Inspirational Film Openings

We studied a number of different films in anticipation of our AS piece.
 I watched the following films for inspiration for our film to decide wether or not to choose a thriller or horror film.

Paranormal Activity 3 - A horror film in a house setting. It uses a hand-held and simple video camera style of filming with limited special effects. This style of film would be easy to emulate and simple to edit due to the camera shots and limited effects. However, I feel that this style of filming with regards to horror may be a little bit cliche and wouldn't stand out.

I thought that this film would be good to look at with regards to horror in general, containing many themes typical of a horror film; The Supernatural, the juxtaposition of strange events happening in a normal setting, and jumpy, and suspenseful sound and editing.

Kidulthood - This is an urban thriller film. it features a young cast, aimed at a teenage audience. The themes of the film focus around gun and knife-crime, and youth culture. The fast paced editing, themes and urban setting and overall plot of how one event can shape the life of someone in just one day are all elements that I find interesting and think would be easy to emulate in our film.

The last film i chose to look at was Harry Brown, similar to Kidulthood - is an urban thriller that focuses on knife and gun crime. I found it intriguing the idea of how an innocent man can become involved in the criminal world by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After looking at these three films we have decided that we are going to do a thriller based film. The themes and plotlines of the two action thriller films seem more attractive than that of the horror film.
Thus we came to the conclusion of shooting thriller film.

Target Audience (audience profile)

The Pearl & Dean Film website shows a profile of the audience for every film that the company show. As an example the profile of the Horror film Paranormal Activity; this film has a near enough 50/50 gender split showing that there was equal interest taken by both men and women. As the film was rated a 15 by the BBFC  the age range of this films audience starts at 15 years old. the majority of the audience (55%) falls under the 15-34 age range. As for classes the specification is slightly confusing so here is the categories simplified.
A's = bankers, lawyers, directors, and other high powered jobs
B's = teachers, nurses, managers, graphic designers etc
C's = skilled jobs, office workers, plumbers, electricians
D's = non-skilled jobs
This class split shows that the majority of the audience is in class group C1, which is skilled jobs and office workers.

With regards to our film we have decided to use the profile of two films with similar settings and with what we think have similar target audiences; About a Boy and Harry Brown. About a boy because of the city setting and intended age range. And Harry Brown because of the themes and setting; eg. the block of flats and inner city setting, also the themes of gun crime and violence.

This film, rated 12a by the BBFC is not a thriller, but was chosen because the setting and the intended age range is similar to what we want for our film. This film has a 40/60 male to female audience split, meaning that the film was more appealing to women than it was to men. The majority of the viewers for this film were aged over 45 (38%) and there is an even spread over the ages 15-44. As for the classes that viewed the film in the cinema the majority is in the Upper Classes - the A/B section. Meaning that the majority of the audience for this film were in higher paid jobs.

Harry Brown - an action thriller based in the UK. I chose to analyse this because of its similar storyline and similar themes that it includes. This film was rated 18 by the BBFC meaning that it was aimed at a young adult audience. The majority of the audience is in the 15-24 age bracket (32%) and there is a 63/37 percentage split in the gender of the audience 63% male and 37% female. The class split shows that the vast majority of the audience are in the lower classes with 58% in the c1 class group.

Music Video Ideas

the locations that we have chosen to shoot are video are the following: council estate where most gun crime occurs the possible places we visited were london, the reason for this was because london has the most crime rate. The second option and place we had was another estate in windsor near the school, we chose this due to the fact that it was closer to the school and we could access this facility anytime of the day. As you can see on above these are the 2 sites we visited in the pro-production of our film

After along time of discussing with the group and weighing the advantages  we came up with decision of filming in ward royal in windsor , there reason why we came up with this decision was due partially to the fact that, it would be easier for all our group members to get to and lastly it would have been to dangerous for us to film in the london council estate because of the crime rate.We had a fake which was our prop this would have caused us difficulties in london as the police are alert of terrorism,

BRAINSTORM. IDEAS FOR CLIP

Our idea.

For our thriller opening we have decided to focus on the action-thriller sub-genre. We decided to stick to this particular sub-genre because there are many different themes involved and settings that a thriller can take place in - leaving our group with lots of different and exciting options.
After looking at the conventions of a thriller movie we came up with a few options and themes of what our opening could include;
-Crime
-Violence
-Drugs
-Police
-Coincidence
This list alone left us with a number of options for our opening clip.

[insert picture of brainstorm]

We decided to take a crime based storyline.

The idea we came up with was to create drama and the typical thriller film scenario through an accidental shooting.

The issues that surrounded this were how the character would get a gun?

- this was solved by the start of the clip featuring a mysterious character who would be the person to bring the gun into the film.

- the character who received the gun would accidentally let it off and kill/injure an innocent person.

these are the main two ideas of the film that underpin the entire plot.

Preliminary Task Storyboard