Brick

• Conventions - suspense, tension, enigmas, flashback
• Camera - fade in , close up of face, close u[ of hand , flicking cigarette
• Editing - straight cut
• Sound - girls sound scared on phone, girl scared asking for help, pone box ringing, car horns as it drives passed, people talking 
• Mise-en-scene - dirty clothes and hair, bracelets , casual clothes , glasses.

Thriller openings

Memento

• This film has an extremely difficult narrative structure where events are told in 10 minutes segments but backwards.
• The echoes the confusion that the main character feels as he struggles to remember events.
• 
  
• Conventions  - cliffhanger, reverse, suspense, tension, enigma
• camera - close up of man, kegs, hanger, showing room, close up of photo
• sound - depressing, dialogue man confused, Lenny happy making jokes, man doesn't remember.
• mise-en-scene - photo with blood, colour of photo changes and vanishes. camera, window of car blocked , man has something written in his hand.

Cliff hangers

• Sometimes, although not always, used. Often feature a main character in a precarious or difficult dilemma, or confronted with a shocking revelation
• This can entice the audience to keep watching in order to see how the situation resolves itself.
• It’s not exactly, strictly speaking, a thriller, but the Italian job (1969) gives us a whity example of this in its famous ending.

Video from North by North West showing this scene

Red herrings

Red herrings

• A red herring is the name given to a device which intends to divert the audience from the truth or an item of significance.
• Can work with other devices (enigmas) to create suspense.
• In saw, two characters spend time imprisoned in a room in which a third character lies dead. Throughout the film, both characters appear to be guilty of a series of murders, until it is discovered at the end that the third person in the room is not actually dead but is, in fact the killer.
• North by North West (Hitchcock 1958)
• “Dusting crops where there aren't any crops”
• Main character, Thornhill, sent to meet a man (Kaplan) who will explain why he has been mistaken for a government agent and, we believe, help him.

Narrative – structure, formulas and devices.

Narrative – structure, formulas and devices.

Use of continuity editing

• The clear establishment of cause and effect, plotting which establishes character motivation and helps tell an interesting story which proceeds logically and steadily.
• Enigmas- this refers to a puzzle, something mysterious or inexplicable, or a riddle or difficult problem.
• In thrillers this is commonly something which the protagonist has to try to find out or solve before the narrative is resolved and the film finishes.

The psychological thriller

The psychological thriller

The mind, conflict and the past

• The suspense created by psychological thrillers often comes from two or more characters preying upon one another’s minds, either by playing deceptive games with the other or by merely trying to demolish the others mental state.
• Sometimes the suspense comes from within one solitary character where characters must resolve conflicts with their own mind usually this conflict is an effort to understand something that has happened to them.

Hitch cock's maguffin

A maguffin (sometimes maguffin or maguffin) is a plot device that motivates the characters and advances the story, but has little other relevance to the story.
"we have a name in the studio, and we call it the maguffin, it is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. in crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers."m

Notorious

Rope (1948)

• Tells the story of the two young , wealthy men, Brandon and Philip, who strangle and murder a friend of theirs just to see if they can get away with it.
• They then invite other close friends (including the murdered mans parents !) to their apartment for a dinner party, whilst hiding the body in a chest/box in their sitting room, just to see if they can get away with it.
• The suspense is created through the body in the chest box.
• What will happen?
• Will the body (and the two men) be discovered and brought to justice?
• Do we, the audience, even want this to happen?

suspense and shock

Imagine a scene in a film similar to this (classroom, student, teacher). the camera reveals that there is a bomb under the table to the audience but we the (audience, student and teacher ) are unaware of this.

• Will we be saved?
• Will the bomb go off?

This is suspense.

Now image the same scene except that instead of the camera revealing the bomb under the table it, with any warning explodes and kills all present !

• This is shock !

An example of this is children of men

AS Coursework Thriller

The brief
The titles and openings of a new fiction film in the thriller genre to last a maximum of two minutes. the coursework is 50% of the course.
mark schema
Marks are awarded for demonstrating excellence in the following criteria:

• holding a shot steady
• framing a shot
• using a variety of shot distances 
• shooting material appropriate to the task set

Before you begin filming you must go through the planning process.
you should then undertake some research into the genre and complete the research sheet.

