Alone? Analysis.

Alone? Analysis.

My opening scene for our film ‘Alone?’ employs a variety of different conventions to which a real thriller film usually contains. We employed the use of enigma codes in creating tension and making our audience want to know more by use of questions. The main questions that continually appear are similar to the thriller film ‘Se7evn’ as the audience are left to ask ‘who is the murderer?’, ‘why is he doing this?’, ‘why go after the girl?’ and ‘who is the victim?’ These questions are raised because of the tense atmosphere that we created using moments like lights flicking on and off and knocking on doors, the audience need to know the answers to these questions to be able to fully understand what’s happening. We also looked at the use of a ‘damsel-in-distress’ woman character to remain faithful to the conventions of a thriller film. Our victim was a young woman getting ready to go out with some friends, a typical thriller convention scenario, taking an ordinary place a making it extraordinary with excitement and violence. Our group also decided to employ partial vision within our opening sequence so we created the ‘killer’ and made sure that his face was kept hidden throughout, this created a lot of tension as the audience felt the need to know who he was and what he looked like. The character types we chose were very similar to that of the characters in the film ‘Hannibal Rising’ the male figures were the ‘villains’ and the female figure was the ‘victim’. Thus, our film mirrored that of a real thriller films as it had similar characters.

The way the woman in our sequence was presented was very stereotypically ‘damsel-in-distress’ like, because the victim of the story was a ‘defenceless’, ‘scared’ woman and the dominant figure was the male killer and this shows a stereotypical view on men and woman, unlike the newest version of King Kong where the woman character is a lot more dominant in her role. My film also presents upper class people in a different way than normal; it shows a more detached view on the upper class society. What goes on in a ‘perfect’ household is never really seen from the outside; however, later on in my film this presents itself through a violent father and a mother who doesn’t care.

I believe that the kind of media institution that would distribute my film would be the likes of Hollywood’s subsiding company like Fox Searchlight as they specialise in the lower budget films like my own and they are used to producing similar films being closely linked to Hollywood studios. I also believe that a good way to distribute my film would be through the likes of Youtube as it reaches a wide range of audience and I could get my family and friends to send on the link of my movie and get lots of new people to watch it, and if it is liked then people will give great feedback and it may eventually get picked up by the bigger labels.

As a group we decided that our thriller film would have a 15 certificate because of the adult themes within. Our film is not suitable for children under the age of 15. Our film was aimed at both male and female audiences as there are no references to inequality or diversity on the topics of sex and gender.

We attracted our audience by, firstly creating a questionnaire for people around college and work to fill in for us, we then collected all the data we sat down and went through it together and picked out the main things that kept cropping up and tried to incorporate everything that the audience wanted in our film. They wanted an ambiguous, one word title and we came up with ‘Alone?’ the audience told us that they wanted to be put on the edge of their seats and we created a tense atmosphere but not giving too much away, therefore making them feel ‘on the edge of their seats’ and they also wanted to be able to work out puzzles for themselves and we helped them achieve this by keeping our opening sequence easy to follow but with many leading questions to be answered and they will only ever be answered if you sit and watch the whole film, this was the intended effects as it made our audience want to know the rest of the film and how everything plays out we did this by creating a sense of mystery and tension in the opening scene and the feedback that we received like for example when we asked people to tell us three words to describe our film and the majority of them said ‘tense’, ‘mysterious’ and scary’ this proved to us that we achieved the intended effect. We created mystery by using the conventions of a thriller film by concealing the killers face and keeping him hidden from view. The audience are left on the edge of their seats. The target audience for our thriller were 15 years and older and we stuck to that certificate with the fact that there was barely any swearing and the violence was minimal and was purely based on tension and events that might happen rather than creating a gory, violent opening scene, we wanted the audience to want to watch more and we believed that bringing in too much swearing and gore would have been too much for our target audience to handle too quickly and we thought that our audience would prefer our ways of building up to a climactic moment and ask questions later. We also kept our setting realistic, its a typical scenario for any young teenagers able to go out and have a good time so we stuck with the idea of keeping our setting as realistic as possible as we believed it would reel in our target audience and appeal to a wider range of people.

During this course I have learnt so much about the technology involved in constructing this opening scene to a thriller film. I learnt to use the camera and all its different features like for example the pull focus shot, even though we never incorporated any pull focus shot in our sequence it really helped me familiarise myself with the camera and use it successfully when I learnt these harder to achieve shots and for a first try I think it was pretty successful. The many different angles and types of shots were significant in creating a good, professional type of scene and the use of the 180 degree rule was something that we practised but could have done a little better as we learnt after filming and during the editing process when we found that we hadn’t successfully pulled off the 180 degree rule. I also learnt how important the use of a tripod is and how it can help get the angles and heights that you need, it also ensures you get the best possible, steady shot and helps guide the tracking shots so they are smooth and easy to do.

Learning how to use Adobe Premiere properly has been of real importance in the construction of our project. The use of the effects fade and dissolve really helped in construction process as it clearly helped convey the passage of time in the sequence and without it we wouldn’t have been able to achieve that intended look and it may have confused the audience when watching, it helped link shots together and made it flow continually. I also learned how important the use of non-linear editing is in making a film as it let my group and I come back to and add to our project if we weren’t fully satisfied, this was quite obviously the case with our sequence as we missed out shots and added ones that suit the sequence better.

Looking back at my preliminary task I have learnt so much since then and I have progressed significantly. I have learnt just how important it is to work as a team and to have good communication within my group. However, we also learnt that handing out significant jobs for us each to do get the job done quicker and was much more effective, it will only work successfully if you have good communication between group members. My group and I kept in touch via email and text and if one person needed help then we were just one text away and always willing to help. The blogging process really helped with the outcome as it helped me organise my thoughts and our progress as a group and I knew exactly what I had to do next as it made me keep everything in order.

Conclusively, I think that my thriller film was quite original and was as successful as we could have made it considering it was our first proper film. We met the codes and conventions of a typical thriller film that we had learned prior to creating our own thriller opening scene. Our sequence took into account the audience research that we had collected, again, prior to creating the sequence and it met most of the audience preferences.