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.