5th January - Past AS Thrillers and the Box Office

The first lesson back from the Christmas holiday, we started to learn about film openings and so we watched a documentary and were given a question sheet to fill in which watching the documentary. We were particularly looking at the techniques used by different directors, such as Orson Welles, Thomas Sutcliffe, Jean Jacques Beineix, Kyle Cooper and Stanley Kauffmann. The whole concept of the documentary was too see what was more thrilling in an opening sequence, an explosive start or the build up or vice-versa. The ones in favour of having an explosive start believe they immediately have the audience’s attention and the ‘please is received straight away whereas the ones in favour of the slow build up argue that they allow the audience to know a little about the story but are eager to know more, resulting in them being ‘pleasured’ at the end. Directors state that they are under pressure because when making the trailer, they need to add most of the best bits so they can tease the audience, but this leads to ‘no surprises’ during the film because they would have seen all the best bits in the trailer. The documentary also reveals some of the problems that directors have with publishers, because some publishers disagree with the directors decision like Orson Welles wanted no credits at the beginning of his film ‘A Touch Of Evil’, but publishers at Universal Studios argued against his decision and changed this.

After the documentary, we then watched previous AS thrillers from last year. The first one our teacher showed us was astonishing and I actually believed that it was a real thriller because of how real it looked and could not believe it had been done by some media students in the last couple of previous years. The thriller was called ‘Blasphemy’ and it was so technically and cleverly done. They also used an intertexuality from a famous Brad Pitt but what made it look really good was the editing of all of it. We could tell it was really thought about and our teacher revealed to us that some of the members of that group spent whole days in the editing room to make everything look perfect, and it did.

The second thriller clip we saw was called ‘Essex road’ which I thought was more realistically done by an AS student. I really enjoyed this clip as everything made sense at the end and the type of camera shots they used with the very effective mise en scene. I also liked they way they used their flashbacks as they clearly indicated to their audience that the activity happened in the past. However, they could have made a few adjustments to improve their thriller but I enjoyed it very much.

The next couple of thrillers we watched were:
‘The Untold’ which was about a teacher on her way to school where one of her pupils had been abducted. This one was good for the variety of camera shots and angles they used.
‘Timecode’ was a little confusing at first but created great suspense. It was about a boy waking up with a brief case. He is handcuffed to the brief case for some reason. They had incredible shots of the skyline. I think they had a very good location and the sound was unbelievable as they used someone speaking but the audience does not really know what it is about.
‘Days Are Numbered’ looked very professional. This was about a man rowing in a bout sees a suspicious looking girl. The shots were outstanding, as the film had come out beautiful on film as the sun reflects nicely on the water in the canal. They also used some good fades.
‘The Fragile’ was very suspenseful as we see all types of shots, especially unexpected ones like in an isolated barn and a hole through a wall. They also used some incredible sound which made me feel like I was living that actual moment in the film.
‘Not Alone’ was the perfect example of the slogan ‘simple but effective’. It was all in one location and was about a boy washing some cups in his house. What was good was the great match cuts they used and the sound. The lights turned off a cup of tea was made on the table when they came back on. This made it suspenseful because we had many point of view shots so we felt like we were in his shoes, which I believe was good because we saw everything in his perspective.

Finnally, after the clips were all over we started to look at cinema audiences of 2007 and found out that females are more likely to watch less tense and action packed films than men as the statistics state that they usually like films like Hairspray, Enchanted and Attonement. Men were more likely to watch action packed films like 300, Die hard and Spiderman 3. we also found out that men usually watch thrillers more than women.
The Box Office Statistics show that James Bond Quantum of Solace made £5,164,182 but the movie with the highest total gross to date is Mamma Mia with £67,879,439 which was due to the record breaking DVD sales, beating the pirates of the Caribbean.