Thriller Evaluation
In this essay, I will be evaluating our filming project. I will examine what went well, which things could have been improved and what the audience thought about our film. The task was to make a thriller movie and we were instructed to go out and do some research on the thriller genre and also we were shown other openings of films so that we could get a good idea of what type of opening we should have to our film.

From watching the openings to thriller films, we found out that in quite a few films they were using little children in the first few minutes of the film. For example in ‘The Shining’ one of the central characters was a boy who is able to ghost were twin girls at first they seemed like normal children but at the end they turned out to be ghosts. The twin girls were aged about 11 and they audience were given clues that the girls where ghosts because most of the characters do not see them when they appear. However, a boy of roughly the same age can see them. When the girls appear, the boy sees bad things like a river of blood also he sees other dead people. The film maker all ways try to make little kids look venerable and that what we tried to do with our film even though we didn’t have kids but the actors tried to dress to look as young as possible.

Our product is aimed at young audience aged 17-26+ males and females. We have males and females in our film so both sexes can relate to our film. Teenagers often get kidnapped or assaulted. Females are often the target for criminals because they are vulnerable and also young females can be rape victims. There wasn’t any particular reason why we had an Asian girl as the victim but we used a girl to get kidnapped because girls are easy targets for a man to abduct. Ethnicity was not one of our criteria when we were casting. We kept to gender conventions by having a male abductor and a young female victim. We tried to make the victim look young by dressing her like a young girl. We did this because we thought that this made her a more likely target. Religion was not a consideration in our casting.

I think that our film has the ability to be distributed around the world because everyone likes thriller films. British films do not have a very large American audience so this makes wide distribution difficult. However, British films have a better European audience. Also, British films do not have a big budget for their films so the quality of the picture is not as good as in American films. For example ‘Donkey Punch’. In its opening weekend it was shown in two screens in the USA and it made $4,744. When it was shown in nine screens in Sweden it made 119,650 Euros and the in UK it was shown in 155 screens and made £144,953. They only had a budget of £500,000 however in Hollywood they have a minimum budget of $20million. If they had had more money for distribution it would have had more viewers. In order to find a buyer for our film, we could put a short trailer on the internet. We need to be careful to avoid losing the opportunity to sell the film. If the whole film were to be launched on the internet audiences would be able to see it without paying for a DVD or cinema ticket.

This film aimed at an audience of young adults of both genders but I think males will find it more interesting. It is for people who enjoy watching horror and thriller movies. Adam is an 18 year old, studying at university, who really loves to watch movies in his spare time. Adam likes horror movies because he says they are really exciting to see especially when the tension is built by the music playing and in some occasions changes the whole mood of the film. We tried to do that with our film. Adam finds it scary when the music goes all quiet and then there is a sudden outburst of music.

Our selling point will be having four very big stars which is a bit of a risk because if the film doesn’t do well we will lose a lot of money paying the actors. One of the actors is Brad Pitt; women love to see him on the big screen. We tried to pick celebrities that would attract women and men. The other two are Scarlett Johansson and Angelina Jolie; they are two of the sexiest women in Hollywood. We had to have one British star and that is Simon Pegg. We tried to get some American actors because we are trying to attract the American audience. Names like this are known around the world so we hope the film does well. Our main method of advertising would be on the internet. We would have some games that would be linked to the film and there would be trailers of the film on the television and internet.

Before our first project we thought that it would be easy to make a two minute film. When we learnt about all the rules of filming we realised that we were wrong. Filming is a complex process. For example we had to do the 180 degree rule and we could not use the zoom function on the camera. This meant that we had to do a long shot and then a medium shot and combine them using match cuts. Using Final Cut Pro was stressful because we had to make sure that all the shots changed smoothly. For example, we had some shots on the stairs and in one shot Shabaze was on the third step and when we tried to film from another angle we had to start it from him moving up to the fourth step. Sound Track was fun to use but it took too long to find the instrument that we wanted but I think that all our music sounded good. I liked the way it is possible to just pick one or more instruments and combine the beats in order to get a tune. Uploading the movie into the internet was easy but it took some time to upload into the blog.
What we did at the beginning of the year was a great help towards our final project because we had some ‘match cut’ practise at the beginning so that in our final piece we were able to use a lot of match cuts. The film making was difficult but it was fun and we found out that to make an effective film you need to make sure that all the little pieces are good; even just a little movement of the camera could make the film look bad. For example, we had a close-up of Precious; I moved the camera a little bit and it made the film look a bit cheap. Also, good music will make people want to continue watching. For example, there was one video that we watched which had one of the worst sounds we had ever heard. It was like a siren and everyone was holding their ears. No one wanted to continue watching the film. There was another video which had a good beat but it was not such a good video. However, people continued watching the film. Our story boards changed as we went along. The planning process was harder than the filming but because we had planned carefully we found the filming easy.

When we showed our film to the class, they liked it. They liked the black and white part of the film because it showed that it was a flash back and that’s what we wanted the audience to think. This was a very effective technique. The ‘bad guy’ of the film was dressed in a black ‘hoodie’ and the audience knew straight away that he was the villain. The change of music changed the mood of the film. For example, when Precious was ‘in present time’ the music is slow. When the film moves to the flash back the speed of the music changes; it became faster because they were in a playground having fun. Then, when the villain was getting close to them, the music became louder and faster. The rain made the film look better because it made it look like a dull day. This emphasised the mood that we wanted to create for a Thriller film.