My Thriller Opening

Progression; Preliminary task > Fully finished production

From making our preliminary task and our fully finished production I feel I have made a massive progression. After completing my preliminary task, I felt confident with the equipment and ready to produce the final project.
Overall I thought we improved, from using the equipment to our technical ability to producing a short opening with a variety of shots.
Now looking back on my project I am very happy with the end result. It looks like how I could see it in my head while planning. I know it could be better with more professional equipment. My opening fits conventions of a thriller. We took a different look on a thriller, instead of action or tension or scary moments, we created questions and a plot that could be taken further. We took a realistic plot and with different shots were able to create confusion and give our audience an end result.

Target Audience

Our target audience is of both genders from the ages of 15 to early 30’s.
We chose this particular audience as it is one we can relate to well. These ages probably hold the biggest audience for those who actually watch thrillers in general.
Our production represents the same social groups and age range as our target audience. We hope that our audience will be able to reflect and relate to the issues we show.
Our thriller shows the story of four young girls going missing. We aim to scare and raise issues among the target audience that highlight real life threats.

Our thriller would have a 15 certificate. The 15 certificate allows the following ;

• Frequent use of strong language
• Sexual activity and nudity may be portrayed but without strong detail
• Violence may be strong
• Drug taking may be shown
  

However the certificate finds it unacceptable to show detailed causing of pain or injury. The film must not either encourage or promote drug use. This age certificate and its terms allows you to produce a thriller films with out having to consider the issues that may disturb a younger age

Scripting

Here are the scripts for our three voice overs;

1. Female voice over recorded by Ellie Dawson;

- Have you found her yet?
- Where is she?
- Is she ok?

2. CID Officer voice over recorded by Mr Johnson;

- Good morning, this is a statment from hertfordshire police on the 23rd january 2010, from myself cheif investigator Mr Johnson. Firstly i would like to thank the family of Megan Baker and my fellow police officers in this on going investigation. Megan Baker went missing on the 17th January 2010. Police have been continuously investigating the dissapearence, We are aware of the 3 other girls that have gone missing and at this moment in time we do think they are connected. Megan Baker was a 17 year old girl studying at Hitchin Girls School. Megan was 5'5 with mid length straight hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing jeans and a black coat walkinf down Nightingale road. So far we have found Megan's phone in the search and know that on the morning of her dissapearence she was on here way to meet, who we assume to be a boyfriend, with the name Rob. We urge any members of the public with information relating to Megan's whereabouts to contact a member of my team at the earliest opportunity.

3. Male voice over recorded by Sam Bysouth;

- Meg, where are you?
- I thought we were going through with this
- Have you backed out?
(sigh)
- Just ring me, im worried.

Title

For our thriller we decided on '17/MISSING' as a title. We loved this as it mixed two aspects of our thriller, the fact our main character along with three others went missing and also the fact they all went missing on the 17th of consecutive months.


For title ideas we had :



Final Title idea;


We decided on this title as we thought it presented the two meanings of our title well. The other two ideas were more likely to convey that there was 17 people missing. We chose white and red to clearly stand out on a blacked out screen. We chose a transition that split the title in two with the colour split. This title appears at the end of our two opening minutes, therefore the audience are able to clearly relate it to the plot of the film.

Final Story Board

Changes to Shooting Schedule

Click on the image below to see the changes made to our shooting schedule;

Problem Solving During Filming

Lighting and Trains – We would have really liked to have film as dawn breaks, in the mist and dark lighting of early morning hours. The lighting would have naturally changed during shooting so to have a running consistency through shots we would have had to have planned really well. The timing and lighting would add some suspense to our opening and highlight the importance and urgency of the journey that our main character takes in hopes of completing something. However we were unable to film at this time, our scenes were of a journey via a train, and on a day allocated to filming trains were unavailable at this time.

Actors – We had a mad rush to find an actor for our boy character. We originally had a boy in place but at last minute he pulled out leaving us to find a character free for our allocated day for filming. This was hard to solve as people were not always available for our shooting schedule. For us to complete our filming, co-operation was needed on both sides. Our actors gave up time for our filming and we shuffled some scenes about on different days to fit around when our actors were available.

People on scene– Trains did not only affect our timing of filming and therefore our lighting, but also caused us problems when filming shots. On the day of filming the train scene, there was a biking event on location and therefore the location was really busy. We had people obstructing our shot on camera and holding our actors best performance back as we have to allow movement around the public.

Equipment/steadiness –For when we were following our main character we planned to create a point of view shot as though the shot was coming from the eyes of maybe a follower. We decided to film sections with further equipment so that we could steady our camera. We decided to film using a golf trolley to steady our camera on. We knew this wasn’t perfect but we would like to think with professional filming equipment this scene could look perfect as we would have access to equipment such as a dolly and a dolly tracking system. But when filming we had difficulty steering the trolley straight and looking over our footage we decided that those shots actually just looked messy and unsteady. We decided to go back to hand holding our camera and walking out our scenes out.

Original Shooting Schedule

Click on the image below to view our shooting schedule;