Props update

We've been talking about what were going to need in terms of prop quite a bit now, here's some details.

This is my favourite prop, an old leather suitcase, thought we could use it for the scene where the detective comes home to find his wife dead.

This is pretty cool, its a lunchbox shaped like an old radio, it had vodka in it. It's going in the kitchen for the scene where he finds his wife dead.

Black document wallets for the titles.

Just a few bits and pieces, mostly my costume, see the little metal badges, thought they'd be cool as part of the "shamed detective" idea.

The Polaroid photos, my printer wasn't happy to print them in grey scale, so we'll have to shoot those bits normally, and edit them to black and white on the iMacs. I thought they had Polaroid colour photos in the fifties though.

The envelope for the Polaroid photos.

Some other little bits, thought these would suit as things on the table, but also thought about a little, evidence assembly montage, similar to Se7ens opening scene.


So there it is, i took out twenty quid last week to buy the props, but so far it's all been stuff we have or £2.05s worth of stuff from Fovia. Maybe i was expecting too much. I've still got to have a look around some shops in town for:

• A trilby/fedora - whats the difference?
• A "trench coat" - i thought we had that sorted, but Monty was thinking of this:

• A few more evidence files, i can't even find a picture of what Monty descirbed to me.
• A picture of myself as a criminal, so a mugshot, with a board with my name and that.

Costumes, Characters and Props

Our main character, the protagonist of our story, is the detective. We've decided for our story to have a 1950's theme, so a noir feel, this is because these films are pretty much all crime-thriller, and we have to dress accordingly. We plan for him to be wearing a long coat, a shirt and tie, suit trousers and smart shoes, and a fedora. We've got all of this, the only thing we have to do is have two ties, one for the present time when he is in the attic, and one for during the flashback.

The antagonist of our story is the burglar. We were discussing this and were unsure of how to have this character dress. We didn't want to say, "just wear a balaclava", that's really cliché, and that's something we wanted to avoid. We decided on a black jacket, a black beanie, plain black gloves, we couldn't decide between jeans or suit trousers, we didn't want a completely stereotypical burglar, and again, smart shoes. This character only appears once for a few seconds, but we felt it was important that we made as much effort with him as the other two characters.

Finally we have the wife of the detective. Because of filming dates we thought we would struggle with this, but luckily our group is filming on Monday, so we'll have the camera over the weekend, so we can film any scenes with her in at the weekend. We want the stereotypical dress code of the 1950's, so a cardigan, skirt, tights and the slippers girls wear that look like they're about to fall off, you know the ones. A necklace, ring, hair tied back maybe, little details like that to finish it off.

In terms of props, there isn't much we need which we don't already have to hand. We need to get some paper files to write the titles on, and put together some newspaper articles about the story, this seems easy enough. We plan to make these, print them off and stick them to the front page of existing newspapers, which we have plenty of, to make them look official, or we could leave them loose, so it appears as if the detective has kept them purposely as clippings of his career. We have a gun for the robber to use, I'm concerned this is going to be a plastic one with an orange barrel that doesn't look realistic, but I'm assured it'll look the part. We need to get a photo of the detective character and his wife to use as part of the array of evidence, were going to get this when we've got someone willing to work with us, then edit it to black and white, print it off and trim it down to Polaroid photo size.

We have a few scenes that will have shots of the house we film at, which I'm concerned may not look like houses from the 1950's era, this shouldn't be a problem because we can't be perfect, and we can't time travel, so we'll just have to be sure to move anything which wouldn't look right, like a TV, DVDs, microwaves, things like that.

We were discussing getting a few props that they would of have, so on the Saturday before we film I'm going to have a look around in a few charity shops for things we could use as props, things like a Polaroid camera, old books, and so on.

Storyboards

As you'd expect, we've been putting a lot of effort into making some good storyboards, i know, believe me, a good storyboard is key in succeeding.

This was our very first storyboard, its primitive but it was drawn out to give us the basic idea of what he was thinking of for the idea from his pitch.

I drew this one out, it's a little more detailed, and starts to take into account the content of the flashbacks.

This is one we drew out with intention of following on our filming day, it shows stage directions in red, camera angles (some in the number circles, some just written out), sound ideas, and is just more detailed in what the audience sees. Its nicer to look at.

Title Ideas

We’ve been discussing how we want our titles to look in our Thriller production, here are the ideas we came up with.

Idea 1:

This first idea, we were thinking of a typewriter look, with each letter being added to the title in a typewriter font. This would create the effect that the titles are being typed out, on a typewriter, to the audience. We decided on a typewriter for this idea because we want to make a 50’s noir Crime-Thriller, so a typewriter fits in the feel of the era.

