Account Of Research

We researched many different sources that we felt could help, aid and influence us in making our thriller title sequence. We looked for stories and news articles about child abductions and also films that showed good use of camera, sound, editing and mise-en-scene.

The first thing we did was look at the main theme of our sequence which is child abductions. The definition of this is the abduction or kidnapping of a child or baby by an older person. The most famous case was that of Montana Barbaro, who stole a child from a car park in Melbourne 4 years ago, and was found in a derelict house 40 hours later. There are many different forms of child abduction that exist, for example a stranger removes a child for criminal purposes, for child sexual abuse, torture, to elicit a ransom, or murder for extortion. This has recently taken on greater awareness as a result of movies and television series. We looked at some statistics about abductions and 74% of the victims of non family child abductions are girls, this helped to influence our use of a girl as the victim.

We looked at a few film extracts as research and the most important one to our thriller title sequence was the first scene of Psycho. It offers a voyeuristic look at lovers in a seedy hotel, Telotte argues, "As a result of this shift in perspective from a disembodied, narrative camera to an actual character's eye ... we are forced into a deeper sense of participation in the ensuing action." Having read that quote and seen how affective it looks in the film Halloween, (shown here in the youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKLlcI0cWI0 @ 2min 10 secs) we decided that we would start our thriller with a voyeuristic shot of the intruders POV looking into the house.

The cross cutting in the film ‘Don’t Look Now, shows how a film can be shown using a double narrative. This reflects our thriller ideas of having a double narrative cutting constantly between shots of things happening upstairs and downstairs.

This research has helped us a lot in creating a sequence that has improved narrative and filmic themes.