Researching The Film Industry

By researching the industry, I have allowed myself to understand the process of which a film must go through in order of becoming open to the public. This will help me to understand how I must structure my thriller opening and how I must use editing and post-production effectively to create an opening that captures the audience. 

Textual Analysis: Se7en

This textual analysis focuses on the opening, and first few scenes of the thriller film, 'Se7en' by David Fincher. This textual analysis will help me to understand what makes a good thriller and how I can add these effects and ideas into my own thriller opening for my coursework.

Conventions Of A Thriller Film

A thriller usually consists of a battle between an antagonist and a protagonist that creates a deliberate disruption in the equilibrium. A chain of events creates tension and suspense leading up to the climax. (1)

Thrillers also consist of multiple subgenres. These are used within the plot of he film without the audience consciously thinking about their presence. These subgenres include:

Action Thriller: This uses physical action to uphold tension throughout the plot. This subgenre will often have continuous motion and physical stunts/chase scenes that contribute to the whole idea of the danger the protagonist faces.

Crime Thriller: A crime thriller usually relies on the plot of a serial killer, murderer, robbery or manhunt in order of creating suspense. Often the storyline will focus around both the antagonist and protagonist.

Film-Noir: Film-Noir is based around the popularity of a stylistic type of crime-drama or thriller in the 1940's and 1950's. As stated in the title, the film is edited into black and white.

Psychological Thriller: In this subgenre the threat comes from the mind, not the constant use of physical violence.The protagonists in psychological thrillers must rely on their mental resources to solve the situation

Science Fiction Thriller: These are based on the use of hypothetical sciece-based films. Often, this sub-genre will explore the “future-gone-bad” theme, including plots that revolve around alien invasions, dystopian scenarios, and super-diseases
 
Religious Thriller: This subgenre includes religious questions, ceremonies, and objects to revolve around a specific religion or religious view. Exorcisms, demon possession, and church cover-ups are typical themes of Religious Thrillers. (2)

Credits

  (1) http://www.slideshare.net/JasonsA2Media/codes-and-conventions-of-the-thriller-genre
  (2) http://thescriptlab.com/screenplay/genre/thriller

Thriller Opening: Initial Ideas

Me, Jake and Oliver had a discussion about what direction we wanted to go in for our thriller. We came up with several different ideas and different concepts for the opening scene. We noted down these ideas in a spider diagram and wrote a brief synopsis for each idea. We came up with both stereotypical ideas and ones that were less used. Out of all our ideas, our favourite concept was the 'Under The Bed'' idea where we would be able to use different camera shots to be able to create tensions, fear and suspense.

 



Barthes' Narrative Codes

Barthes came up with the theory that there are 5 narrative codes that explain all narrative texts. These codes are: Action Code, Mystery/Enigma Code, Semic Code, Cultural Code, and Code of Oppositions (Binary Code). Each code gives a different theory as to how a narrative hints different things towards the audience.

In our preliminary we subconsciously used several of these codes just from our knowledge of the genre of our piece. Without knowing it we had included examples of each code.

Action Code (Proairetic Code)

The Action Code is the idea that the audience will recognise an action and immediately associate it with the next logical step. This advances the narrative by leading the audience into the next piece of action. For example, a film may show the action of someone packing a suitcase. At this point the audience will automatically make the connection to the character leaving/going on a trip, just from the first initial action.

We used this code in our preliminary piece when we showed the assassin walking in through the door. We immediately led our audience into following the idea that the assassin would then enter another room in which more action would take place. As this was our only example of action code, we could have added extra actions that would automatically lead you to the next logical action. For example, as originally planned, we could have placed the contract, from the interviewer, in front of the assassin who has a pen in their hand. This would have led the audience to automatically assume that the assassin was going to sign the contract and commit himself to the job in hand.

Enigma Code (Hermeneutic Code)

The Mystery Code, or Enigma Code, is used to explain the narrative by controlling what information and how much information is supplied to the audience. This grabs the audience's attention and keeps them interested by setting up a mystery or problem they believed will be solved during the course of the narrative. Unanswered examples of enigma code also seem to frustrate audiences and create a talking point.

