Planning idea's for our Thriller

Dear Catherine

Thank you for your email, as filming would take place outside Museum Opening Hours (before 10am or after 6pm) we do need to cover costs to keep the Museum open, including staffing costs. Our standard filming rate is £450 per hour which we reduce to £150 per hour for students and we would not be able to reduce this costs any further.

Please do advise if you would like to go ahead with the filming and I will be happy to investigate available dates.

Best wishes,
Debbie

Debbie Dowden
Events Officer

Imperial War Museum
Lambeth Road
London
SE1 6HZ

Tel: 020 7416 5393

Once again,  the price was too high to be able to film at this location. So we settled for using our studio at school and placing our thriller sequence in an old bomb shelter, in both the past and the present day.

After these many attempts of finding a location to film in, we came up with our final idea of BLITZ.

Thursday, 16 December 2010

Planning idea's for our Thriller

 Dear Sir/Madam

We are currently in the process of planning our AS Media studies coursework Thriller Sequence at Hurtwood House and while searching for locations we stumbled across Cane Hill Asylum. We researched it and found this website and were wondering if you could give us the details of the current owner as we were wondering if there was any chance we could possibly be able to use it as a film location for a day in January. There will be profesional teacher supervision aswell.

Many thanks in advance for any information you can give us.

Regards,

Charlie Manton, Sophie Greig, Catherine Ward Thomas

Hurtwood House

Radnor Lane

Holmbury St Mary

Dorking

RH5 6NU

However we heard no reply from Cane Hill, so moved onto other mental asylums. After phoning many of them up, we rang the Surrey County Council who told us that there would be too many insure procedures to complete if we wished to film in a derelict building.

At this point our idea once again took a turn as we decided on a plot change. Instead of setting it in Victorian times we moved forward 50 years to the era of World War 2 and took our young girl to a tube station. After contacting Aldwych Station we discovered that it would cost £250 p.h which we could not afford.

Our idea took another turn when we thought about other locations to film in and came up with the idea of using an exibhition at the Imperial War Museum:

 

 

Dear Sir or Madam,
We are currently studying for our Media AS level and need to produce a 2 minute opening sequence of a horror/thriller movie. We came across your 'Blitz Experience' exhibition and fits our theme perfectly. We were wondering if it would be possible to film there for a day in early January. We understand that it costs £150 p.h, however as we are students we cannot afford a morning's worth of filming there. Would it be possible to reduce the price to allow us filming there for around 4 hours.

We have been planning an opening sequence revolving around one 8 year old girl who has lost her mother in a bombing, we would like shots of her wandering around the bombed streets of London after the bombs have dropped. Is there any way of getting these shots without paying the full price? After our exam we would be happy to offer you the footage we shot and the finished sequence if it is any use to you.

Many thanks,

Catherine Ward Thomas

Media Studies Dept.
Hurtwood House School
Radnor Lane
Holmbury St Mary
Dorking
Surrey
RH5 6NU

The museum replied with this email:

 

Dear Sophie,

Thank you for your email, as filming would take place outside Museum Opening Hours (before 10am or after 6pm) we do need to cover costs to keep the Museum open, including staffing costs. Our standard filming rate is £450 per hour which we reduce to £150 per hour for students and we would not be able to reduce this costs any further.

Please do advise if you would like to go ahead with the filming and I will be happy to investigate available dates.

Best wishes,
Debbie

Debbie Dowden
Events Officer

Imperial War Museum
Lambeth Road
London
SE1 6HZ

Tel: 020 7416 5393

Once again,  the price was too high to be able to film at this location. So we settled for using our studio at school and placing our thriller sequence in an old bomb shelter, in both the past and the present day.

After these many attempts of finding a location to film in, we came up with our final idea of BLITZ.

Shot List for BLITZ

Tracking shot of bunker

Close up on posters

Close up on foods

Tracking to desk

Close up on newspaper and leaflets

Close up on chair and gas mask box

Cut to bed/feet Panning shot up girl’s feet

Pan up her body

Pan up to her head and over her shoulders

P.O.V shot of her writing

Extreme close up of diary

Wide shot of girl looking around

Close up of her shuffling back to bed

Cut to black

Medium shot of breaking through of bunker

P.O.V shot of torch sinning round

Close up of propaganda poster

Close up of books

Wide shot to see ghost

Media close up of bed

Close up on diary

Over shoulder shot of man reading diary

Wide shot to reveal ghost

Cut to black

Black frame

BLITZ.

