First productive group meeting

In our first productive group meeting we decided on the dialogue, the shot types, the location and the props we are going to need. We made some small changes to the initial idea, changing the title to from "last man standing" to "friendly fire" and some alterations to the synopsis. We then decided to do some research on thrillers. We made a questionnaire and got random people from around the school to answer them.

What people look for in a thriller

Analysis of a foreign language thriller

The trailer starts by introducing the characters, we see the man early on and it is evident that he has fallen in love with this girl. The non-diegetic sound is also quite romantic and draws the audience into the story. As she undresses the non-diegetic sound seems to to be going nowhere until we see a scar on her upper thingh and suddenly the mood of the music changes into an eerie, sinister tone. The next shot reveals an isolated chair in the middle of the room, possibly used to tie somebody down. The electric blinds closing may signify no hope for her victim. We then see another man who looks at her and is most likely her next victim. The non-diegetic sound is now really tense bacause we know somethings going to happen. A strangley shaped object wrapped in bandages moving and then the man looking at it adding to the suspense. The music builds up to her sitting on the with the phone ringing. She is sat in a very unnatural position. After we see a close up of her smiling, suddenly the sack in the background moves. This is followed by screams and cross cutting between the men trying to escape. The non-diegetic sound is now oriental making the film feel different to a hollywood horror.

The Matrix target audience

On the IMDB it shows there is a demographic breakdown of the film viewers of the Matrix Reloaded. This film targets a young, male audience as the user ratings showed. According to the user ratings, 153,000 male users rated it, in comparison to only 17,000 female voters. The female voters also generally rated the film a lot lower than the male voters, particularly in the 18-29 age bracket where the males rated it 7.3 and the female audience rated 6.9. The film is most popular with people under the age of 18 and least popular with males who are 45 and over. I think that this films primary audience is below 18 because teenagers generally prefer films with lots of violence and special effects like the matrix whereas men over the age of 45 dont have much interest in action/ thriller films.

Comparing target audiences

Saw targets a target audience between 18 and 30.  This audience is primarily male because it is a horror and stereotypically girls don't like horror because of the gore and violence. The secondary audience will be women who go to see the film with their boyfriends. Horror is generally considered to be a young genre and horror fans are usually under 25. This is for the same reason theme parks have a young target audience, becuase young males enjoy a thrill.

In contrast this film will appeal more to girls because of the cast. Brad pitt, Matt Damon, George Clooney and Andy Garcia will attract girls because girls find them good looking. Therefore young females is the secondary audience. The films primary audience is young males because it is a gangster film and young males sterotypically enjoy violence. There will also be an audience of an older generation that remember the first Oceans 11 that was made in the 1960's

Camera Shots

Here are some of the shots we have been learning about in class. I have been experimenting with the different types of shots in my prelim task.

Title sequence of seven analysis

The non-diegetic music at the start creates an eery beginning to the film and the open book giving it a sense of mystery. The first credits are white on a black background and look badly handwritten. They are also scribbly and flash similar to lightening signifying that this film is going to be dark and scary. Then there is a shar screeching sound as we see someone cutting dead skin off of his fingers with a razor. The hand looks dirty and blistered from working. We then see a montage of this person wrting, cutting, reading, sewing, going through pictures etc. From the gruesome picture of dead prople we can gather that thi person is investigating. There are also lots of little signs that signify a murder, like when he celatapes a picture, running his finger across the neck of a woman creating the image of her had being chopped off. The blood smear on the page after this also signifies a perhaps unhumane death. The pictures become even more gory and gruesome and we see a man with a giant needle through his head. Shortly after this we see the man use a needles signifying that he could be a killer. We dont ever see the mans face in this opening sequence, giving him a sense of mystery. The opening sequence ends with the man taking a newspaper cutting with the word god, suggesting there is spirituality in this film.

Influences on our thriller idea

Our thriller idea was based on reality TV type films like big brother, x factor and I'm a celebrity get me out of here. We did this because reality TV programmes are relevant to now and over the past decade has been the most popular kind of TV. In this thriller we want to show an idea of what future reality TV could be like. Our thriller is going to show reality TV going to far and instead of jungle survival, we are putting our contestants head to head with guns, knifes and baseball bats.



Here is an example of reality TV porgramme "I'm a celebrity get me out of here".

My Thriller Idea

The Power Point Pitch

Scream Presentation

Scream

First group meeting

In our first group meeting we discussed the ideas we had and presented them to each other. We analysed each thriller idea and considered how they were going to work. This meant estimating how long they would be, if we can suppy the neccessary props and whether the idea conformed to thriller genre or not. In the end we chose my idea about the reality TV program called last man standing. We decided on this because it is an original idea, not done before and is topical o now because there are so many reality TV programs goin on at the moment.