Idea 2:

For this idea we thought about mixing it in with footage at the start of the thriller, after the character has been introduced, but before the flashbacks. The detective is in his attic looking through old evidence files, the titles on the evidence file say, for example:

“Case 0602

Detective: Actors name”

“Evidence file 73

Director: Directors name”

These would look really effective and work really well in the theme of looking through old evidence files.

Thriller Update

Just thought i'd keep you updated. We agreed on idea one, about the shamed detective having mysterious flashbacks about how he fell from the height of his career. At the moment were working on some mock storyboard, title ideas and getting together costumes and props.

Thriller Pitches

We recently presented out Thriller Pitches, here they are.

Idea one.

Our first idea is about a shamed detective in his attic looking through old evidence files, reminiscing about before what happened, happened. He has flashbacks of his career and how it slowly deteriorated.

These show location, props and costume. For location, we've found a number of suitable places we can film the attic scenes, and for the flashbacks we would film them in a variety of places, based on what the flashback is. We have plans for a car crash, which we would film on a country road. This would be out of the way, and we wouldn't be disturbed by traffic.

Idea two.

This idea is about a sinner who has gone into a confession box to confess to a priest about his sins, but after a while he notices the priest isn't who he thought he was. Personally, i'm unsure of this idea, i don't know whether we would be able to film in a church, and i don't know if we'd be able to make two mintues of footage.

As shown, most of the filming, if not all, would be in a church or a churchyard. I don't know if we would be allowed to film here.

Idea three.

This idea revolves around a burglar who has broken into a house hoping to steal some valuables, but soon starts finding strange paraphinalia relating to murder, kidnap, etc. He then enters a room and finds something that we don't see, we only see his horrified reaction, and someone knocking him unconscious. He then wakes up tied to a chair in a dark room.

Well, there they are. We like the first idea the most.

Questionnaire

We came up with a little questionnaire to give out and get some feedback about the kind of things to include in our very own Thriller production. We got some brilliant results, Action, Mystery and Crime were the three most expected sub-genres for Thriller films, so we can't be going wrong with our Crime-Action-Thriller.

Confidential

Our results came back as a good variety of male/female, and mostly from people in the 16-20 age group.
For peoples favourite genre, it was either Action or Comedy, because we can't really make a Comedy-Thriller, were going to use these results and go for a Action-Thriller. On top of this, most people expected themes of Action and Mystery in a Thriller film, so this backs up our decision to make an Action-Thriller.
Finally, for age-rating, it was expected to be either 15 or 18, so we'll go for a 15 so it'll have a larger target audience.

Planning for our Thriller opening

Alright,

So today we've been informed we need to start thinking of some ideas for our Thriller task, which is awesome. We need to present our three ideas to the group sometime next month (November, 2011), so we need to get a move on.

I'm thinking we need to have a look at recent Thriller genre films for ideas for our Thriller task, so films like Paranormal Activity Three, Contagion and Straw Dogs. We could make, with relative ease, something similar to any of these.

We need to visit any locations we want to film at so we know what they are like in terms of atmosphere, lighting, what kind of camera angles we can pull off, and so on. We struggled with getting in camera angles in our prelim that would catch what we wanted to film but would also keep in with the continuity of the acting.

No Country For Old Men, the introduction

No Country For Old Men is a 2007 American crime-thriller set in 1980s West Texas.
No Country For Old Men starts with near a dozen establishing shots, these set the location of the film as a desolate, lawless land. There is none, or at most very little movement in any of these shots, this shows how quiet it is in this place, an unusual setting for a Thriller film. There is a voice-over throughout all of this, Ed Tom Bell, the regions sheriff, talking of the rise in crime in the area.
It then introduces the villain of the story, Anton Chigurh, a hitman set to recover a large sum of money from a failed drug exchange. He's being arrested and put in the deputy's car, along with the strange piece of equipment he uses, a bolt-pistol, used for stunning cattle before slaughter. At this stage, we haven't seen Chigurhs face, it is obscured by lighting, or we see him from behind. This keeps his identity a mystery to use, we don't know who he is, where he came from or what he has done to be arrested.
The car drives away with a rising pan of the landscape, to show us how desolate the place is. It also shows how empty the place is, and how difficult it would be to find someone out there.
There is a mid-shot of the deputy talking to Bell on the phone, with Chigurh walking up behind him, his face blurred out or not in the shot. We can see him do this, but the deputy doesn't, it build tension as he slowly approaches the un-aware deputy, before grabbing him with the handcuffs around his wrists and pulling him to the floor.
There is then an unusual birds-eye view shot of Chigurh strangling the deputy, we can see Chigurh for the first time, and his emotionless face as he kills the deputy. A close-up of Chigurhs face shows that he has no remorse in killing this man, half of his face is blackout of in shadow.
It then cuts to him washing his wrists in a sink to clean the blood off, and shows us the floor where the deputy kicked during the struggle, leaving marks, these show the aftermath of the brutal event. Chigurh, unaffected, has bandaged his wrists and calmly collects his bolt-pistol and gas canister before leaving in the cop car, completely calm about killing the deputy. It shows us who he is as a character, a cold-blooded killer.

