Before we starting filming, we had to research Thrillers, as this was the theme our film was going to be on. I researched films such as The Woman In Black, Se7en, and Black Swan.
I noticed one thing about the majority of the Thrillers I researched, and it was that although many were directed at teenagers/young adults. Not many actually had any relatable storylines for such audiences, or many teens in the film itself apart from a few, such as Jennifers body. This seemed to be because many thrillers are about paranormal or out of this world experiences. Which makes for a good Thriller, however my group and I felt that it’s not the only way to have a story line for one. We decided to break out of that a little bit and have a story line that was more possible of happening in real life, which in some ways would make the story more effective in the desired effects of a Thriller.
However we still followed many conventions of a Thriller to make our story fit into that genre. We start our piece with some non diegetic sound of spooky music and have a flash back to what happens in the end. This happens in many other Thrillers, and grips the audience in straight away as they’ll have many questions about why that was put there. We also added in a fading black screen at the end after the tense build up. This was done, and is done a lot in real-life productions, to enhance the feeling of emptiness and darkness which was shown with the death that came just before. We felt this makes Thrillers have a little extra tension, and so decided to incorporate it into our film. Also, like many Thrillers, we kept to the convention of having diegetic sounds to show what mindset the characters are in. We mostly used Tv sounds in the background in the beginning of the film when the murderer and her boyfriend are sat watching TV, to show how everything’s casual and nothing bad was happening there creating some depth to the story and making it more realistic and again more relatable to the audience as it’s an everyday task. We also decided to have the radio on in the background of the victim getting ready to set the scene, the music was upbeat to represent the fact she had no idea what she was walking in too, but the audience did.
Another convention of Thrillers, is having a male villain and a female victim, we challenged this by having the murderer a woman. We felt by doing this we were breaking out of stereotypes presented by the normal productions of Thrillers and gave our piece that little bit more of a twist.
In conclusion, our final piece does challenge the conventions of Real life production in a few ways, however in many ways it also sticks to these conventions. Therefore I believe our piece breaks the conventions enough to stand out, but not so much so that it doesn’t seem like a thriller.
I noticed one thing about the majority of the Thrillers I researched, and it was that although many were directed at teenagers/young adults. Not many actually had any relatable storylines for such audiences, or many teens in the film itself apart from a few, such as Jennifers body. This seemed to be because many thrillers are about paranormal or out of this world experiences. Which makes for a good Thriller, however my group and I felt that it’s not the only way to have a story line for one. We decided to break out of that a little bit and have a story line that was more possible of happening in real life, which in some ways would make the story more effective in the desired effects of a Thriller.
However we still followed many conventions of a Thriller to make our story fit into that genre. We start our piece with some non diegetic sound of spooky music and have a flash back to what happens in the end. This happens in many other Thrillers, and grips the audience in straight away as they’ll have many questions about why that was put there. We also added in a fading black screen at the end after the tense build up. This was done, and is done a lot in real-life productions, to enhance the feeling of emptiness and darkness which was shown with the death that came just before. We felt this makes Thrillers have a little extra tension, and so decided to incorporate it into our film. Also, like many Thrillers, we kept to the convention of having diegetic sounds to show what mindset the characters are in. We mostly used Tv sounds in the background in the beginning of the film when the murderer and her boyfriend are sat watching TV, to show how everything’s casual and nothing bad was happening there creating some depth to the story and making it more realistic and again more relatable to the audience as it’s an everyday task. We also decided to have the radio on in the background of the victim getting ready to set the scene, the music was upbeat to represent the fact she had no idea what she was walking in too, but the audience did.
Another convention of Thrillers, is having a male villain and a female victim, we challenged this by having the murderer a woman. We felt by doing this we were breaking out of stereotypes presented by the normal productions of Thrillers and gave our piece that little bit more of a twist.
In conclusion, our final piece does challenge the conventions of Real life production in a few ways, however in many ways it also sticks to these conventions. Therefore I believe our piece breaks the conventions enough to stand out, but not so much so that it doesn’t seem like a thriller.