Final Evaluation And Analysis Of Finnished Product

We were required to research, plan, shoot and edit the opening of a thriller film sequence, for us to succeed in making our thriller sequence a sensation, the final product had to be generically authentic and generate significant rising tension and atmosphere.

In our initial lessons on thrillers we were taught the basic aspects that can either make a thriller scary or not and create fear and suspense in the hearts and minds of the audience. We learnt that by playing with our most basic worries and drawing on the most infantile and therefore subdued thoughts (these thoughts can be voyeuristic, sexual or violent) you can provide significant tension and have the viewer in the palm of your hand to manipulate them in however way you want. We used this point in the development of our initial idea. We decided to focus the sequence around a child being taken by an intruder, using the child to represent the helplessness and the love of any mother and the intruder as someone no one wants to ever find in their house. If you raise these questions in the minds of the audience they will feel unnerved and become removed from their usual safety comfort zones.

Having learnt all this we tried achieve and apply as much as we could to the production of our thriller. Firstly, the production style of our thriller had to be thought through and planned very carefully so as to ensure that we provide sufficient tension and fear; this was prepared during the pre-production stage when we produced a production file containing all the details and planning for principle photography. Things that we took into account that had to be looking authentic to enhance the realism for the viewers to sufficiently believe what was happening and to take into account what will get them scared. All this comes under the heading of Mise-en-scene; this means everything that you see in the frame, the firstly topic is costume. Costume played a major role; the costume had to be looking genuine, as they are vital for generating realism. A very important one is the setting and location. We had huge difficulty finding a suitable location that would create fear and alarm in the audience. We were looking for a fairly big quite oldish house that was secluded so that the audience would feel vulnerable with no one to help. We saw an example of this in ‘Don’t Look Now’ (Nick Roeg, 1973) when there house was isolated and there was no one to help them when their daughter died. We did find one that was sufficient for what we needed and not much set dressing had to take place, it was good as it gave off the old creepy look very well just from the look of it. The lighting played a very important part in creating tension. We had to generate a very dark, unwelcoming and sinister look so the lighting was key in the success of this. The casting had to be real and stereotypical, due to the fact that the sequence had to be so short we had to get across as quickly as we could the meaning and interpretation of each character so the casting had to represent the most typical person you would connect to the role.

Then in the principle photography stage, we had to generate the tension from the shots that we chose to capture. This came from the composition and setup of each shot, for example, if you were wanting to produce a scene that illustrated vulnerability and helplessness, we would shoot a high angled shot, this creating the desired feelings through the shots themselves. We used some of these high angled shots of the mother throughout our sequence, as we wanted to create a helpless vulnerable view of her. We also constructed some shots that used different angles to create a sense of enigma and disorientation for example the shot of the intruder walking up the stairs. A typical way to make the viewer feel uncomfortable and uneasy is to do a right to left pan, this happens because its unnatural to us as English because we are used to reading from left to tight. Some other techniques we decided to exercise were to have very distinct hand held shots and POV shots of the intruder; this enhances the voyeuristic style. As soon as people feel like someone is watching them secretly we become very paranoid, so this works well to create tension. We used this style for most shots of the intruder.

Lastly, creating anxiety in the post-production stage was the hardest as you can totally change the meaning of something through the style of editing and the type of shots you place next to each other. The meaning becomes contextualised by it’s positioning in its relation to either key filmic elements, which helps to anchor down its meaning significance and potential interpretation. During editing, another technique we used was the scene of delay to create discomfort for the viewer. In our thriller sequence cross cutting and cut aways were used to show the second storyline of the intruder entering the house, slowly introducing him ready for the climax in the middle of the sequence. The quick speed of these cuts makes you question what and who it is and therefore increases tension. A factor that also helped with this is providing the audience with privilege audience knowledge (the bomb under the table technique) and showing them through the quick cross cutting the intruder entering, meanwhile the mother and child are totally unaware of anything being wrong, so this makes the atmosphere during the build up to the climax very tense.

I feel that the main weaknesses in our product is down to the narrative being to drawn out and not enough focus being placed on the ambience and more focus needed to be turned to the isolation of the child and the oblivious vulnerability of the mother, due to this we did not put in enough little snapshots and quick cross cuts. My other main regret is that we lit the shots to brightly so the finished product isn't dark enough to give it the sinister feeling it needs. On a much smaller scale there are a few shots where you can very briefly see the corner of the red head lights/lighting stands, but it is very hard to notice so it is not a major issue.

On a more pleasant note, the main strengths are that it is generic in what it looks like and achieves, with full realism throughout. We fulfilled the unit brief, therefore the sequence is an overall a success, reaching out to the audience and providing them with an entertaining piece of film. A major strength of ours that was a massive contributer to our success was our organisation as a group during each of the stages of the project, making it much easier to accomplish. I am also pleased with the success of the technicalities we had learnt in class before hand and were able to put to practice during the making of our project.