Inspiration for the opening titles to our Thriller film

Creating the opening titles to a film (and particularly for a Thriller film) is an art form in of itself.
Part of the reason for this is that it allows the directors to be really creative with the effects that they want put across to the audience - it could be used to ease the audience into the film with a hint of tension or it could be designed to calm the audience down a little if the opening scene is particularly tense.
Another reason why the opening credits are so important is because it would be one of the very first things that the audience and so the style by which these are done hints at the style of the film as a whole.
The opening titles in our Thriller film are inspired by a combination of those used in the Thriller film Se7en and the ITV drama series Lewis and Endeavour (and likely Morse as well).
In Se7en (see video right) the opening shows a character (who at this point in time is left in the shadows) who is meticulously planning something and making many notes - seeing as this is a crime Thriller we can assume that this is the murderer plotting the acts which he is about to commit. The music is edgy in a why that connotes a destabilised mental state for the character involved. The meticulous nature of the planning for these acts also brings across a sense of OCD, and the fact that we know that the killer is basing his acts on the 7 deadly sins (as revealed in the synopsis) we can almost describe this as a sense of religious zeal to the character. We liked the way in which the titles were done - by showing bits of work from the character followed quickly by a fade in which it would show the next name in the list. As Anna also has a destabilised mental state, this kind of style would suit her character well too.
In each episode of Endeavour/Lewis, the style is very similar in how it opens in that the audience is shown snippets of characters performing different actions followed by a title coming onto the screen which allows the audience to get a feel for what the general themes are for that episode and who all of the main suspects are. Again, the style of credits is one that we felt we liked to it was one that we decided to adopt for our own Thriller film.

Evaluation question 7: "Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression to the final product?"

Evaluation Question 3: "What kind of media institution would distribute your media product and why?"

Evaluation question 5: How will you attract/address your audience?

If our opening were to be developed into a full length feature, we plan to attract and address our audience through means of advertisements. One method of advertisement that we would use is posters. Posters are a good way of getting the word out about the film as they can be stuck to walls or places that people walk past every day or without the specific intention of looking for a film to watch, which will therefore draw the attention of more people. Also, some people like to collect film posters. 

We could also create a website to promote our product. Our colour scheme for the website would be black and red. Black is often associated with power, death, evil and mystery and red, as well as being the colour of blood, often represents danger. We would also perhaps use hints of dark red as this colour represents rage, anger, malice and wrath. The website would contain all the information about the movie: cast/crew information, trailers, where people can see it and links to these other sites. 

We could also use social media, by creating a Facebook page and a Twitter feed and encourage people to share it. Through the use of social media, we could also hold a competition, such as that anyone who shares our film will be entered into a prize draw to win a poster signed by the director and the actress who played Anna, along with any other cast members who would be involved if the film were to be made into a full length feature. By doing this it will increase the chances of our Facebook page and twitter feed being shared, which will therefore make more people aware of our production. 

We could also create our own video space on both YouTube and Vimeo. On this space, we could have cast and crew make vlogs and videos about production, the story and other aspects of making of the film as well as interviews and sneak peeks at scenes. As the average attention span of an online viewer is less than two minutes, we would have to make sure that a lot of the videos are no longer than two minutes long as we would not want to lose their attention. 

We could also create a few teasers for the film and release them a week or two before the trailer is released. Each teaser trailer would provide the audience with an unanswered question, which will draw the attention of potential audience members by intriguing them. The trailer will give a little bit more information but will still not give so much that the audience is no longer intrigued.

Evaluation Question 4: Who would the audience be for your media product?

As our film, if it were to be made into a full length feature (see plot summary), revolves around the psychology of a criminal, and to be more specific a serial killer, our target demographic would be people who find the topic of psychology interesting. 

Also, our target demographic would be people aged no younger than 15. This is due to the fact that that there will be a strong level of threat throughout a large proportion of the film and there is a possibility that strong language will also be used. 