Elements of a good thriller

In class we watch the cartoon

Below is a clip of the cartoon !!!

THE RULE !!!

Animated director Chuck Jones worked at Warner Brothers for decades making short movies starring Buggs Bunny, Daffy Duck and company. He also made Road Runner cartoons.

Making of Preliminary Task

For my preliminary task I was in a group of four, we done a story board as I have already shown on my blog showing our idea of what the preliminary task will was going to do. We filmed the preliminary task in are lesson and changed a view things later on making sure that we included everything required for our preliminary task.  When we had finished filming, we started to edit the film, we done this using a program called Final Cut Pro X. When the editing was finished we uploaded the final film on to YouTube.

My Preliminary Task

My Preliminary Task

This is the story board that we have used to show what are preliminary task will look like at the end.

Different types of thrillers

spy thriller- james bond, tinka tyler solider spy
political thriller- ades of march, v for vendetto
conspiracy thriller- state of play
legal thrillers- john griffan pelican brief

Thriller

The thriller is  very difficult genre to pin down because it covers such a wide range of films. thrillers are films of suspense that are supposed to instil terror into the audience.

preliminary task video

Foundation Portfolio

Perliminary task - is a demonstration of continuity editing, it must show you can successfully use : match on action , shot reverse shot and 180 degree rule .
Match on Action - we see a character start an action in one shot and then see them continue it in the next.
Eye line Match -character is looking at something in one shot , in the next shot you see what they are looking at.
Shot Reverse Shot-when you film over the shoulder of the character going form one character to another.
180 degree rule-is a basic guideline that states that two characters (or other elements) in the same scene should always have the same left/right relatyionship to each other if the camera passes over the imaginary axis connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line.

paronormal activity

The film builds suspense becuase the demon creates sounds but not so terrifying then, is builds it but my making scratching sounds,loud banging ect and this builds up the supspense to when the girl is not in control and the demon is in her body.the sound buils suspense becuase the sunds get worse every time they go to bed even though we can not see what is making the sound we are still scared becuase of this and it creates a tense atmosphere.

Camera-The camera is uses through out the film to show the night and day activity of the demond and the camera is used to view the whole of the house and the werid activitys that are going on. also in the film is the use of mise en scene , this is :
Costumes-in the film the acotrs are wering very casual cothes , this shows they are normal people getting sormented by this demond
Lighing-in the film the lighting is dark and the lights flicker on and of , as the actors move around there always seem to be light shows their the nice people in this and when its dark the demond is a work shows his in control of everything and is dark and mean.
Actors-The actors are very good becuase you can see that they are scared by their faces and the emotions that they show becuase of the wird things that are happening to them they are facing.
Make up-the actors have hardly any make up on sure that they are pure and inersent in all of this wierd activity.
Props-the props that are used is a things that you find in a house e.g. bed, sofer. ect and they also use a camera,voice recorder , laptop, to show what the demond is doing.
Setting-the film is set in the couples house , mostly in the bed from but it does travel round coursing pain and make them feel insucure in the house .
The narrative structure is when the sub titles are presented to the audience , In the film the the sub titles were presented in white writing and were clear for the audience to read about what is happening in the film.

Black swan "psychological thriller"

A ballet dancer wins the lead in "swan lake" and is perfect for the role of the dedicated white swan princess Odettle- but slowly loses her mind as she becomes more and more like Odile, the black swan.in this psychological thriller they have used clamp.
Costumes-one is wearing a dark black swan type dress and has lots of detail were the other is in a glamours white swan dress.
Lighting-when they are dancing on the stage they have used a single sport light and low key lighting.
Actors-she plays the part really well being friendly and happy to be the white swan, but we can see the fear in her eyes and the lack of perfection in her prefomances and she loses her mind.
Make up-the white swan has delicate sliver branches across her face ans soft pink lip colour, whereas the black swan has red eyes, purple, red colour lips and silver,green branches coming of her eyes .
Props- the lights- chandeliers hanging from the ceiling in the dance scene.moving gates
Setting-it is set in New York city at a ballet company.

