Research

Our group has been researching different movies which are similar to our thriller and the movies listed below, are movies which have the same conventions of a typical Thriller.

These are movies which are similar to our movie:

                                                         

 Spellbound(1945)

The movie Spellbound was a movie done by Alfred Hitchcock who was the most famous thriller movie director/producer of all time and his famous works included a movie called 'Psycho'. 

Spellbound was an international picture movie and it was first shown in 1945. 

Spellbound got a rating on the imdb.com site a 7.7/10 which is a high rating which means that it was a success. 

The target age group for the movie Spellbound was PG, which means that parental guidance is expected, de to the bloody effects.

A famous line in this movie is 'Will he Kiss me or Kill me?'.

The budget for this movie was $1,696,377 and a made a massive profit of $7,000,000 just in the USA alone which is a big difference for just a small budget. 

The trailer for this movie created suspense and this was quite good because as an audience our group felt that it made us want to watch the movie more.

http://www.trailerfan.com/movie/spellbound-1945/trailer

Charade 1963 

Charade is a movie set in the 1963 about a detective who is trying to get down to sorting a crime and the movie ends roughly the same as our movie because the killer ends up being the detective and this creates suspense right from the start to the end of the movie. Charade is truly a thriller which is not to be forgotten it has many means and shows the true meaning of a thriller.

Charade was directed and produced by Stanley Donen and written by Marc Behm and Peter Stone. Charade is truly marvelous due to the fact it had well know starts of the 1990's such as Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn who starred in well known movies such as My Fair Lady(1964) and Breakfast at Tiffany's(1961).

Trailer of Charade

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3418161433/

The Sixth Sense (1999)

The Sixth Sense stars a well known actor, Bruce willis who has acted in many blockbuster movie which made many audiences more attracted to the movie. Bruce Willis has acted in movies such as Die Hard and Die Hard 2, Oceans Twelve. The movie is about a child psychologists who is attending to a troubled little boy who believes that he could see dead people but the movie takes a new twist when we discover that Dr. Malcolm Crowe(Bruce Willis) himself is dead and is just like all the other wandering spirits. This movie is similar to out thriller because it is mostly about identity and how situations could sometimes lead us to do things which we wold not usually do. 

The Sixth Sense inspired us hugely because we wanted to show the consequences of peoples actions and it helped us to have a mixture of 'The Sixth Sense' and the movie 'Charade', this is how we created our thriller movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2sDw-XBuKc

Planning

  Murder in Mind

SCREEN PLAY

By

Daniel, Rosamond & Jordan 

Shot one

Intro text with a message being typed explaining the situation of this opening sequence. It is used with a special typing sound effect.

Shot two

Shot of an image of dead body lyin

g on the floor. The camera pans along the body and cuts. Camera is at a high angle. Camera cuts to the next scene of a high angle shot of a pair of feet.

Shot Three

Shot of a black Screen. With heart beat sound effect.

Shot four

Shot of dead body, camera is panning along to the top of the body and then cuts. Camera cuts to a high angle shot of the legs of a body.

Shot five

Black screen. With heart beat sound effect.

Shot six

Body image. Camera moves along body to show face. Camera is at a high angle

Shot Seven

Black screen. Sound effect

Shot eight

The productions company’s name is shown (Eagle Eye Production). Sad piano starts playing.

Shot nine

Title of production “A Daniel Makwara Film”

Shot Ten

Detective is walking down stairs searching for prime suspect.

Shot eleven

Star of movie’s name “Starring Jordan Alexander' playing the role of Detective James.

Shot twelve

The detective appears towards a yellow door. A handheld camera follows him from behind. Camera is at a mid-shot angle.

Shot thirteen

“Starring Rosemond Browne” playing Nikita.

Shot Fourteen

This shot is showing the body again still panning up to the face but then cuts as half of the face is shown. Continues piano music is still playing and camera is at a high angle.

Shot fifteen

This shot shoots detective James opening the yellow door and walking through it. The camera doesn’t move at this point

 but keeps a close-shot as he walks away. The shot has an over the shoulder shot on the door. Camera slightly pans to the right.

Shot sixteen

Detective turns James walking towards and then through a second door. The camera is still and at a medium shot. Piano and violins music in the background.

Shot seventeen

This shot is a shot reverse shot like showing detective James walking through the door in the dark room where the villain is for questioning. Piano and violin music still playing.

Shot eighteen

This shot shows detective James approaching the villain from the back. Wide shot, medium angle shot. Piano and violins still playing.

Shot nineteen

This shot shows the detective aproaching the villain and looks at him with a shocked face.. Wide shot is used in this shot.

Shot twenty

In this shot is shows the villain's 

identity which turns out to be detective James. A medium shot was used first then a zoom in to the villain's face. The violins repeat.

Shot twenty one

The shot shows a close up of the villain’s face.

Shot twenty two

In this shot the identy/face of dead Nikita is revealed as she lays dead in the hallway close to her house in an abandoned building. A high angle shot in used in this shot. The camera is looking down on Nikita’s face.

Shot twenty three

This shot shows the name of the movie. A thundering sound and a gong is used as the sound effects.

