The enigma code – creating an element of secrecy to catch the attention of the audience in order to keep them interested and continue watching.
The action code – an event which causes the narrative to move forward, for example, a character acting aggressively will cause a reaction from another character.
The symbolic code – using a visual metaphor to link an object or idea to another meaning.
The semic code – the use of connotation to give the audience an insight into characters, objects or settings.
The cultural code – uses culturally specific significance from outside the narrative to create a meaning within it.
I feel that by outlining these narrative codes it will help me withing my thriller to know what i need to encode, it will also allow me to understand the different segments of the narrative.
This is our final narrative plot for our thriller. The idea is of a girl riddled with paranoia and madness finding her way into an unknown location she finds a room sits and looks in the mirror and sees another girl staring back at her, in her dazed state she wanders through the setting finding paraphernalia from the night before
I made a Mood board to help visualize my ideas and to establish what I would like to use as concepts for my thriller, Mood boards are used in art to gather ideas for a new piece and are the equivalent to a writer’s notebook
My storyboard is based on the idea of a psychological thriller. A girl suffering from extreme mental conditions including schizophrenia and extreme paranoia convinces herself that she is dead and is having an out of body experience, in order to return back to life she must kill someone who she believes is her.
After establishing my idea and presenting it to the group we tweaked the idea in terms of narrative we decided that the out of body experience would be hard to film, so we said that the protagonist would just be a raging psychopath who wanted to murder someone for revenge.
Also included is a mood board from a member of my group.
This is Beth’s mood board, her idea contained themes of deceit, murder, and betrayal, we used the idea of murder from her mood board to come up with our final narrative.
This is molly’s mood board we decided to take the use of darkness and blood and combine them with the phycotic elements of my thriller to finalise a detailed narrative
I’ll be using other peoples thrillers to help me gather ideas and comparing them against the success criteria I’m going to be using the thriller “MEGAN” as my example
Holding the shot steady- I would give this piece a level 4 due to the fact every shot it is still, even with every angle used the shots that are shown are sturdy and well thought out. When tilting the camera is still steady and you can tell the difference between movement and shots.
Framing a shot- within the thriller, the variety of shots really helps contribute to the tension, this thriller uses particularly good depth of field when outside the shot of her hanging up washing has the antagonist in the background by using that depth of field it draws the viewer in and want to know more, I would give it an upper level 4.
A variety of shot distances- throughout the thriller, there are many camera distances used, I feel they could have used a larger variety as most of the thriller was shot in close up, mid-close-up and mid shot. I feel they could have made use of long shots and captured more of the scene to help explain the narrative I would give this a lower level 4.
Appropriate to task- Throughout the thriller, it features the key iconography so as the viewer we can infer the genre, I feel with the use of blood, creepy non-diegetic sound, and the repetition of paranoid moments its shows the true repertoire of elements of a thriller. I would give this an upper level 4.
Mise-En-Scene selection- The whole thriller is packed with M-E-S, The use of normal house objects makes us feel as if the happenings could happen to us, the use of spilt pills helps us understand her mentality throughout, every prop was well thought out and put to good use. I would give this an upper level 4.
Editing for meaning- The use of flashback type segments and random bloody hands really help to create the key features that appear in a thriller, the editing is continuous and never breaks I would give this and upper level 4.
Shot transitions- shot transitions are well thought out and help to affect the audience as much as possible, most transitions are jump cuts, this to the audience is very jarring, tying in with the key elements of a thriller. I would give it a lower level 4.
Sound with images- sound within this thriller works really well, throughout the thriller, there is only non-diegetic sound this a weakness as it is harder to understand narrative, however, the sound works really well, the only diegetic sound, in the end, I feel they could have used more diverse sound. I would give this a lower level 4.
Using titles- the use of titles used really reflects the true thriller genre, the use of one blood-stained letter and the rest white, this connotes themes such as innocence. I would give this an upper level 4 .
While discussing ideas for our narrative of our thriller, we came up with the idea of making a survey to receive information on whether or not our thriller appeals to core audiences and our target audience, our survey was entitled “Thriller Research”. We received 59 responses which helped us to identify what we needed to include to please our demographic.
(Click on the image to see full results)
93.2% of people who took part in the questionnaire were between the ages of 16-25 this was ideal as our average age for our core audience, this is especially important because we’re getting feedback from the main viewers of the film.
We then created a facebook profile for an ideal viewer of our thriller, we had to include potential interests and hobbies of the person and different likes in different types of media such as music, TV shows, and movies. Completing this task makes us think about how to appeal to our selected demographic for our thriller and what we had to do for them to enjoy our thriller. We had to appeal to a psychographic, this a term used in marketing referring to a part of the market due to their hobbies and interest.
I worked with Carlos to film and edit a montage of myself making an origami bird,
The first step was to create a storyboard of our ideas, we drew out or ideas to create a narrative and a list of shot we can follow while filming, we included camera angles and editing techniques to make the narrative make sense. The main thing that we had to think about was continuity editing and learning to edit well.
In terms of the success criteria, which was:
Holding a shot steady
Framing a shot
Shooting (variety of shot distances)
I would say that many of things we have done well and some that can be improved. In my opinion, I would say that all of the shots are held perfectly still, we used a tripod to make sure of this. In addition, we could have worked on the framing of shots as they weren’t as interesting to look at as perhaps I thought they could’ve been, I must use techniques such as the rule of thirds to help me improve my framing. Lastly, I would say that we used a variety of shot distances from long shot to close-up, however for next time I would say to use a variety of angles to help make the montage more visually pleasing.