Prelim Task Review

We've finished our Prelim Task now, burnt it to disc and handed it in,
We had a few problems emerge with the file format of the footage and we lost some, which meant we didn't have a lot of footage to pick from when editing our footage together, so of course, it didn't come out as well as we wanted it too.

I'm happy with it because we managed to get in a good variety of camera angles and we put in a few transitions to make it fit together well, we just didn't have a good amount of footage to work with, so we know for our main task to use cameras that will extract the footage in the correct file type, MP4, not WAV or whatever it wanted it as, and we know to get a good amount of footage of each different action so we've got plenty to work with.

Post Prelim Task Filming, Uploading, and Editing

There's no real importance in this post, I'm just letting you know I'm still here.


Hello. So as you know we went out and filmed our prelim task this Tuesday (4th October 2011), and it went well. We got to the location and decided not to do the shots with the shutter, it was really bright outside and you could see all the shop inside, and it looked silly.

We hoped to get this as the title.

Anyway, we filmed and it went really well, Donleys a pro actor and it turns out i still cant act to save my life. Monty guarded the cameras and it turns out a guy where i work used to own a camera shop for 15 years.






No problems with filming really, got all the footage we decided on in the end, we used three cameras so we've got footage of one scene from two angles, we can use this for good continuity.

The workshop, where all the dialogue happened.

We started uploading straight after we got back, but we found we couldn't upload the footage from the SD card, so we were having to move it to a computer, change the format online, then put it back on the Mac, effort. We then found out how to import it straight off the camera in better definition, much better :)


So now we've started editing the footage together, no problems so far, got some nice title effects going, a company logo, all these crazy things :D

The back door, where most of the action was.

Prelim Task

So this week we've been planning our prelim task, and we got into groups. I'm working with Tom Donley and James Montgomery on this one, two guys i know, so i don't think teamwork's gonna be an issue here. We hope to get out and film next week, on the 4th October, 2011, it's a Tuesday, we should have around three hours to get the filming done then come back, download it and hopefully make a start on editing it on the Macs.

I can't tell you much about what we're planning until we've finished and uploaded it for everyone to see, but i can say that what we're planning it pretty intense considering it's just the prelim task, so were gonna have to cap it for our main task, which i reckon we should be able to do with what we've got in mind for our main task.

Anyway, i can tell you we're going for the usual drug-deal-gone-wrong, we're filming it in this abandoned warehouse i know about. Our storyboard looks tidy and we've got it all pretty well planned out, so we just need to get out and get some filming done.

Psycho, the shower scene

The shower scene, of the thriller film Psycho.

The scene starts with Marion Crane, one of the films main characters, doing some calculations on a piece of paper, probably to do with the money she steals at the start of the film. The camera angle is a mid-shot throughout most of the part, with panning to keep her in the scene without breaking the shot as she walks to the bathroom.

In the bathroom she disposes of the paper to hide the evidence and goes for a shower, its a low-angle shot keeping the attention on her feet as she gets into the shower.

In the shower, almost all the shots are close-ups, this emphasizes the feeling of intimacy with the audience and pulls them into the situation the victim is in, as well as concentrating on what the victim is seeing with numerous POV shots of the shower head.

After this, the angle switches to mid-shot of the shower, you see Marion in front of the shower curtain, but behind that the camera pans to show the door opening and a figure entering the room, Marion unaware. It switches to a close-up of this new character, the murderer who we deduced to be a woman because of the finger nails and hair, swiping the shower curtain aside brandishing a knife posed to strike, then a close up of the knife being plunged forward towards the victim.

A reaction shot of Marion screaming is shown, this is a close-up, to concentrate attention directly on he screaming, then a shot of the knife plunging through the stream of water at the victim, this is a POV from the victim to show the audience what Marion is seeing.

There's a brief struggle, Marion trying to fight off the attacker to no avail. This is an interesting shot, because of the angle we can see the attackers face but the shower rail is positioned so it blocks out her eyes. Shots are quick here, about 30-40 in this scene, this empathises the speed and intensity of the scene.