Due to the fact that the film includes a high level of threat and violence, it would also be important to target people who aren’t faint hearted, perhaps through making it clear in a film trailer that violence is included, as if people don’t like the film they may post bad reviews on websites or speak badly about it, which will have a negative effect on box office takings because then other people will think the film is bad and won’t give it a chance.

Evaluation question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In the opening to our thriller, the social groups represented are woman, criminals and police officers, through the characters of Anna and the woman at the desk in the police department. Both of these characters are represented atypically but in very different ways.

Woman, stereotypically, are often thought of as being kind, innocent and gentle. Our main character, Anna, heavily subverts this expectation when we find out that she is in fact a killer, with a body count of 27, which is an extremely high amount of crime for anyone. 

Also, you would usually expect criminals to be men, due to the fact that the news often covers cases in which the criminals are men. Having our criminal as a woman subverts the expectation of a criminal being a man. A criminal, in most cases, will show at least some type of either regret for the actions or in some cases take pride in them, but Anna subverts this expectation as she shows no emotion of any sort. 

The woman at the desk also subverts expectations of women. When one is to hear the words ‘police officer’, the chances of them thinking immediately of a female police officer is highly unlikely. This is because the job is typically seen to require bravery and the occasional need to pursue a hostile suspect, which, stereotypically, are qualities believed to be more in males rather than females. Therefore, representing the police officer as a woman will subvert the stereotypes of women being weaker and more timid than men.

Evaluation question 1: How does your media product use, develop or challenge the conventions of real media products?

Evaluation Question 1 by Matthew Alan Herriott on Scribd

Anna - Final draft

Finally, having made the various adjustments and changes advised to us by the audiences we showed it to, I can at last present the opening to our Thriller film:

The filming process (part 4)

Filming, day 4

Date: 109/03/17
Time: 10:40-12:10
Section filmed: Closet shots (added post storyboard construction)
Personnel: Evie (Producer), James (Producer) Chloe (Anna), Matthew (Director)
Props/costumes: T-shirt/trousers, Newspaper (NEW), Coat, shoes.
Equipment needed: Camera, Tripod, Chairs.

After we had shown the first draft of our Thriller opening to a few audiences AND to a professional (See Audience research part 1 & 2), it came about that in order to achieve everything that we had been advised upon.
What we needed to achieve in this extra filming was to get more facial appearance for Anna, to hint more at what the surprise reveal ending was going to be, to show some form of hesitation/thinking/processing on Anna's part before she was to go out, and to fill in the continuity error which had been created when we had to remove the Bathroom sequence.
I came up with an idea, using the Closet shown above, in which Anna could go into a room in order to retrieve her coat and shoes because most people (even Sociopaths and Serial Killers) don't tend to leave their outdoor clothing in their bedrooms. Whilst she is doing so, she could be seen to pick up a newspaper (hinting at a new story, such as murder), look at it for a few moments whilst thinking over what it says (thinking/processing time) and then discard the front cover (the headline) to show that she has thought about it and has made a decision. Of course, I also tried to feature her face in it from time to time so that we could get more facial appearance for her.

Audience research and feedback from first draft part 2

As I said at the end of the last of the last post, the second half of getting feedback on the first draft to our Thriller opening would be to show it to someone in the local area who had more experience in this kind of field.

He came back to us having viewed it and said that we needed to do some work on the editing and add some more to it, more specifically:

Editing:

The Title needed to be moved back in the sequence - we originally had it put at the very end - because he said that made the opening look more like a trailer and in order to make the end more powerful it needed to cut more abruptly.

Some of the shots dragged on longer than was necessary which killed the suspense.

Even though it would seem a little more tedious to add in even more, we needed to include more titles in order to give sufficient credit to the everybody involved in making it for ALL of their roles.

There were some specific scenes which needed to be cut out (almost) completely because they were either filmed poorly or were utterly unnecessary.

Extra filming:

We needed to make sure that we showed Anna’s face to the camera a little more so that we could see more emotion added into the piece.

We needed to have more shots (e.g. newspaper cuttings/thought process in Anna’s mind) that eluded to what the end would be (without making it blatantly obvious) so as to add more tension to the piece.

