Preproduction: Lighting Practice

We was given the Nikon DSLR to shoot pictures and videos of different lighting in preparation for our thriller opening. We was also allowed to play around with a few different lenses, we managed to experiment and create some original, interesting shots. We was able to adjust lighting and focus to make professional looking photos with different atmospheres.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We then improvised using different coloured folders; pink, blue and yellow to create different ambiences and was able to change the potential genres, for example; fantasy, horror and parody. This was extremely interesting as we acquired the ability to physically affect the mise-en-scene with props.

 

This is the equipment we used, a bright flash light and coloured folders. By getting practice with this equipment we are allowing ourselves to, in effect, throw ourselves into shooting with enough practice to create our desired effects.

 

David Lynch: Thriller Director

David Lynch

 David Lynch is the notorious American film director of films such as; Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet. Films with more sick and violent themes, definitely not family films, his films are extremely disturbing, for example his biographical film named The Elephant Man.

The best way to describe him or his works are as an absurdist, his work is very surreal.

Motifs in Lynch's films: Leading film critics Le Blanc and Odell to state that "his films are so packed with motifs, recurrent characters, images, compositions and techniques that you could view his entire output as one large jigsaw puzzle of ideas", if you've ever watched one of his films you will understand what we mean, Blue Velvet is a surreal film that you won't understand unless you think like David Lynch.

Even though he is an American film director, his films are influenced by a lot of European film directors, such as, Fellini and Tati, however he was influenced by Stanley Kubrick a lot and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.

As we are shooting a thriller opening, I will study a lot of Lynch's movies, especially the openings, and how they convey messages.

Planning: Storyboards

A key part of Preproduction is storyboarding our Thriller Opening.

This helped us greatly as it allows us to visualise the scenes and shots we are going to do, I am happy with the visualisation we have with these storyboards.

Filmmaking: Initial Ideas

As we are creating the opening to a Thriller, we thought it would be best to create a brainstorm of ideas, it was interesting to find out what 'Thriller' meant to each of us, when talking about Thrillers to one of us it meant Silence of the Lambs and Se7en and to another member of our group a Thriller was more like Primal Fear and Memento. We discovered sub-genres and let them influence our decisions and ideas; Psychological and Crime Thrillers primarily. When thinking about our plot a plethora of narrative devices were flying through my head, Plot Twists and Deus Ex-Machinimas but we eventually settled on making it very implicit attacking our viewers phobias and fears of darkness, heights and insects.

 

The Kuleshov Effect

"The Kuleshov Effect is a film editing (montage) effect demonstrated by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s.It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation." - Wikipedia

Me, Emma and Jake attempted to recreate this effect within the school premises as it would be important to understand the effect of cutaways to maximum capacity to prepare us ultimately for our AS Thriller Piece.




Lev Kuleshov was a Soviet Filmmaker who was originally involved with the dissection of the basics of filmmaking, he researched the dissection of film for juxtaposition and in consequence revolutionised the assembly of film.

"In a 1964 interview for the show Telescope, Alfred Hitchcock called this technique “pure cinematics – the assembly of film.” Sir Hitchcock says that if a close-up of a man smiling is cut with a shot of a woman playing with a baby, the man is portrayed as “kindly” and “sympathetic.” By the same token, if the same shot of the smiling man is cut with a girl in a bikini, the man is portrayed as “dirty.”" - Elements of Cinema

Research and Planning: Age Rating

I have decided to research the BBFC Age Rating System, what makes a film a 15? what makes a film an 18?

Due to my film being a thriller, to be appropriate and befitting I believe it would have to be rated either 15 or 18.

If I watched a 15 rated film, what would I expect to see? (extract from BBFC.co.uk)

• strong violence
• frequent strong language (e.g. 'f***').
• portrayals of sexual activity
• strong verbal references to sex
• sexual nudity
• brief scenes of sexual violence or verbal references to sexual violence
• discriminatory language or behaviour
• drug taking

If I watched an 18 rated film, what would I expect to see? (Extract from BBFC.co.uk)

• very strong violence
• frequent strong language (e.g. 'f***') and / or very strong language (e.g. ‘c***’)
• strong portrayals of sexual activity
• scenes of sexual violence
• strong horror
• strong blood and gore
• real sex (in some circumstances)
• discriminatory language and behaviour

I was unaware, but there is also an age classification called R18 which in common tongue is porn, even pornographic content has a content restriction, for example, in an R18 film, consensual sex is allowed but some certain extreme features are not allowed such as Urolagnia and uses of illegal drugs.


I predict that our thriller piece will only have an age rating of 15, if we include any violence into it then it will be implied, there will be limited dialogue, definitely not enough to include swearing. The film would be 15 but the opening could even be a 12, it will be dark and have a tone of crime but it won't include gore nor blood, only a scene where the murder of a woman is implied.

Audience Theory: Gerbner, Cultivation Theory and Lazarsfeld, Hypodermic Needle Theory

The Cultivation/Culmination theory

The cultivation theory divides audience into Light Viewers and Heavy Viewers
- Heavy Viewers are affected by the Mean World Syndrome, where they believe the world is nastier than they think.
These watch TV for 4 or more hours a day.

- Light Viewers watch the TV for less than 4 hours a day.

Chandler put forward the argument that "The more we live with TV, the more invisible it becomes"
believing that what we become tolerant of what we watch on TV, if we watch a lot of violence on TV then we will believe its socially acceptable to be more violent.

It was put forward that the more TV you watch; the more materialistic you get, indifferent about environmental issues, more racist and more violent

George Gerbner observed that in primetime, TV was 80% violence. So, heavy viewers was watching 80% violent TV, if his theory was correct, proving that the Heavy Viewers would get about 80% more violent due to their tolerance with violence in real life.

The Hypodermic Needle theory

When the entire concept of advertising and conveying a message was still fairly new, when TV was only a couple of decades old, Governments was interested with advertising and in effect, Propaganda was created to try and persuade people to do as they said, exactly.

The Hypodermic Needle theory suggests that the message relayed in advertisements will transmit itself into the mass consciousness of the mass audience, it implies that all audiences are passive or heterogenous. That what we watch on TV will affect us directly and brainwash us into doing what the media makers want, if they advertise a lot of violent TV then we will be violent.


The Uses and Gratification theory

This theory is different to the preceding two theories as both of them (Gerbner and Lazasrfeld)