Thriller comparison - Miss Georgiou

I think my group and I have created a successful thriller sequence because it fulfills what the brief asked of us. It is 2 minutes long and is conventional in many ways. It also confuses the audience, making them vulnerable to feeling any emotion, which will make them feel nervous and means we can fully manipulate their emotional state. For example:

• The use of low key lighting (See below).

• The setting of a forest, (See above), which is conventional as it creates the idea of the victim not being able to escape from the killer which builds tension. 
• The music we used added to the effect of the footage and matched the images on screen, building suspense. 
• The mysterious, childlike credits matched the narrative and built tension, (See below). 

• The sound scape built up into a crescendo during the blackout, before the underwater scene. - It made the audience wonder what was going on which made them feel nervous, creating suspense. 

I feel that the micro element which best shows my creativity and understanding of thriller conventions would be the use of a fade. This editing technique is used in my narrative to clearly show the change in time from the girl walking alone in the forest to her being with her older sister. It is also the change from low key lighting to high key lighting and this confusing the audience and makes them feel that things are forever changing. It gives my narrative a clear but creepy mood to it and the emotions the audience feel because of this is what makes it conventional. (See below for an example of a fade). 

· Compare your opening sequence to a successful thriller and explain how your thriller is conventional. Consider the narrative, representation of characters, sounds, editing, mise-en-scene





To show my understanding of the generic conventions and developing a real thriller, I have compared my thriller opening to the film ‘The Sixth Sense’.

The film is about a young boy who can communicate with spirits that don’t know they are dead, who seeks the help of a child psychologist, played by Bruce Willis. Just like most thrillers, the film uses low key lighting in certain scenes in the film; these scenes are usually when Cole (the little boy) is communicating with a dead person. For example, the scene where he shows Malcolm the dead people who hung themselves at his school and when he talks to a woman in the kitchen. It is in these scenes where the suspense is built, and so the low key lighting, tension building music, the use of montage to put the images together etc, are all used to show viewers how scared the little boy is and to help the audience feel scared too.

The clip below is from the Sixth Sense and shows one of the scary, tension building scenes in the film. It shows the innocence of the little boy bursting for the toilet but is too scared to go in the dark. This makes viewers connect and sympathise with him, associating him to be the victim. This is similar to my thriller as the scarf and pink dress the girl wears shows her youth and innocence. This clip is conventional mainly due to the sound added which makes the scene scary by building suspense. Viewers, having previously connected to the little boy, feel the emotions he does as it is clear the boy is frightened. The use of the shot showing the thermometer going down and the breath being visible in the air shows how cold it is in the house. This gives the scene a supernatural feel to it as we associate the cold with the supernatural, and dark, scary things. It also may make people shiver and feel paranoid which is very conventional in thriller films. There was also the use of low key lighting in the shot showing the length of the hallway (see below) and throughout the clip to add to everything mentioned above.

This film, like my thriller opening is not a very stereotypical thriller, as the sixth sense focuses on the journey of the boy and how Malcolm helps him deal with his ‘gift’. There is a fight scene, but instead of taking up the entire narrative of the film, happens at the beginning and is forgotten right until the end of the film. The film has various settings such as Cole’s house, school, local hospital and the area he lives in. These settings are not conventional as they do not make the audience feel nervous by the victim being trapped etc, but simply tell viewers more information. They also make the thriller more believable as these settings are easily accessible to the general public. This could make them think the scenario in the film could happen to them which will make viewers nervous, and this feeling is what is conventional. The fact that this is an entire film and not just a two minute opening means that the effects used are going to be better. Whereas my group and I allocated several different roles between us, there would have been a team of people on each job; they would’ve had a bigger budget etc, and so there are obviously some major differences between the two. Both thrillers do have a similar element, as both create the enigma of finding out the main character is dead; Malcolm finds out he died at the beginning of the film, right at the very end, and the entire film has been building up the tension so that the audience feel very shocked at the end of the film, which makes the film conventional as it had used the common 3S’s in it. However, in my thriller, I only had 2 minutes to create a similar effect. The main character, who is the victim, unlike in the sixth sense, finds out she is dead at the very end of the opening, which would also surprise the audience in the hope they will continue watching. I therefore had to build suspense in a different way as I didn’t have the length of an entire film. I therefore chose the stereotypical setting in a forest, with the victim dying at the end, as well as the conventional looking credits added in.