What Sound Will Be Encorpourated In My Thriller?

Music in thrillers is essential! It is there to create tension and suspense in the audience, which only heightens the drama and paranoia even further. Music within a thriller is a key part to the telling of the plot, as at the build to the climax, the music will change slightly to heavier and eerier instruments and sounds, in order to solidify the anxiety the audience would be feeling at this point. 

Typically, a thriller film's sound will start off at a slow and at a gradual pace, but towards the middle and sudden scares, this pace will increase. Strings are a very popular sound to hear in thriller, as this creates a certain 'screech' which accompanies the mystery and uneasy mood of a thriller.

Alongside strings, the piano is also seen and heard in most thriller films, as its complexities to reacher various octaves is widely used. From high pitched keys, to the deepest ones, the keys of a piano are seriously exaggerated in order to force it's audiences into fits of shivers and goose-bumps, which of course is ideal also for the crowds ho watch thrillers. 

Diegetic and non-diegetic sounds are seen in most common thrillers, as soundtracks are key, and so are backing noises such as dog barks/howls.

Synchronous Sound is also a well favoured method of sound, as (for example) out of tune instruments like pianos create anticipation. 

Asynchronous Sound is another type of sound used, where the music heard has nothing to do with a thriller. This is seen mostly in Tarantino movies, such is using western soundtracks for a murder scene. 

In particular, 'the exorcist' soundtrack is of particular interest to my group and I as we have always said that we plan to incorporate piano into our accompanying music. We deeply studied this piece of music, and really idolised how it was such simple keys used, just repeated over and over. Despite this however, we are worried about this repetitive concept, as we concerned that this will not work with our opening shots and movements.

Filming Permission Slip

This is our permission slip that was handed out to John, Jake and Jon (our main actors), in order to gain parental permission.

Takes

For all sections and potential clips and scenes, we decided very early on that we would take various shots, angles and movements of each, in order to try and achieve the highest standard, and see what would work best. 

For instance- the establishing shot. We actually filmed on three separate days, in order to see how different lighting settings (caused by the weather) would effect the setting, and made sure we moved the drones camera around, in order to gain every angle of our schools site. 

Below are two movements by our actor (but from different angles). This allowed my group to look into finer details, and depict the minor problems that we wanted to erase before finalising each shot.

                            

Our Questionnaire

My group and I have devised a questionnaire in order to establish what our target audience is and what exactly they normally like to see in a thriller opening. We produced a questionnaire with various questions relating to Thrillers, and handed around 15 sheets out to various aged and gendered people. This is an example copy of what would have been received by our sample audience-

Using our results, we have then tried to incorporate our viewers preferences into our opening, in order to get maximum pleasure from our target audience. Our questionnaire found that our best suited age group would be 16-20 year olds, and that they prefer action Thrillers compared to Horror Thrillers. We also found that the most popular Thriller films were James Bond and Cape Fear; also that our audiences favourite TV Thriller was Dexter, which luckily we have taken into deep consideration when planning our opening. 

Preliminary Task

This is our preliminary task, which we created before we even started to film our main media shots, as we wanted to get a feel for how the camera works, and what can be achieved with our editing system 'Final Cut Pro' works. 

Final Plan!

Overview Plan For My Thriller

My group and I had spent much time brainstorming what we wanted our opening to feature. As expected, we all had different viewpoints, but we all knew we wanted to use psychological aspects of our Thriller research. We quickly came to the conclusion to base our Thriller on The Deep Web, which is a segment of the internet which is difficult to access. It is where Hitmen and Drugs can be retrieved, via the internet. As a slight change, we have decided to call our opening 'The Dark Web' as we feel this sounds more mysterious. 
Our opening will feature a schoolboy who is planning to hire a hitman in which to kill a member of his school, who happens to be bullying him. He gains access to 'The Dark Web' via a school computer, and it is all about him going through the various mindsets of him actually going through and hiring the hitman. 

This is our first plan for our opening. We decided to try and capture as many thoughts as possible, hence the messed lay out, but this sheet is the foundation to our final outcome. 

Days later, we then began thinking about all the different camera angles that we want to incorporate into our opening. This is where we depicted our brief plan even more and started to discuss the core details to our idea.