My Contribution To The Group Planning Work

Order of the title sequence for our opening.

The following is a rough draft of the possible titles that could make up our title sequence and he order that they could appear in:

Directed:
Script:
Edited:
Costume design:
Music supervisor:
Music effects:
Music:
Cast 1:
Cast 2:
Cast 3:
Cast 4:
Cast 5:
CJG studios presents:
A CJG production:
Innocences Seized

Another variation of this could be:

A CJG production:
Directed:
Script:
Edited:
Costume design:
Music supervisor:
Music effects:
Music:
Cast 1:
Cast 2:
Cast 3:
Cast 4:
Cast 5:
CJG studios present
 Innocences Seized

How my research has helped my planning

My Primary research helped me to plan my thriller because it allowed me to see what audience I should aim to target. I also gained knowledge about how often people watched movies and what made it more enjoyable for them. This helps me because it means that i can change and adapt my thriller opening to try and make it more applicable to to what the audience want. My secondary research was helpful because it gave me more background information about the genre and of films as a whole e.g age distribution of cinema goers had the highest number of people between the ages of 15-24 year olds.

By Making a timeline of the title sequences from "Iron Man 3" it helped me to see not only what order the cast and crew appeared in but also the timings between each credit. When we analysed thriller posters this allowed me to see how characters are represented with the use of colour, clothing, scenery and other items. It allowed me to pick out reoccurring themes, the strengths and weaknesses of each and apply them to my own thriller i.e the lighting, clothing mise en scene.

When I analysed "Olympus has fallen" it allowed me to see how straightaway the setting influenced how I felt about the scene i.e the presidential resort made me think something bad or important was about to happen or was very likely to happen. Because of this I realised that the way I use my locations will be very important - what effect will it have on people and what do they associate with my location. In this opening there were themes of responsibility, protection and family. These are all very relatable themes as we are all responsible for something if not then at least our own actions. The majority of people also have people they want to protect whether this is a family member, friend or business. Again most of us could transfer ourselves into some of the events of the family in the scene. This help me because these themes made me particularly interested in wanting to find out what happened to the family, wanting to make sure they ended up safe. This influenced the theme of my thriller as I saw family and protection as an important, adaptable and expandable theme.

By looking at thrillers with different sub genres such as Psychological Thriller (Shuttter Island), Action Thriller (The Dark Night Rises), Horror/crime Thriller (Saw 7, Silence of the Lambs) and Scifi Thriller (Inception) it allowed me to see how the different openings were conveyed and how each one conformed or challenged the overall thriller genre. 

I learnt a lot from analysing the opening scene of "Body of Lies" especially with costumes and how much they can influence how you interpret a character and the beginning assumptions about that character that you make. I also learnt that giving a few hints of the location of the scene is important incase the viewer misses information i.e in the opening of "Body of Lies" you are told that it is in Manchester, however if you missed this you would still be able to tell that it is set in England due to the use of an establishing shot that shows a English police officer and a red English telephone box. This in its self also tells me about the importance of a variety of shots as the viewer wouldn't have been able to have a second chance to gain this information at the beginning if it wasn't for the establishing shot. 

Sound track updated

*Changed/Updated information

This is the beginning of our sound track. When we first started looking into the style of music we were going to use or create we were finding it hard to come to any conclusion. We then turned to other films and youtube for inspiration. We decided to distort a nursery rhyme and put our own twist on it. We then started researching different nursery rhymes and their meanings. We decided that 'Mary Mary quite contrary"was the one we wanted to use because of the various meanings behind it. One of which is the idea of the following: "Mary is addressed first-hand about all of the poor saps she's sent to the graveyard (her garden). The silver bells refer to instruments of torture that crushed the thumb with the tightening of a screw, and cockleshells were torture devices that were attached to the genitals" This is quite a dark meaning and idea of the rhyme however we thought it was appropriate as the character Andrew has a very dark and shady past. (http://www.cracked.com/article_16576_the-disturbing-origins-5-common-nursery-rhymes_p2.html)
We decided to look on youtube for scary nursery rhymes to see what others had created and how they created it because we wanted to know if it was possible and if it would actually sound as freaky as we intended it to. 

The video at the bottom of this list help to inspire us quite a lot, not only for the high quality and the chills it gave us but because it was made on garage band which is the software we wanted to use. This made us believe that it would be possible for us to create something that too could give us or others chills and enhance the effect of our footage. After hearing this Jess told us that it reminded her of a sound track in the film "Insidious" as it too used a nursery rhyme but with an added crackling/old effect. So we decided to look into it and see what it sounded like. 

after listening to this we were even more inspired as we were feeling rather scared and that was without even watching the imagery. We thought by replicating something similar to these that we had looked at it would help support our sub genre of horror. 

The third film/ sound track we looked at was "The Others" . This film uses a whispering effect which helps develop the thriller genre as it creates the "creepy" and "mysterious" effect that thrillers generally have 

We then went into the sound booth and started recording. We created two different tracks, one with a 'epic diva' effect that made our voices echo and the other with a 'deeper vocals' effect that gave a dark deep gloomy effect to our voices. These are both going to be very useful and we indent to use them specifically when the killer is shown. 

We are also going to create some sound effects by using instruments that we will borrow from the music department but we will also create them using sound effects on garage band and possibly by ones all ready made that are free to use. The other effects we need are sticks breaking, wind, foot steps, birds, crashes, bangs, (possibly pots and pans clashing) glass braking, scraping and thumps. We want these sound effects as we think they will help create tension and suspense. 

There is a short clip in the first scenes when Charlie is running around the lakes where we would like to add some sounds that involve violins and possibly other sting instruments. This is because we believe violins create a lot of suspense and tension. We noticed in the recently released film "The Hunger Games - Catching Fire" that a lot of suspense and emotion was generated from the sound track that involved violins being frequently used.  

Inspiration of our thriller

Our thriller has a sub-genre of horror. This is because when we started to think about story lines for our opening and thriller in general we quickly came to realise that the most memorable thrillers we had seen were ones that had a sub genre of horror. Because of this we thought it would be easier to have a sub genre of horror as there is a lot of inspiration for us to look to and for us to recall upon from what we have already seen.

Thriller Name ideas

This is our first take on thinking of names for our thriller opening. We started with the "associations" branch as this would give us a good starting base. From here we went to the the "name" branch as we thought adding a name to the title could be a possibility. The branch that helped the most was the "existing thrillers/horrors" as from this we could see how existing film titles were structured, for example we realised that a lot of films started with the word "the" this inspired a few of our possible film titles.

This is a more advanced section of the "our ideas" branch from our first thoughts. Planning the names out on a separate piece of paper allowed us to really think more about why that title would be a good name and what it would represent (the green information) This made it a lot easier to decide on our final name idea as we had a much clearer view of what each individual name meant. We finally decided to go with "innocence Seized"  (the blue writing) as Charlie is being forced to deal with the events. Once this happens she looses a part of her self- part of her innocence- this is taken from her, another word for this is seized. We also chose this as it doesn't give too much away about the plot and so leaves the audience wanting more. This was important for us because we were really weary about not revealing too much

Production Name Ideas

This is our first mind map for production/distributer names. We were loosely exploring ideas. 

This is our second mind map of ideas. It stemmed from the idea of our initials CJG. The G is reversed to help make the shape of an elephants face.