18 December 2008 - Lesson before the Christmas holiday

This lesson we were analysing four movie clips from the films 28 Days Later, The Shining, Collateral and What Lies Beneath. First, we brainstormed all the different types of thrillers and examples of these thrillers. We came up with Murderous Passion, Psychological thriller, Political thriller, Super Natural thriller, Innocent on the run and action thrillers. All these different types thrill the audience in their own separate we but do the same job in thrilling the audience. This gave our group an idea of what kind of thriller we would like to make and how we need to prepare to do it like them but also made us decide we also want something unique about our particular thriller like how the other thrillers all had something special about them.

We were given a large worksheet given us space to comment on the sound, Use of Camera, Music, Editing and Setting and location. This gave us the idea of how a thriller is usually constructed and how the use various element to make the scene more effective in thrilling the audience such as in 28 Days Later they use tilted camera shots which is unusual and in Collateral they use the camera focus effectively to show the audience a significant message. Once we filled up all of our sheets, we were able to have a much clearer understanding of how we could construct our thriller. We learnt how effective the various camera shots and the carefully thought about selected sound all contribute to make the thriller more and more thrilling.