Research: Narrative ideas (Miss Hawkins/ Ms Heath)

My idea: To start off the title of my thriller narrative was 'The Descendant'. In this plot we see a young man grow up without his beloved dad. Living with his mum he is a normal boy who goes to high school each day, however, he was blessed with special gifts/ powers which his dad also had, hence the name 'the descendant'. Throughout the thriller we see the young boy turn into a man who some may call a vigilante, how ever he is on a search for his dads killers, fortunately for him, they are also on the search for his dads descendant.

Yasmin's idea: The second idea was Yasmin's. Her thriller narrative was called 'Obsessed'. Her narrative plot follows the tale of a dad who becomes obsessed with his daughter after splitting up from his wife. During the plot we start to see the man battle through depression as he places pictures of his daughter up in an empty room with nothing but a rocking chair and a girls doll. the daughter's mum warns her not to go visit her father simply because she gets a sense of danger/ and anger within him. However the daughter does nit heed her warnings and chooses to visit her dad anyway. So every weekend the daughter travels to see her dad, but on this particular day he is not in and has left the key under his doormat, the girl then goes inside the house and starts exploring the rather large household. She then stumbles into the room where her dad has all these pictures, she is freaked out by the sight. Suddenly she hears her dad come in the house calling her name, he ventures upstairs to the room of pictures where he clocks on to the fact that she has seen the pictures, he then goes on a hunt for his daughter as she attempts to run away without being seen or heard.

Jemar's idea: The chosen idea was Jemar's; he called it 'The Awakening' and it is about as a young girl called Amy who lives with her mum Natalie and her father Tom. Within this film we start off by seeing four pictures on top of a fireplace showing family pictures within different seasons. The audience will not see the person holding the camera which will create tension and suspense among the audience. When the family arrive home they feel as though something is watching them, which it is. As we see the family become disturbed over little Amy's sightings of moving figures around the house, we also see each family member attacked mentally while they are sleeping, or while their awake, as they may see something look away and then look back again; they start to hear noises around the house and see what looks like shadows moving around the house. As we move through the opening scene we start to understand what is happening within this house hold and how threatening it is for the family who lives their. 

These clips will be accompanied by slow- paced music as the audience start to see Amy becoming disturbed by her viewing of something standing outside her house looking at her. She screams and her dad comes running and thinks its nothing until he sees the figure himself and becomes disturbed about what he has seen, his wife comforts him and just tells him that it was nothing.

All the sounds and images build up the tension and suspense in the audience when the family is looking down a corridor they see a shadow walking slowly around the corner, just as it's about to turn around the corner the opening then ends and goes onto a black screen where he hear screaming and the title screen comes up saying "The Awakening".

Film Influences:

Paranormal Activity 4:

After watching this film, my group decided it would be the main influence for our thriller film. This is due to the similarities in the narrative/plots in both our film, and Paranormal Activity 4. Firstly, the film is set inside a family home which is said to be the safest place possible for a family, however, when looking back at my groups questionnaire responses we knew that we should play around with this stereotype in order to have a big impact on our target audience.

Sinister:















Sinister is the second main influence of our thriller film, this is because this film has a mixture of all the elements my group wanted to put into our thriller, these were; suspense, tension and surprise. This film does this exceptionally well which is why my group chose to use this as an influence.

Conclusion:
By using other successful films as influences to help us create our own thriller film means that we are able to use all of their strengths to improve our own thriller film  enabling it to have a large impact on the audience and it to be conventional to the thriller genre. My group are able to have confidence in our thriller film due to this, as we feel as though our film has worked around the influences and has been able to create the film depending on the responses we had from our questionnaire.

Questionnaire and results- Miss Gibbins

In order to create our thriller film, we needed to create a questionnaire in order to gather some information and research on what our target audience wanted to see. This in turn, would help us when it comes to actually creating our thriller film, so that we would be able to make it effective on our audience and conventional to the thriller genre.

Pictured above, is the questions I asked our audience. When counting up the results, we found that that the majority of the group liked and watched thriller films more than the other genres. This was a great result because we knew that we could focus on the thriller genres conventions instead of placing a mixture of other conventions inside our film in order to make it more effective on our audience.

This question was asked because it was essential in helping us to plan and build a base for creating our thriller film as we could always relate back to our target audiences answers. The questionnaire would therefore help us when it comes to creating a certain impacting effect on the audience; furthermore, when added to our research of other thrillers, it is able to help us to make our thriller conventional to the thriller genre.

The next question we asked people was “when watching a film, out of the themes below, which theme do you prefer”, this was how we decided on our thrillers genre. The most chosen theme was psychological, due to us setting the film inside a house with a mystery character; we decided that this would be the best place to have the biggest impact on the audience as a home is supposed to be safe.

The theme of our thriller was basically the most important question we could ask the public; this is because the theme is what our thriller will be based around. The theme most chosen being psychological, helped my group majorly as we had a good idea of how we could make ideas conventional to the thriller genre while relating to the chosen theme

The last majorly important question we asked was “what do you think has the biggest impact on the audience”, when asking this, we was relating to suspense, tension and surprise. The most important joint elements were suspense and tension with surprise trailing by only two votes. Due to this, my group decided that all of these elements were needed inside our thriller film in order to have a much needed impact on  our audience.

In our thriller film we didn't choose a single element to be the main one due to our results. This in turn means that our thriller film will have a better impact on all people. Firstly suspense helps create surprise as the audience don’t know exactly what will happen so when something pops out onto the screen they will jump up and get surprised by what they see. Tension helps my group to keep the audience entertained at all times and hooked to the film.

Conclusion:

The creation of a questionnaire has helped with the creation of our thriller film because we are able to make the film relate to the public’s responses. Furthermore, this would help us to make our thriller film conventional to the thriller genre as we are able to use the questionnaire as a base line to create our thriller around; for example: the theme chosen was psychological; due to this we have based our thriller film around the theme of psychological trauma. When looking at the response from the questionnaire, it was clear to my group, that our target audience was 15-20 year old people of a mixed genre who all wish to see a thriller film containing suspense, tension and surprise. This information is essential to our group as we now know who our target audience is and what they want to see within our thriller film.