Initial Ideas and Collaboration Work

Rory, Matthew and myself met to discuss the possible codes, conventions and ideology behind our film opening sequence. We each came up with our own ideas and displayed them into the mind map shown below. The topics we discussed were, audience, genre and sub-genre, plot, setting, costume, shot types, and sound. It is important that we carefully looked at each of these topics to make sure our opening scene has the key conventions of a thriller film. One of the biggest decisions we had to make was sub-genre which would essentially determine the plot because for example a dramatic thriller would be more emotional for the audience whereas a psychological or horror thriller would leave the audience on the edge of their seat in anticipation and suspense. In the end we decidede to allow our target audience to decide what sub-grenre our film will be through questionaires and focus groups where they can express their views.

For our plot, we came up with several ideas which all fit the conventions of different thriller sub-genres. Matt came up with an idea about a ghost which was causing greif in the city and it was down to one police detective to track it down and stop it. At one point, Rory thought that it would be good if, within the film, their should be several mysterious homocides which need to be investigated in order to find the one behind it. Then after some more thinking we all came together to think of our most promising idea involving the interrogation of an prison inmate who worked closely with a most wanted criminal that the police are desperatly after. Despite the ideas being different they all seemed to be based around one common thing- Crime. Each time we thought of a new idea, crime appeared to be apart of it which I think is quite good because according to my research, thriller films were most popular with audiences aged 18-35 when crime was a key convention.