With our AS coursework we were required to make a small 2 minute introduction to a thriller film. To do this we had to attract the audience through the use of camera, sound, editing and mise-en-scene techniques.
First of all, looking at the mise-en-scene of the clip (anything that can be seen in each shot) we had to have a particular theme that our target audience would find interesting. We had three scenes in the clip and all of which needed quite different props to work. For example, with the scene of the boy in the room we needed to make him look vulnerable, young and alone. To do this we used props like his plain white clothes and a small bedroom to show that he wasn’t living a life of luxury. Also, another technique, the actor was looking vulnerably out of the open window which create the impression of him being bored and alone.
In another scene, this time of the two men walking, we wanted them to seem the total opposite; dominant and important. To do this we used props like black suits and a briefcase to imply that they were important people. Also with these men, we thought it would be a good idea to have them walking to show that they were going somewhere important.
Also, with mise-en-scene we tried to make the other man in our shot, who’s sitting in the back of a van, look like a rogue agent with his shirt top button undone. This is a common theme in this sort of film, for example in James Bond, when he’s on his missions he sometimes wears clothes in that sort of style. Furthermore, we thought that it would be important for him to have a laptop so that the audience could see that he was an agent as he had high tech gadgets.
Looking at another technique of mise-en-scene, we found that the contrast of lighting in two of the scenes, the man sitting down and the boy in the room, was a significant way in highlighting the fact that one was innocent and the other was more mysterious. Darkness is a common theme in thriller films and it helps the audience fell like something bad is happening. In this scene it helps to show that the man is hiding or on the run, a typical incident in thriller films.
Through camera, we realised through looking at other thriller film openings that the shot composition plays an important role in maintaining the mystery that thriller films often have. We tried to use shot composition in our thriller, in the scene where the men in suits are walking, by making sure their heads weren not in the shot which helped maintain the mystery. We also found that this was a good idea because these characters personality and recognisably were not important, as we wanted them to look like they had no character and they were just doing the job in hand.
When we were researching common camera techniques used in thriller films we noticed that it was a common them to use close-ups to show the important objects in the film, that links the whole mystery together. For example, we had close-ups on the two men’s tattoos and also the symbol on the piece of paper. They were all the same symbols and we decided to use this so that the audience would be interested in this symbol.
When looking at editing techniques that are often used in thriller films, we found that in the kind of circumstance that we wanted to portray, a fast cutting rate with fading transitions in and out of the credits were important to keep up the speed of the clip.
We also used a fading transaction combined with a sound bridge at the end of the clip which was combined with dialogue to create a cliffhanger, leaving the audience wanting to know what the agent is talking about when saying ‘go on my mark...... go’. We found that this increased the intensity of the mystery and found that having ambient sounds in the background helped lead to the climax of the opening.
We had a backing track playing throughout the clip and we choose to have one that had a fast beat to maintain the speed of our transactions and the cutting rate. We found it was important because it create a sense of a chase and as if something important was happening.
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