Story Board

Equipment

Mac computer

This the kind of computer we used for creating our blog site and the editing of our opening thriller sequence. It made our work much easier because it is made for projects like our opening thriller.

Camcorder 

This is the kind of  camcorder we used for the shooting also known as for the recording of our opening thriller scenes. This equipment was used through out the whole project.

Tripod

This is a tripod which we used to support our camera during filming. This kept our camera steady less shacking making the picture come out in good quality.

Final Cut Pro Software

This is final Cut Pro the software we used for the editing of our opening thriller sequence. is was the best bit of our project because this were we did all the sound effects, graphics and adding the music.

Inside Final Cut Pro Software

This is a screen shot of what final pro cut looks like when we were using to edit our short film.

Eagle Eye Productions-Preliminary Task

Preliminary Task

Murder In Mind-Thriller Opening

Evaluation of our opening thriller

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our thriller is based around what a typical thriller should be like and we were able to do this by ensuring that we did research into typical 20th and 21st century thriller movies. We then used the different ideas from the movies and mixed and matched them, this was how our final piece came together. We used a variety of different soundtracks to highlight the mood in each shot and this was influenced by the way soundtracks change in each of the movies we looked into. The soundtracks we used are slow to highlight the shock, the nervousness of the characters in our thriller. Our thrillers scene paces are quite fast compared to the music which makes the audience more interested and at the end with the big gong, it shows the surprised face of the detective which is to our grow opens a new page into what else could come after the discovery.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our thriller we believe would be attractive to certificate 12, this is because the thriller would not be understood by those under 12 due to the huge twist in the story line and our thriller is aimed at an audience more lik

ely to go view our thriller. The story behind our thriller is about a murder detective with schizophrenia who later discovers that the latest victim had died because of him and this then leaves him on a trail to discover if that was the only victim he had attacked. 

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

The media institution who is more likely to distribute our groups work are those in the mainstream industry such as the VUE cinema,

this is because our idea is a mixture of previous movies which were big and these types of institutions had previously and currently show movies similar to the produ

ct we want to distribute. Our group decided on this method of awareness of our movie because it guarantees  a hug quantity of viewing of our movies plus profitability which will then enable us to do a sequence to our thriller. 

How did you attract/address your audience?

Our group aims to attract audiences to view our thriller by showing trailers before the launch , this will enable audiences to know roughly what our thriller is about and what they should be expecting. The trailer will show details of when our thriller

is going to be in the cinema's, the genre of our thriller and the actors/actresses featured in our thriller. Our thriller will be addressed to those from the ages of 12 and above because we believe that many teenagers see police as their enemies. This movie highlights just how normal the police force is and that even the police can suffer from illnesses. 

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?

Our group was given the opportunity to work with professional equipments which top studio managers use such as the Apple Mac, which gave us the skills required to edit and add special effects onto our thriller. Due to the fact that two members of our group had previous experiences with a camcorder it made the recording of our thriller easier to shoot but we had difficulties because the camcorder we were given was more high tech than the ones we had previously used. Our group found it very exciting to be able to record our thriller with each of us getting the opportunity to use the equipment, this gave us knowledge and skills to finish our thriller. We used softwares such Pages,Soundtrack Pro,Motion,Live Type and Final Cut Pro which helped us to edit our thriller by adding soundtracks, special effect words.

Using these softwares has helped me

 and my group members to gain skills and knowledge about filming and editing, this will help all of us in the future, such as being able to analyse movies. This will help us to know how each scene in a movie fits in with what directors want and how each scene helps to create a reaction from audiences.

Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

During the preliminary task each individual in our group learnt the different shots required to make our thriller a success and how each shots helped to get audiences interested in our thriller. We have learnt how different shots/scenes are important in ensuring that audiences are attracted to our thriller opening. We have learnt how different movie companies such as DreamWorks brings together different scenes to make blockbusting movies, we have learnt how important it is to put hard work into shooting and editing scenes. Movie companies such as Universal use the same technology we used to do our thriller such as the new Apple Mac with features such as Final Cut Pro and LiveType which we used when typing words into our thriller.

Audience Opening Thriller Review

We showed my opening sequence to over 20 other students amongst the people in our college and outside. we asked them to give us feedback on what they thought of our opening sequence. we was listening to things they liked about it and what they didn’t like about it.

We let a group of people watch it at once to make it easier for us to take notes. We noticed that through their facial expressions during the viewing that their certain things they found odd and some they liked. 

We mentioned two reviews from two students who gave their points of views on the opening 

Reviewer 1

“I thought the movie was okay. I didn’t really get it at first, I had to watch it a 2nd time to understand it because it moved so fast. The actions were well organized and it made sense to me. I also liked how the detective saw himself when he was searching for the murderer I was thinking to myself how did they do that.”

Reviewer 2

“The beginning told me the story of the film of how the detective was going to find the killer of a girl who was murdered. Then when I saw the dead body I got an uncomfortable feeling. It was the first picture you see and you’d look at it and gasp, just like i did. I also liked the way they made the detective see himself in the murderers body. I thought that was done really well. One last thing the title speaks for itself “Murder in Mind” the way the thunder and bong noise made it so thriller chilling.”