Looking at previous students work, I found the thriller ‘Last Autumn’ which you can watch below:
How ‘Last Autumn’ reaches the criteria for a level 4 thriller:
Firstly, they kept the camera held steadily throughout the film, however, when the tense, quick edits started, the camera work was slightly less steady, which perhaps was reflecting the dizzy, panic the character seems to have. The initial focus pull (which did exemplify steadiness) demonstrates the apprehension within the clip, it makes it seem like they’re being watched or spied on which isolates the character.
When the male is walking toward the greenhouse, theres a clip where he’s framed in the window, and so centred in the frame, with all focus on him. These artistic frames that really focuses the viewer’s mind on him, and gives him a sort of superiority over us, and fundamentally the female.
Theres continual changes in the shot distances, where when she sits down on the bench there’s a variety of angles, including extreme long shot, mid shot, and close up. These act to circle the character, and therefore isolate her as we see no one else, which is quite a typical theme in the genre.
Mise-en-scene was fairly limited in the conventional thriller sense, however, their use was very effective. The black gloves was a particularly engaging aspect, as this furthered the ambiguity of the male character, it covered his identity and foreshadows the unfortunate events still to come.
The editing was successful in making sense through the narrative. A particularly good example would be when the female character gets strangled and is left to lay on the floor. They edited this point of view shot so that the the screen would fade and blur out, to show she’s dying or dead.
The shots transition so well, especially in the scene where the male takes off his tie and we get various views of the process, and I think that’s fairly typical of the genre, where you gets a very fast paced but detailed trail of shots that lead you to this quite threatening, tense scene.
The sound linked with the scenes throughout, and especially so when she was getting strangled. The crescendo of the soundtrack reached its climax just as she was taken. The dramatic music really engages and captivates us as an audience, and is very typical in the thriller genre.
The titles are put into the video in a really interesting manner, where they fit into the setting, as if to conceal themselves, isolating the characters further. Additionally, they’re in this typewriter style font, which reflects the uneasy tone as the writer wishes not to associate themselves with the text in a personalised way.
