Thriller Evaluation

This is the final draft of my thriller evaluation.

Thriller Evaluation

1. Our thriller film, “Faye”, uses a variety of different references to other thriller films. The first shot you see is of our main character, a femme fatale, Faye, putting on some heavy makeup. This identifies her as a femme fatale, and is inspired by Marion Crane in Psycho by Hitchcock. She is an easily recognisable femme fatale, as she has lots short skirts, quite heavy makeup, and a beret. These mask her identity and make her harder to recognise.. We have used a lot of close ups or Faye’s makeup being put on in our thriller to emphasise her deviance as a femme fatale. This is similar to Marion Crane putting her make up on before running away at the start of Psycho. Faye seems to be a character that doesn’t care what happens, or who she hurts as long as she looks nice. She is quite laid back and casual about everything. Some similar femmes fatales in film noir such as Greta Garbo in ‘Mata Hari’ and Lauren Bacall in ‘The Big Sleep’ act and dress like this. This may be because they want to hide their identity, whilst their glamorous appearance and independence makes them into iconic characters who scorn convention.

2. We set our thriller mainly in the narrow streets behind Bryony’s house. This was empty and provided us with a lot of interesting and threatening shadows, which were emphasised by some chiaroscuro lighting, provided by hand lamps and mobile phone lights. This was meant to create large distorted shadows, similar to the Third Man, though this didn’t really work as our lighting wasn’t near powerful enough and we didn’t have the space to create shadows that climb up large buildings.

3. In the end we only really used non diagetic sound from our soundtrack, Basin Street Blues by Ella Fitzgerald. We used this soundtrack as it is jazzy and sounds like the kind of lifestyle Faye would live. It’s also called Basin Street Blues, which sounds glamorous and slightly sleazy injecting the mise-en-scene with a seductive quality. We can also imagine Faye listening to this as she is applying her makeup, almost as if she hasn’t a care in the world. Our diagetic sound didn’t seem necessary as you can only hear a few taps and footsteps. These sounded far too contrived and unimportant. We did have some powerful heavy breathing noises and screaming sounds, although they didn’t fit in with our final cut.

4. In our film we have 3 characters, in which 2 are femme fatales. The “victim” character is a man, thus subverting the strong man stereotype and almost reversing the roles of men and women. All our characters are meant to be the same sort of age, young adults. We wanted this age as young adults are young and energetic, but still have enough sense to plan a crime well. Our male character is represented as vulnerable as he seems dead at the start of the film, an idea inspired by “The Third Man” as Harry Lime is said to be dead but has just lied to escape the law, though we never see this.

5. I think our thriller would only be a YouTube film. It hasn’t got any special CGI’s or effects, so it wouldn’t attract many technology craving film fans. It would probably be given the classification of 15. It has some quite horrific images like Faye being suffocated by a bag, and there is some blood. It has no famous actors and little CGI’s. This is because we haven’t got any funding for this film. If we had a grant for this film, we could use many special effects and buy more actors. This would create a much larger audience. Though, as the film “Slumdog Millionaire” had no famous actors in and didn’t rely on special effects but still won 8 Oscars, this proves that actors and CGI’s don’t make a film popular all the time.

6. This sort of film, according to our questionnaires and film research generally should appeal to younger men, but not particularly teenagers. These people are old enough to understand the seriousness and dramatics of the film, such as thinking about the enigma at the end of our film, though they aren’t young enough to demand incredible high technologies. Generally men watch thriller films more than women. This may be because there is often a lot of violence and crime, which women don’t seem to enjoy as much, though we have to female characters as lead roles in our film, so female audience members may be attracted to that. Older men and women will probably enjoy this film too; many thriller films were set or made in the mid 20th century. They are often black and white, and have similar characters and plots. The older generations may be more used to seeing thriller films like this, and wouldn’t demand special effects as much.

7. We have attracted our audience by studying the results of our questionnaire. We found out that most of the people we surveyed preferred crime thrillers to anything else. We had already decided this was what we wanted to do, so these results almost confirmed that. Our audience had overall preferred a male lead role in thrillers. Our idea wouldn’t have worked without the classic Femmes Fatales as lead roles, so we had to overlook this result. When asked which thriller films our audience liked in the past, the same 2 kept coming up, “Psycho” and “the Third Man”. So we regularly tried to refer back to them in Faye.

8. From using the technologies we have, we’ve learned to use more powerful lighting to shoot our film; we had some great shots that had to be discarded due to the lack of lighting. We learned about camera techniques and options, such as black and white picture, just by playing around with different camera modes and functions. Black and white I believe is quite a prominent feature in a thriller film, it makes the film look more surreal and distorted. In many we’ve studied, such as the Third Man and Psycho, there has been black and white picture. In our thriller, we really wanted to emphasise the bold colours of Faye’s makeup, so we kept the colour in. When using our editing software we have not only learned how to primarily edit a film, but new effects such as a cross fade, which we repeatedly used in our final cut, as it makes our shots look more sequential. Our experimentation with the camera and editing software was purely using trial and error, at first we were beginners to this sort of technology, and so didn’t know anything about them, but after seeing what our options were, we soon worked out what effects worked best. My favourite aspect of the editing effects we’ve used is a technique called ghosting. It basically leaves an opaque version of the last few frames in the shot as something moves, making everything look distorted. We used this in a close up of Faye’s eyes, and the effect really emphasises how nervously she is looking round. I’ve also learnt how to use a blog. As all of our coursework had to be put on a blog, which none of us had done before. Weve learnt to create the blog, edit posts and add labels, which has been very useful for the organisation of our thriller.
9. When looking back at our preliminary task, we have learnt that it’s not always best to have dialogue, as it can often go wrong and waste time, so we’ve decided to have no speech in our thriller. We believe that having no speech would make the audience concentrate more on the visual elements, such as the close ups of expressions on our actors’ faces. We learnt how important it is to have clean cut shots, and have the right transitions between them. I think all of our shots have worked very well, though as our idea changed a day before filming had to be finished. This forced us to experiment more and use less obvious lighting. In the future, we’ve learnt that we would spend more time getting everything planned and set.