Fixing the errors:

The editing was a relatively simple fix, I just needed to cut down on some of the clips, remove the rubbish ones, and move the titles around a little.

The filming was far more complicated seeing as it involved going out again and taking more shots which could then be added to the film.
(See filming day part 4 for details)

Audience research and feedback from first draft part 1

Next post: 

As part of producing the opening to out Thriller, we decided that we wanted to get some feedback on what others thought of it. We wanted, first of all, to make sure that the feedback we were given was not biased - so we couldn’t ask people, like our families, who would say that they thought it was brilliant as we made it.

We did this in two stages:

The first was that Evie went out and showed it to a couple of groups of people so that we could get some general feedback in terms of what the public thought. Within this, we asked them a series of four questions:

Q1) What would you rate the opening to this film (1-5 stars)?

The results that came back were:

And when the results from this rating trawl are filtered by gender:

This tells us that overall, viewers whose gender was male preferred the opening to those whose gender was female. If we took data from a higher number of people, assuming that this follows the same patterns as the data already shown here, then we would be able to see that it should be a male audience more than a female audience that we should be targeting this film at.

Q2) After watching the opening to our Thriller film, would you be interested in watching the rest of the film?

Once again, we then divided the data into yes and no so that we could see which gender had preference on watching the rest. The results that came back were:

This indicates, again, that boys preferred the film to girls, although only by a small margin. This also showed us that we would need to make some improvements in order to better persuade our audience to carry on watching, so we asked the audience what they liked/disliked about the opening and here are the general responses that we got:

What did you enjoy most?

Good camerawork
Build-up of tension and then a shock to the audience
Cliff-hanger
Range of shots and transitions
Good music
Slight lack of storyline makes it intriguing.
Spoken line unexpected and effective

Is there anything that you didn't like?

Too slow paced
Some of the shots were too long
Not enough storyline
Needs more suspense
Scenes were overpowered by the credits
Too much time on the credits
Not enough shots from above the waist
Too repetitive

This gave us some ideas as to what we should do but - not to discredit the value of the feedback that we had already received - we also wanted to get a professional in to look at our work and see what he thought on the matter. 

Evaluation Question 6: What have you learnt about Technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Evaluation Question 6 by Matthew Alan Herriott on Scribd

Designing the Thriller film poster

As part of getting a film out there to the public, it is necessary to have a promotion campaign to advertise your film. Therefore, as part of putting the opening to my Thriller film together we decided that we should create a poster for the film. In order to do this I used the website: "Cool text"

so that I could develop the text for the poster and Microsoft Powerpoint in order to edit the images that I wanted to use (the editing that was required was relatively simple so I did not require the use of anything too complicated).

The idea for it was relatively simple, like with the Box, I wanted to get across the idea of Anna appearing to be innocent on the outside whilst secretly being somebody completely unexpected. Therefore, the key design feature that I used was to have half the screen in full colour and the other half of the screen in black and white. I also decided whilst using Cool Text that I wanted the text pieces to appear to be carved onto wood and then put into the background to create the effect that somebody had written those onto the wall behind Anna - obviously, seeing as the technology that I had access to was not the best editing software in the world, it would not appear as realistic as I would have liked but I was pleased with the effect that I had created.

I also needed to come up with a suitable tagline to fit with the film. Initially, all that I could come up with was: "All is not as it seems." But I soon realised that this would not be enough, so I reworked it and and eventually came up with the idea of "Nothing is as innocent as it first appears."
As a Thriller film, I felt that it would be challenging to try and come up with a tagline that did not give away too much about the film, so I thought that this would fit in with the theme of mystery surrounding Anna's character alongside fitting the requirement of not giving away too much.

The first draft for the Thriller poster looked like this:

However, it was pointed out to me that it would be better if I had the director's and producer's names down on there as well. It was at this point that I changed what the tagline was going to be.

Once all of that designing was done, my Thriller poster was ready to be displayed to the public.