Thriller Evaluation

I-spy

Heres our finished thriller opening:

Just a quick update on how filming went

After our first day of shooting, we found that some of the shots of the computer screen showed lines that weren't there. So we got everything prepared for another session of filming where we concentrated on ensuring there were little, if any lines shown on the screen. To avoid this mistake we had to put the screen at a slight angle which ensure no lines would be shown.

Audience feedback

Questionaire

Me and Sam conducted a questionaire into what people enjoy in the thriller genre and how we can incorperate this into our own thriller. An exampleof one of our questions was: What do you enjoy most about the thriller genre and why?
We got the response from most participants that the suspense of thrillers really creates the interest and draws the audience in, teasing them and giving them narrative engimas so they can try work out the story line but have twists to keep them guessing.


Focus Group

Me and Sam put a focus group together so an audience can watch what we have produced so far and get constructed feedback on ways we can improve on our piece. The suggestions made were the use of a sound track should be included as it is vitual to creating suspense and setting the mood. Enhance the digetic sounds of the current piece to build up tension and draw our audience more into our piece.

Characters, costume, make-up, props and settings

When considering our characters, we wanted to create narrative enigmas surrounding them so we didn't want to give too much away. The opening shows two characters who the audience assume are friends but after reading the messages passed between the two of them, there isn't necessarily any proof of a friendship which creates questions about the relationship the characters share.

The two characters would seem completely normal to the average human being so revealing the characters little by little is a better way of gripping the audience so they never become bored of what they're seeing.

To blend the characters into the stereotypical teenage boy we used people with typically shoulder length, overgrown hair with no make-up and naturalistic costumes. We didn't need to purchase anything for our costumes as (being of the same age as our characters) we had the appropriate clothing to display our characters ages).

In terms of props, we relied on a working laptop and webcam in two different rooms. Although only one of each were shown in our piece the other laptop and webcam were used to enable us to show somebody on webcam, a key part in our opening. We had to create a 'top secret file' to progress the story and relieve one question (what is the file) that cues many more (such as; Why does a secret file concern young teenagers?, Who is the man in the file? and What does it say?). We used a red background for the file to ensure it's bold enough to stand out and put an image of a man in a suit on the front large enough so people can see it and assume the file concerns him.

Of course to include this we needed the printer as a prop to film printing the file. Hannah and I thought of a perhaps subtle, yet effective prop use of a mug. There is a scene where our main character turns around on his chair, gets up and grabs the mug and drinks from it while being followed by a pan from the camera. Including this scene breaks up the piece a little bit and creates a kind of relief for the audience after being confronted with lots of close-ups and extreme close-ups in succession.

The setting we used for the main characters room contains models of boats along with sails, oars and various other parts, suggesting that there could be an obsession with the nautical. If the audience were to take the assumption further they could then link this obsession with the reason he's interested in secret information (for example, when he was a child, his father may have been killed in the navy).

Defining our target audience

To maximize revenue, it is important to have a target audience for your product. This helps developers to control content to gain the appropriate classification certificate for their film. for example if a spy-thriller is aimed at 12-20 year olds it would be inappropriate for them to include content that would cause the film to be classified as an 18 as this would cut out a substantial percentage of their potential consumers, ultimately losing income.

The typical age range for a film is 16-25 as this is proposed as the age range when people have the time and money to watch films at the cinema. We decided to aim for a similar target audience however the introduction of modern technologies along with a teenage protagonist may create an appeal to a younger audience, for example 14-25. Targeting this audience would require a rating of 12/15 to include the highest percentage of possible consumers.

Storyboards

Here are the storyboards, the page numbers didn't show up but they are in order from top to bottom.