There are then clips of a rolling storm, sounds of thunder and rain. This builds an atmosphere of anger and violence, but the storm could also represent a cleaning as the murderer kills Marion, a thief, this doubles up with her killing Marion in the shower, a clean and pure place.

As Marion dies, she reaches out and grabs the shower curtain as the attacker disappears, this represents her struggling to hold onto life as she dies. The hooks holding the shower curtain break and she falls out of the shower and collapses on the floor, her blood draining away down the plug hole.

After this, there's an unusual shot of her blood mixing with the water and draining down the plug hole, this then fades into a shot of her dilated iris, rotating outwards to show her face as she lies on the bathroom floor, mimicking the water flowing down the plug hole, as her life fades away.

The British Board Of Film Classification

The BBFC is an independent, self-financing non-profit media content regulator. The give every film, TV programme and advertisement a rating to state who it is suitable for.

U - Universal
A "U" rated film should be suitable for all audiences of four years and over. 

PG - Parental Guidance
Unaccompanied children of any age may watch.

12/12A - Suitable for 12 years and over
12 and 12A are based on the same criteria, and the material only suitable for people aged 12 and up. 12A is only used in the cinema, where no-one under 12 can see a 12A film unless accompanied by an adult.

15 - Suitable only for 15 years and over
These tend to have stronger themes, for example discrimination, drugs, horror, imitable behaviour, nudity and violence.

18- Suitable only for adults
These are based on the decision that adults are free to choose their own entertainment.

R18 - "To be shown only in specially licensed cinemas, or supplied only in licensed shops, and to adults of not less than 18 years"

The ones your mother warned you about.

So there you  go, age ratings and stuff. Were probably going to go for 15 in our production.

Camera techniques

These are some of the important techniques for when it comes to filming our thriller.

Framing: This is the distance from and the angle to the subject.

Movement: Movement of the camera in relation to the subject, e.g. panning and zooming.

Composition: Where the subject(s) appear within the shot.

Rule of thirds: After dividing the shot into nine, points of interest should be located at the green dots.



Golden mean: In this, points of interest are balanced along a diagonal line.

Distance:

There are many different basic framing techniques we can use to create meaning in our production and that can be used to build an atmosphere or set a scene.

- Establishing long shot (ELS)

- Long-shot (LS)

- Mid-shot (MS)

- Close-up (CU)

- Extreme close-up (ECU)

180° degree rule: The camera cannot cross an imaginary line, the camera stays on one side, what is being filmed on the other. This keeps the audience familiar with the location.

Editing

Hello.
So as you know, editing plays an important part in the production of any film, its taking the raw footage and making it into the film that the audience will see.

What is editing?
Putting the clips together in a way that makes sense to the audience.
Joining the clips together.
Adding special effects and transitions.
Adding sound and credits.

Transitions:
These are ways of joining two clips together. The most common transition is a straight cut, going straight from one clip to the next. However there are many more advanced transition, for example:
- Dissolve: A gradual transition from one clip to another, they fade together. It could be used to indicate the passing of time.
- Fade: Usually fades to black or white to indicate time passing or flashbacks, dreams, etc.
- Wipe: A ine moves across the screen with the original clip on one side, the new one moving across it. Could be used to represent the passing of time or a change in lcoation.
- Jump-cut: An abrupt cut between clips for a dramatic effect.

Diegetic sound: Sounds that would be heard inside the film, like dialogue, ambient sounds and so on.
Non-diegetic sound: Sound added to the film during the editing process, like music and sound effects.

Media keywords

Media keywords

So these are some keywords for us and our thriller production.
Thriller: A thriller is a text or performance in which crime, espionage or mystery is depicted, usually in an atmosphere or excitement or suspense.
Mise-en-scene: What is on the screen, like characters, props, etc.
Conventions: Conventions or the expected way of doing something.
Juxtaposition: Placing two things next to each other, usually opposites, e.g. light and dark.
Connotations: Secondary meanings of something, e.g. darkness = evil.

Major genre: The main genre, e.g. comedy, action, etc.
Sub-genre: A secondary genre in the main genre.
Signifier: Hints at something, e.g. Red = blood/danger.
Hybrid genre: A mix of two genres, e.g. Zombie comedy = Zomcom.

The Thriller Genre

The Thriller genre is films, literature and television that uses suspense, tension and excitement as its main conventions.
Thriller has a wide array of subgenres, from Action to Political Thriller, but the most succesful tend to be Psychological and Crime Thrillers.