Lost in daylight - Evaluation.

Marika Ella Ames

AS Media Studies.

Lost in daylight.

Thriller Evaluation.

A good thriller must always consist of numerous high tension climaxes, have the viewers on the edge of their seats, fast paced music that builds into a crescendo at high suspense points, the audience being aware of the ‘villains’ plotting in order to make the audience feel they have a superior seat whilst viewing the film, the audience usually feel that they know something the other character’s don’t, in order for this to happen, a thriller must always contain interesting characters that are at great risk, usually most thrillers have a twist to them, which throws the audience completely off track; this is what makes a good thriller. We studied various thriller films in order to find these points above. Arlington Road was my favourite as the plots was constantly being changed and provided the audience a false sense of security throughout, which Is an essential element of thriller genre’s, but in a way that we as the audience could still focus and not end up completely confused. For example one moment we as the audience thought we knew who the killer was, and that he was going to be arrested, and then the plot completely switched and left it un guessable. Arlington Road is a physiological thriller, which is what our main incentive was for our thriller.

Suspense is created in two different ways, either the audience are unaware of that is to happen next, or the audience immediately knows what lies before them. For example in the thriller film Psycho we are immediately thrown into a spooky dim-lit corridor of a small child cycling through each hallway. We are very confused and not knowing what’s going to happen which creates a great element of suspense. We decided to use this style of film openings to our film; we immediately put our audience into a house in north London, and then recorded feet walking up stairs to create that element of suspense. We thought very hard about each section of our trailer and made sure we knew the main generic conventions of a thriller opening and made sure we applied them to ours. We really wanted to focus on the main element of the conventions, providing the audience a constant false sense of security; we did this by immediately taking our audience into the comfort of a safe ordinary house, the sense of security then disappears once we hear the knock on the door, this leaves the audience in the element of surprise, this is why it’s a constant false sense, of security, which leads us into another generic convention we tried to follow of the audience is always being on the edge of their seat not knowing what is going to happen, having an un-predictable plotline.

As we had to keep to a tight time scale of 3 minutes or under, we unfortunately could not use our incentive to its full potential, the beginning first 20 seconds tracks a pair of feet walking up and down stairs herrrrrrrre which made the audience feel as though they had the upper hand on the other characters, and were somewhat intrigued to find out who this mysterious character was. After this we are immediately brought into the house before the mysterious character knocks on the door; this makes the audience question who she is and why she’s there but this also portrays her as vulnerable.

Our film opening is about a man who comes to a lady’s house to fix her computer, only to realize an hour later that she had died several years ago in a car accident, this is revealed to the audience at the end with the news paper, titled ‘suicide or accident’.

Our post/pre – production helped me understand a lot about the filming making process. I soon realized how important story boarding was after we changed our ideas numerously and forgot to record certain shots. This wasted a lot of time as we had to re-create shots that we could not remember due to not recording them down on paper. For example we forgot to use any close up shots which is key to show expressions and reactions. We did not record these down so had to fill In the spur of the moment. Also our plot was completely changing as not all members in the group agreed with the original idea. I believe that this changed our final product a lot, due to many shots we hopped to have not being in our final piece. We learnt that in future you must know what your idea is fully and discuss all aspects of the plot before you start to record any ideas down on paper, this is what we had failed to do.

Our preliminary audience for our thriller opening would be teenagers, in our pre – production work one of the first things that we decided was that we wanted to target teenagers, from 15 years of age and onwards. We thought our characters in our piece were a representation of our target audience. We had imagined a specific person, preferably a boy, who enjoys playing on the latest game consoles and regularly goes to the cinema. His interest in music would vary from jazz to rock who shops in urban outfitters weekly we believe this person represents our thriller opening. Our secondary audience may be the parents of these teens.

In terms of our soundtrack chose to use the same continuously flowing self composed song, throughout with various soundbites such as door knocking, and the ticking of a clock.

We made sure we used a lot of various orchestra instruments as they highlight tension and suspense such as the violin and piano. Our original plan was to build the music up into a crescendo which we unfortunately did not do due to lack of time, however at the end of the opening; we chose to lower the music to a stop as we felt it would leave the audience wanting to see more. A thriller is made up of lots of different supposed tension sequences, however the majority of them normally build up a high pace; for example in 28days later, when the car brakes down, a lot of tension is built, because the car is the characters safety zone, which subliminally provides us a false sense of security however this security is broken when she is forced to leave the car to fix it, the music starts off at a very slow pace while we are still in our comfort zone of the car, however once she steps out the music builds into a crescendo of high pitched orchestra sounds, then finally lowers back down. The audience are on the edge of there seats throughout this, as they no longer know what is going to happen. The pace normally builds up for nothing to happen and then lower back down, and we chose to apply this convention to our music.\

In terms of distribution, I think that working title would fit our film perfectly, we wants a small UK based independent distributor. From our research Shaun of the dead had given away t-shirts to every person that had gone to see the film when It was In the cinemas, I was thinking perhaps we would do the same, but give away free boxes of popcorn to accompany you whilst watching the film.

As our thriller would have been a very low budget one, since of target audience is teenagers, our main advantage in terms of advertising, is that the teenage generation is very internet orientated, we would use viral marketing, we would definitely use this to our advantage and advertise on the tree main social networking websites for the teenage generation; Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, to attract and select our target audience. This is the easiest form of advertising as it’s cost free ad also spreads the word very quickly. It’s merely other people doing our advertising for us. Or possibly showed at a film festival specified for teenagers. Also to advertise as we’re targeting an internet orientated gender, as appose to using money on television trailer adverts we would use another form of viral advertising and post our trailers onto youtube, where we could have the possibility of thousands of hits per day. With our current web 2.0 we can see our audience’s feedback and try and estimate/calculate our later audience for when it progresses into cinemas.

We would like our film to be a low budget independent small UK release distributed around various small arthouse cinemas. After this if we hit our target in terms of numbers of people viewing our film, we would then progress into DVD release.

I feel as though our group has created a very effective opening to a thriller. For example we have followed the majority of generic conventions that you must apply to an opening. I feel like the constant changing plot line in our pre – production work had wasted aot of time we could have used to do more important things such as story board. We had learnt a lot from our thriller practice exercise. Mainly the lighting, we realized that although things may seem a lot brighter on the camera screen when it is logged and captured and uploaded to the actual computer screen it was a lot dimmer. We made sure that in our opening thriller there was sufficient lighting throughout. We experienced many problems as a group for example clashing of ideas. To resolve this situation we formed all of our ideas into one. Thankfully as we have no shots outside, we did not have to depend on the weather to be consistent each day.