of music which is a note of a piano, and this straight away creates a moment of uncertainty for the audience. All we see her do is walk down a very dark road as if it was a normal day. The clip fades away and forms into a credit, this is basically done by choosing different transactions from the program which I used to edit the movie (iMovie HD) in this case, I used a Fade Out transaction to get from one shot to another, this created a unsettling moment in the movie. The credits were written in a white colour font in a black background, the main thing about this text was that some letters were written in capitals and some in small, this created a moment of uncertainty as this is not what the audience expected to happen. The credits seem to move from side to side slowly which also builds up the tension, it slowly fades out of the shot and then fades in to the next shot.
As the next show appears, another instrument is added to the movie, this is a more fast paced instrument, which means that something is about to happen and it is building up to something. The camera shows the actor from the front in a POV Tracking Shot which makes the audience feel that they are in the movie.
Another set of credits arrive in the same format as the previous but instead they are in a bright red, this would show signs of death which could be about to appear and is just showing us the first warning of this event.