Planning: Storyboard practice

Unfortunately i missed the lesson on storyboarding and why it is important, how to do it properly, and also what the different arrows might mean. But i did catch up with the lesson through my group member Bethany, she did a quick run through what the lesson about and what i need to no. After i had caught up we then had the task of creating our own storyboard to the title 'Terror of the night'. We got given a sheet with all of the acquirements a storyboard should have and then an empty space for our drawing of the scene.

I was grouped with Bethany i found it a lot easier to work with someone else on the storyboard because we both could input our ideas and Bethany had a clear understanding of different shots we should use. We both drew a little bit each but by far Bethany made it very clear that drawing storyboards was her expertise and personally i think she should do our final story board for our film.

Planning: Mise en scene/shot list

Planning: List of jobs

Although most of our planning is done considering the plot and some of the mise en scene and shot list there is still a lot to do and a lot of jobs for people to do. We need to:

• the timings of shots--Me
• start storyboarding--Beth/Oscar
• research more on religious thrillers--Imogen
• find actors--Beth/Imogen
• confirm locations--Me

 Other then this i need to make sure i keep up with my blogging and that i blog the developments that we go through as well as my exam work. So far our planning is on track and we are slowly getting everything ready for when we start to film.

Planning: Development on new idea

Today in our media lesson we spoke more on our new idea of a religious thriller and tried to develop it. In our idea at the moment our plot is a very religious man who goes around torturing and killing people who have sinned against god. When we sat down and spoke more about our idea we decided that we are going to use polaroids for our titles and the titles are going to be had written in a scruffy way, the polaroids are going to be pictures of the sins these characters have committed. We also decided on our introduction to the movie we wanted it to be very ambiguous and unclear to the viewer what this man does so, we wanted a priest to speak about the kidnaps and tortures through a radio.

Planning: Change in idea!

Today me and my group had a change in idea, because as we pitched our idea to our teacher Mr Ford and he told us that it was very typical approach to our task. But me and my group don't want to be typical we wanted to do something new, improved and unique something that a student hadn't tried yet. So we wrote down what we all wanted to do genre wise and we got, a crime, physiological, religious and cults. So we picked out the ones that we though were generally the more typical types of thrillers and tried to mix them around to see what we got. We stepped away from the crime thriller idea as we were in danger of falling in to a cliche of many different crime thrillers, we also stepped away from the physiological thrillers because they also have a danger of falling in to a cliche pattern. Instead we looked more in to the religious and cults idea, we didn't really like the idea of cults even though it would of been a very interesting conspiracy theory to include. But we though a religious thriller is something no one has ever done yet so we built on that and came up with a basic plot line on what we think it would be. This turned out to include most of the genre's we wanted to do anyway because there is aspects of a phycological thriller, aspects of a crime thriller and there is even a hint of the conspiracy theories that is presented in the cults. So to conclude our new unique idea is a religious thriller.

Planning: What is a thriller?

The definition of a thriller is to thrill to keep the audience that you are targeting alert and on the edge of there seat. The protagonist is normally set against a problem a mystery or some kind of mission/challenge, this gives the film a chance to develop and move on through a series of obstacles that the protagonist has to face. Even if a Thriller is a sub genre is will still emphasis any danger that is represented in the film, and because it is the main theme in our introduction we need to include that sense of danger as a main theme. Thrillers tend to be fast moving with a lot of interesting and fast pace cuts between different shots from the camera. They also tend to be from the physiological genre and be very threatening for the protagonist and the characters involved in the movie but also to the audience that is watching it. The also seem to have a lot of mystery behind them and include some extreme villainy such as espionage, terrorism or consipiracy. My group has decided to go with the conspiracy side of things but because we aren't doing a full movie and just a title sequence we need to make this convention obvious in two minutes.

Thrillers are normally seen to have a sudden plot twist that surprise and adds interest to the narrative of the film or book. When the thriller genre is used through a T.V. series it normally adds a 'cliff hanger' to add suspense and to keep the audience intrigued and to ensure that they will watch next time its on. A thriller in conclusion is something that is deigned and made to keep the audience on edge with suspenseful and sensational action.

Planning: Plot plan number one