BLITZ

Blitz[1]xsxx[1]

View more presentations from hurtwoodhousemedia5.

We have begun to mind map and think of ideas for our thriller 2 minute film sequence.
One of our ideas and our favourite one so far was the idea of the blitz in the underground, having a small girl looking for her mother in the tube station in London, using ideas of the layering and scratchy frames in seven we wanted to have this theme showing short sharp flash frames of this ghostly girl, me and my group made a PowerPoint to show off some of our beginning idea's...

However throughout our idea planning we came to a few obstacles that were some impassable, the price of the location and time on our hands, we came to the conclusion that with a much more simpler set we could concentrate on the mise on scene using props and then have our sound and set looking simpler. To do this we had to however change the location idea that we had originally planned, instead or a tube station we thought an old shelter in the time of the blitz, therefore still keeping our blitz idea but creating a simpler way of doing this.
The flaw in our plan was the plot, we had concentrated too hard on location and not enough on what the 2 minutes is going to consist of.
the idea we came up with was still involving a little girl and still involving the spooky ghostly feel to her, however we decided to begin our sequence with the blitz period happening and her alive writing in her diary, showing a lot of shot extreme close up shots of the things she is doing in this shelter. Then the bombing and sound effects of World War 2 end the first section of the sequence opening in modern day as a man with a torch breaks into the shelter. Using a tracking shot, everything that was once there is still there but in a wreck with blood splattered on the war time posters. we see flickers of this girl as he moves the torch around but he doesn’t see this, leaving the audience confused whether they saw what they thought they did, to finish the sequence we see the girl clearly and the torch is dropped and smashed as we fade to a black out. Then in type writer the title of the film to come 'BLITZ' is then shown. We also want to incorporate titles within the story, for example, in newspaper articles etc as well.
this is our now final beginning idea of our two minute film sequence thriller.

THRILLER DENOTATION AND CONNOTATION

There are many small and big key points to a thriller film which makes it a thriller. Things like a pace or movement in camera, sound and plot that invites the audience into a thriller film.

A genuine, standalone thriller is a film that provide thrills and keeps the audience gripped or hanging on the edge of their seats, as the plot builds towards a climax thrillers have been slightly influenced by the horror genre; they have more gore, violence, brutality, terror, and a lot of deaths, but the main thing about the thriller is the plot being gripping and serious, its when the story line is clever and complex and realistic.
Similar things separate the thriller from other overlapping genres like adventure, spy, and war and in some case science fiction. Thrillers are defined not only by their subject of plot but the way they approach the film. For example a gripping story could be portrayed in a more comic or slow way which makes it not a thriller.

 The opening credits of the film Seven show a sinister music and scratchy picture, using layering etc, inviting the audience into a thriller. The images we are seeing are of books and writing and old warn fingers, skin peeling, scissors and cutting paper etc, we know that this is to do with the film about to start however we don’t know what relevance it is to the film yet. We know after seeing the film that every single shot in this film sequence is relevant to the plan that is revealed in the end but it invites us into the movie with a sort of open narrative however not completely as in the film the man in question is revealed from us until the end, you never see the faces you see hands only. This sequence I believe however isn’t trying to give us a clue on the plot but to open the film with a mood that mirrors the films mood.

Seven could be sold as a mystery story where a detective finds out who the killer is of these people, however that is not how the story is shown. The murders are another type of clue towards the resolution of the story and the murderer is although kept out of shot with a closed narrative until near the end, this whole film is approached in a thriller genre. This backs up the idea of the thrillers main conventions being how they approach the story not what the story itself is about.

For example in seven the scene when they are chasing the murderer through the corridors the whole scene is set in a thriller mood, with fast moving frames, canted angles and the chase like all thriller films would show a similar sequence of fast movement and suspension with gripping music somewhere in the film.