Analysing Thriller Genres

18th December:
Today we had to look at random clips from thriller films such as "28 Days later" and "The Shining" and "Collateral" and "Arlington Road". We learned the subgenres that thriller films often get confused with such as horror thrillers, crime thrillers, action thrillers, supernatural thrillers and psychological thrillers.

I particularly enjoyed analysing "What Lies Beneath". The scene had dim lighting and moon light and shadows which gives the atmosphere a very spooky and eerie feeling. Lighting is an important way of creating suspense. The sound effect was a slow, high-pitched violin and a light drum roll. There was also screaming. All of these sounds put together also creates suspense as the audience know something strange is about to happen. The setting was a bathroom in a house which creates suspense because it makes the film much more believable which makes it easier to scare the audience. The main character was a middle-aged, married, white woman who is getting ready for a bath and sees the ghost of a girl in the reflection of the water.

Editing Newspaper Filming

December 11th:
Today we had to edit the scenes we shot in our previous lesson. We decided which segments of each scene we should use. We also placed the edited scenes in order to give a gradual build of tension and mystery. We also tried out putting in a soundtrack to make full use of the human senses. The instruments we used were violins and bass which we conducted in a striking and strong elevation of notes. We made it sound like a gradual arrival of a tragedy. We feel we achieved this affect by starting off with relatively calm, relaxing notes to a more high tempo yet deeper sound with the bass. At the end of the clip, when the character runs out of the building, leaving the newspaper on the table, we went back to using calm notes to show that the shock the character experienced is over but further surprises are imminent. However, we didn't have much time to improve it so we just stayed with our first attempt.

Newspaper Filming

The first filming practice we had to do as a group was to create a short storyline involving a newspaper and record random scenes with a group member acting out the story. We decided to make the story about the Al-Qaeda and a girl who knows something about them who panics when she sees a headline in the newspaper involving them. We took long shots of the newspaper lying on the table, mid-shot of the main girl flicking through the pages, extreme close up of her eyes to show emotion and close up of her crushing a cup and a long shot of her running out of the building door. We recoreded each scene a couple of times to make sure that we can choose from a variety to produce a good clip.