Our group’s brief was to create a thriller film opening that fit the conventions of a subgenre of our choosing. My personal responsibility on the project was to direct, write and plan around half of the scenes in the opening. Our chosen subgenre was to create a psychological/crime thriller which saw us directing our attention towards a young adult audience as per the research we had done prior. 

 

During our first meeting as a group, we discussed creating a film opening that would take place in a woods and feature the establishment of two detective characters. Whilst these ideas would have followed the codes and conventions we were aiming to meet, my partner was dissatisfied with the lack of ambition in these plans and proposed a more creatively experimental opening that still followed the base conventions of the genre. Deciding on which idea to pursue became a point of contention in the group which negatively affected the amount of time we had to create a rationale and pitch for the film. Looking back, we could have moved forward much more quickly if I had just gone with the more creative approach sooner rather than later, which would have most likely allowed us to have planned quicker.

 

Prior to generating the initial plot ideas, I had researched into the psychological and crime thriller subgenres to find that the key elements were that they often focused on a binary opposition between the protagonist (often a detective or victim) and the antagonist (often a serial killer). We also researched that the stylistic codes focused on creating a tense atmosphere through tense music, low key lighting, claustrophobic sets and quick edits/cuts. We also conducted research into what audience we should target and we found that males aged 17-21 were most fond of psychological thrillers although our sample group was very small at 6 respondents which resulted in data that was not applicable to a wider audience. This meant our research into the target audience was not purposeful and could have been improved by asking a wider group of people. On the other hand, our research of codes and conventions was much more effective as it gave us a better understanding on how to emulate our chosen prompt.

 

During the pre-production of the film, we worked on storyboards, a shot list, location recces, costume/prop plans, title experiments and I composed a tense ambient piece of music to be added in post-production. Our storyboards ended up being very useful in visualising each of our shots from the shot list although the overall setup of the shots would make adapting to the pandemic restrictions incredibly hard as I will touch on later. The costume/prop plans worked as a guideline for obtaining props to use though we could have made the plans more useful if we had laid them out in a spreadsheet rather than as a written list and added a checklist to check what we needed to obtain next. We did a location recce to my basement in order to get a general idea of how we should plan the shots that featured that location although we could have done a few more recces to get the same level of information about our other planned locations. Additionally, We conducted some title tests which allowed us to play with some ideas for our final titles in Adobe Premiere. Finally, I produced an ambient piece of music to be used in our film during this time in the program FL Studio 12 which allowed us to circumvent the music planning process as I could produce this element myself while making something precisely in line with my directorial vision for the project.

 

During the pre production process we had several logistical issues that we needed to overcome. Firstly, the global coronavirus pandemic greatly affected our ability to utilise any of our planned actors or sets because our film mainly consisted of confined sets to create tension which proved to be impossible to social distance within. Because of this we were unable to film any of our planned scenes and had to result in filming a series of establishing shots instead. While we may have been able to adapt by filming greatly altered versions of our planned scenes, poor time management and numerous periods of self-isolation in relation to the global pandemic made organising these much harder. In the end, we were unable to complete a full film opening and while the pandemic was a large factor in stunting our progress, ultimately our overambition in creating a creative yet conventional film proved to be our main barrier.

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If we were to create the full thriller film, the cost would be much higher. My research during our production process showed that we could obtain funding for a full film by either gaining equity investment, getting a grant or funding out of pocket. As we worked with effectively zero budget, we had to compromise by borrowing equipment like cameras and tripods from school and using pre-existing equipment, costumes and props we already owned. If we were able to actually film our scenes I believe that this method of borrowing and using owned equipment would have proved effective as any other equipment we could have obtained with a budget would just help to improve the visual aesthetic of the film rather than our ability to create a film. If we had actually acquired a budget we would have been able to obtain costumes that fit the characters better and proper lighting and sound equipment.