In our preliminary piece, we also used examples of mystery code throughout our use of dialogue. We never actually stated that our characters were assassins or that they were meeting about a potential job. We also purposely didn't mention what the job would be, to keep the audience interested and in anticipation throughout the narrative. I feel like we used this code rather well as we managed to create a sense of tension and anticipation in the final edit of the piece.

Semic Code

The Semic Code is all about signs and symbols that tells us/ give us hints about the characters or story line. For example, if an anarchy sign is purposely featured in a scene, it suggests that the next scene will include chaos and destruction.

We didn't use many examples of Semic Code in our preliminary piece of film. We could consider the fact that the antagonist was wearing dark clothes as an example of semic code. I feel like this was the weakest point for our preliminary. If I did it again, I would try to add an example that showed the assassin firm/ interviewer as a higher authority than the assassin/anatagonist themselves.

Cultural Code (Referential Code)
The cultural code is exactly as it says. This is the idea that the narrative can clearly display ideas such as time period and location, without specifically stating this. In our preliminary we unintentioanlly displayed codes of Britain due to our ethnicity, accents and language. These three principles suggest to the audience that we are British. I dont think there is any other way that we could have added extra signs of the location and time period.

Code Of Oppositions (Binary Opposites)
This code refers to the idea of binary opposites, such as black vs white, day vs night and ying vs yang. The only example we used of this in our preliminary task was that the two characters were opposite genders. Oliver, playing the interviewer, clearly contrasted with myself, although our characters seemed equal in strength. We could have added more examples of opposites in our piece.







http://www.learn.columbia.edu/saussure/

Lighting Practice

 In order to create the perfect theme and tension for our thriller we decided to do some practicing with lighting and discover how it can change moods/scenes instantaneously. We borrowed a small LED camera light from the media department to take our shots. We decided to take our photos in the English store room as it was the darkest place we could find that would allow us to manipulate the light. 

 

 

 

 

 

Firstly, we held the camera at a high angle to create a rather angelic/ protagonist feel to the photo. This allowed us to experiment with how we could enhance a characters persona just by changing the lighting of a shot.

 

 

Then we tried to create a softer look, by moving the light above and behind the persons head to eradicate any harsh shadows that would make the person look menacing or fierce.

We then decided to experiment with reflecting the light off of different surfaces. We found a series of different coloured folders and decided to bounce the light off of these in order to create a coloured light.  

We held the light at different distances from the folder to create more intense and more relaxed colourings in the light. Below are the photos we took using the folders...

 

We also experimented with video and how lighting could move over a person. We decided to post the footage on our blogs.

 

Preliminary Task: Video Review

I asked a member of another group to review our preliminary task. I felt it was important to ask others to give us feedback as they would be none biased and honest. I asked Tasmine to give us three points to improve our preliminary piece and three points that went well. 

As a group we took these criticisms into account and made a point of noting them down so that we could improve them when it came to our coursework thriller task. We also agreed with what Tasmine had said in the video as we had noticed these points when evaluating ourselves after the preliminary had been filmed, and put online.

Preliminary Task: Evaluation

I decided to do my evaluation as a powerpoint presentation as another way of exploring different types of skills and media. I also have a video of a review of my video, however, I felt like this should be put up as a separate post. 


                     

Preliminary Task: The Final Piece

Here's our final piece for the preliminary task. We managed to include each aspect from our brief, such as: 180 degree rule, match on action, continuity and shot-reverse shot. I am happy with how this piece has developed and become a short clip of film that manages to keep to the brief, whilst also exploring a short storyline.

Our clip follows an assassin into an ''interview'' with an assassination company. The assassin is played by myself and the interviewer by Oliver. Due to the changes to our original plan, we stepped in to play the characters and move the piece onto post production. 

We had a few errors in post production however, after finishing the final edit, our computer experienced some problems which meant our whole piece was deleted. We fixed this by exporting all our clips onto a new computer and starting again. This ultimately meant we did not have time to put the music on our piece and therefore felt it was not as good as it could have been.

Despite this, we submitted our final piece, and we are relatively happy with the outcome.