Shot-by-shot

Immediately after finishing this list I flicked back through and figured that it was totally impossible to have such a length opening sequence with under 20 shots. With that in mind, it does provide a rough overview of our project and some of the weird and wonderful ideas we hope to make work. Also, it took quite a long time and features some interesting illustrations. With ideas now becoming set in stone, we are beginning to think about starting to gather props, ask people favours and write up a minimalist script for our characters. It's all getting quite exciting.

Target Audience

One of our shared pet-peeves - and something we hope to avoid making - is a film which is only ever so slightly different from most other films in it's genre. This is arguably most apparent in 'Chick Flick' films, of which several follow a basic formula, varied just enough to appeal to it's target audience (just try and spot the difference between films like Freaky Friday, It's a Boy Girl Thing and The Hot Chick.)* However, thriller films are just as guilty of this. A good example would be the perplexingly obvious similarities between Secret Window and Hide and Seek. This diagram exactly demonstrates what we didn't wanted our film to become.
With all this information in mind, we decided to aim our thriller specially at film enthusiasts: people who may spot the occasional reference to other works and hopefully appreciate and recognise the same influences we pay homage to. We envisioned this target audience as being around our age (mid-teens to early-twenties), with a notable interest in film and television and people who would equally spot the same clichés we drew up a list of, most likely to their chagrin. 

*To cover my ass, I also love some Chick Flicks. Waitress, Say Anything... c'mon, who doesn't love Mean Girls?

Codes and Conventions

Before we even started work on our actual treatment, we decided to write a definitive list of thriller film clichés. These stereotypes were ones we instantly acknowledged from many films in the genre and as such the list soon spiralled into a "don't do any of this" list instead:

• Aliens/monsters/vampires or anything similarly supernatural
• Photographs or newspaper clippings on a wall
• Split personality disorder
• Fires, explosions, thunder & lightening (ok, maybe we would have if we could...)
• Mist, fog or blurred vision
• Cars breaking down or characters getting lost
• Masked or cloaked figured
• Hysterical crying or screaming
• "Scare chords"
• Ridiculous plot twists that make the whole film completely pointless or illogical.

Possibly the most pessimistic summary of a genre ever committed to blog, we later backtracked on some of these, realising that abandoning every cliché we could think of would leave us very little to work with, and would make our filming/plot much more difficult to do.

Although, we decided that whatever on the list we did end up using, we would try our best to approach in a new way, by either subverting or intentionally highlighting a particular aspect of its traditional usage.
For example, at the burial of his pet dog, our main character does cry, but it is instead a gradual build up from a whimper to a silent moan, which seems much more effective than the chronically overused "blast of noooo". This idea was something I now remember seeing in the pilot episode of Six Feet Under, and after a lot of searching I managed to find a clip of this scene (6 minutes into the video):



Although becoming a hysterical cry, I found that with the silence before this became much more powerful. This list also lead us to our next important question: who is our product aimed at?