Thursday, 27 January 2011

Inspiration for our thrillers

A movie that i have looked at that links in with our Thriller is a movie called "The Illusionist" , the plot of the story is:

 A young boy falls in love with a girl that is way above his social standards along with the art of magic. Although the parents forbid them of seeing each other they cannot be split apart. Until one day they were found together and the boy was sent off. He became a magician and traveled the world. She fell in love with another man, the Crown Prince. The two got engaged but the boy, Eisenheim, finally meets back up with the girl and uses his powers to free her from the royal house in Vienna.



The trailer for "The Illusionist" :

Another film I looked at was a film based around magic, called "The Prestige", the plot of the story is:

In the end of the Nineteenth Century, in London, Robert Angier, his beloved wife Julia McCullough and Alfred Borden are friends and assistants of a magician. When Julia accidentally dies during a performance, Robert blames Alfred for her death and they become enemies. Both become famous and rival magicians, sabotaging the performance of the other on the stage. When Alfred performs a successful trick, Robert becomes obsessed trying to disclose the secret of his competitor with tragic consequences.



The trailer for "The Prestige" :

Thursday, 9 December 2010

An inspirational opening sequence for our thriller

This opening sequence from "Touch Of Evil" really helps our group for our thriller as the continuous dolly shot is exactly the type of shot that we would like to use on ours for "The Magician" thriller idea. The scene is also set in around about the same time as us so I will take inspiration from some of the themes i.e. clothing in the shot.

Our Final idea for a thriller

However in the end we decided to choose our idea of having a magician, who goes round to clubs in the 1960's, performs tricks "accidentally killing people" then fleeing away, from our research we realised that stereotypes work best in thrillers/ horror's as it is easiest for the audience to relate to them. For example, for our magician we will have him wearing a top hat, waistcoat and coat tails as this is how people stereotypically view magicians to look like.

For our victim, we will use a girl, (almost always used as the victim as they are seen as weak and vulnerable) as our casting will work she will look innocent and we will have her wearing white as this is a symbol for that innocence.

As our thriller is a mystery, the girl will get in the box, however you won't see the event happen, making the audience think about how she could of died, making this more believable as a trick gone wrong

Conceptual Ideas for a Thriller

As a group we came up with a few ideas for our thriller:
  1. the wiki leaks
  2. the cervical cancer jab gone wrong

Tuesday, 23 November 2010

Narrative and Character


5 Stages of Narrative structure:
  1. Equilibrium
  2. Disruptive
  3. Complications
  4. Resolution
  5. New Equilibrium
Example of the 5 stages of narrative structure: Jaws:
  1. Equilibrium- Typical day at the beach, sunny, everyone is perparing for July 4th, everyone is happy.
  2. Disruptive- A dead body appears.
  3. Complications- Do they close the beach for July 4th? Will more people die? Is it a shark?
  4. Resolution- they keep the beach open, and go to catch shark.
  5. New Equilibrium- Shark is killed, shark hunter is killed. Everything returns to normal but there are new changes between the people.
5 Stock Characters:
  1. The Hero
  2. The Villain
  3. The Helper or sidekick
  4. The Victim
  5. The Donor
Example of of the 5 stock characters: Harry Potter:

  1. Hero- Harry Potter
  2. Villain- Voldermort
  3. Helper- Ron and Hermione
  4. Victim- Sirius Black
  5. Donor- Dumbledore
Prisoner of Azkaban poster




Denotation and Connotation of a Horror film

A shot from the movie "Scream"
The Denotations and Connotations of these film pictures 

Friday, 19 November 2010

Conventions of a Horror Movie or Horror Iconography

Here I have made a list of things and feelings that we associate with Horror Films that scare us:
Blood
Suspense
Screaming
Death
A Weapon - An Axe
A Fear - Spiders
Contrapuntal Music - Disjointed Music
Usually at night time
Secluded area
Creepy House
Pain
Bad Weather
Psycopath
Horrible noises - screaching
Small confined spaces
Bent trees - no leaves
Someones always alone
Massacre
Black cats
Protagonist
Antagonist
Black magic
Ghost's
Chase sequences
Swamps
Faulty lights
A woman always dies first ( we see this clearly in Scream, when the blond girl is murdered at the beginning)
Inept police
Scary children
Dolls
Clowns
Delapadated buildings
Cars breaking down

All of these above are signs and signifiers of a horror film genre, a film that incorporates most if not all of these is "Nightmare on Elm Street"