Zodiac

In the film Zodiac , it starts of with two teenagers in a car driving around and instead of going to the burger bar with loads of people around , the girl drives them to a quite place, with know one around , it is very relaxed , then out of know were these people in cars start throwing fire crackers at them, this gives us a glue that something bad might happen but we are not sure, then it goes all quite again, a couple minutes later we here a car coming , it goes in and goes back out again, then a few minutes later we here a screeching of a car and the mysterious black car comes back and parks behind them, and turns its head lights of, then a man gets out of the car with a flash light, the boy in the car thinks its the police but its a man with a gun and kills both of them, however when the man starts to walk away one of them starts moving , so he goes back and shots them again . In this film there are small little hints to tell the audience that something bad is going to happen and this builds up the suspense of the film and it is unexpected, and the audience will want to watch on to see what happens .

No country for old men - Opening Scene

PSYCHO !!!


That is the only way to describe this thriller of a film , it starts of with a narrator talking about the film using boring country scene in the middle of no were , then you see a police officer , taking a man in to the police car with a oxygen chamber , then then drive down this long road and we see the police officer talking on the phone as the police officer puts the phone down , the criminal slowly gets up and with the cuffs on him he strangles the officer down to the floor until he is dead, he then washes his hands and takes of the cuffs, he carries on his murder by killing an innocent man in the car with the oxygen chamber , this film is very scary but it is a great opening to a film because people will want to carry on watching it to see what happens next!!!!! Here is a clip of the film.


http://youtu.be/_kqoJevTIIQ

A history of violence

In this thriller the director has started the film with two guys coming out of a motel, looking all calm and cool , one of them is wearing all black , he looks bossy and in-charge and the other guy looks normal and laid back, in the film them come out of the motel , and put their bags in the car , as laid back guy drives the car along the, guy n black goes back in we are still unaware that anything has happened , then when the laid back guy goes in too get some water we see a load of blood and a person on the floor and another one in a chair the man does nothing, however when the little girl comes out from her room , he bends down and shushes her then kills her , then a another girl wakes up from a night mare , seeing this as an opening make the audience what to watch the film further and see what happens.

Analyzing modern thriller openings!

In media we have started to look at openings of modern thrillers for when we start to do are own thriller!!! To do this we will focus on the mise en scene which is clamps this stands for costume, lighting,actors, make up,props and setting and this is what we will be looking at in the films we will be watching.

North by North West the ending

This fast action thriller ends with the lady shooting Mr Kaplin as every one thinks he is called but its not its Roger Thornhill , but what we don't know is that the shoots were fake and he is still alive, as races to try and save the pretty blonde lady from the villains . In the film, Hitchcock uses everything to make it a great thriller , for example their are face pacing senses eg.car chase , the auction room, he also uses red herrings, this is were they trick the audiance, so the pretend shootng . Macuffin is used in thrillers but as Hitchcock quotes it "it is not used and it is not necessary". The main part that were thrilling were the car chase, when they climb down the cliff at the end and the auction room when i escapes.

All the right ingredients for a great thriller!!!!

Parallel and Contrapuntal sound

http://youtu.be/WpmILPAcRQo-music

 I have created a contrapuntal sound were the song does not match up to what is in the video.
prom night with I have the time of my life music!

North by North West continued

In media we are carrying on with watching North by North west we are but to the part of the film were he is in the auction and the men are going to kill him, so he decides to course mayhem in the auction room and get carted of by the police.  

Alfred Hitchcock North by North West

For are first assignment we had to watch Alfred Hitchcock North by Northwest film , here is the trailer for the exciting thriller movie , it also ties in with are first topic which is thriller movies. 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJz5g9eXEtk&feature=related

Thriller is a broad genre of literature , films and television . Thrillers are fast pacing and loads of action type of films , normally a thriller movie is a villain driven plot and the hero has to over come this , this type of genre interests the audience by adding a dramatic scene into the film so for example a car chase . 

In the North by Northwest thriller an innocent man is kidnapped by these two villains and they think they got the right man but they haven't and they force him into the car with a gun and make him drink , then when he tries to escape, he finds himself driving in a horrific manner and has to stand trial , this is an exciting thriller lets see what happens next !!!    

Welcome to my media blog.

Welcome to my new As media studies coursework blog , this blog will chart my progress of my  portfolio as i start my coursework.