Stabiliser

This is the stabiliser we will be using for our film. It is made by Yelangu and is a good stabiliser. It will hopefully add some dynamics to the film as it will allow us to move the camera in much more creative ways. It will also allow to make our handheld shots much smoother, and allow us to have much longer shots which will let us have some more fun creatively.

Character Profile - Main Antagonist, Following Man

Name: Unkown
Age: 40+
Ethnicity: White British
Gender: Male
Clothing/ style: All black clothing, large black boots, coat and gloves.
Influences: Taking influence of many dark silhouette shots of the man, from films such as The Screaming Skull and film noir
Character Function: To provide fear and a sense of the unknown in both the girl and the audience
Character's Personality: The audience are only introduced to him through a series of close ups, never revealing his face, keeping the man very hidden from the audience, not allowing them to connect with him as they are left questioning whether he does actually exist or is just a figment of the girl's imagination

Character Profile - Main Protagonist, Young Girl

Name: Lily
Age: 14
Ethnicity: White British
Gender: Female
Clothing/ style: Bold red clothing to have connotations of blood/danger and to make her stand out distinctly against the dark surrounding and follower dressed solely in black
Influences: Taking heavy influences from Sin City, see the picture below
Character Function: To appear very innocent and capture the audience sympathy to make them fear for her
Character's Personality: There are two distinct sides to her personality. She appears cheerful and normal when interacting with her friends, though as soon as she leaves to walk off on her own her extremely fearful and paranoid personality is revealed.

Audience Research - Releasing the Questionnaire

This is our questionnaire.

We published it to Facebook and George's Google+ circles. We asked our parents and friends in person and via Social Media (Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct Message, Snapchat, and WhatsApp).

We hope to get many responses via these media and it will be interesting to see which choices people make. We intend to close the questionnaire on the 12th of December, giving it a gestation period of two weeks.

You can take our survey here - please do! It's free and it'll really help us out.

Audience Research - Making the Questionnaire

We have created a nine question questionnaire to present to our target audience to help us decide on how to make our thriller. Using the service SurveyMonkey, it was decided that we would use simple and easy to answer questions as this will encourage more people to answer the questionnaire ensuring more accurate results. Hopefully, 10-30 responses will be received. Looking at some previous media studies questionnaires, we came up with questions that we thought would be most relevant to our film. Below is a screenshot of us making our questionnaire.

Preliminary Exercise

Here is my preliminary exercise I found it reasonably straight forward to use the cameras and to edit the clips together as I have had practise doing both these before. Although it was useful for me to have a chance to experience using the specific cameras and editing software that I will likely be using for my final film.

Initial Thriller Idea

1. The Pitch or Outline

• The film follows a young girl walking home from school who believes she is being followed 

2. Audience

• 15-  A small amount of violence and threat

3. Narrative

• The audience sees a girl say goodbye to her friends and begin to walk home
• They begin to hear loud footsteps before seeing anything, then dark boots appear, clearly not her shoes
• The shot's begin to crosscut between a close up of her face and the shot of his boots
• More of the follower is gradually revealed though the audience never see his face
• The opening could span over multiple days 
• It will play of the idea of paranoia, and whether the follower is really there of if the girl is imagining it
• It will end with the girl looking back, though the audience will not see what they sees and instead just her a loud scream before it cuts to black

4. Style and Tone

• Dramatic tone
• Very dark, maybe with a slightly red tint to hint at blood and danger
• Shot changes start slow as she is with her friends then the editing speed will increase gradually throughout the film to a high speed editing climax just before the scream

5. Characters, Costume, Props

• The young girl - wears a red blazer/hoodie to highlight her from those around her
• Everyone else very bland, dark clothing, though very few passers by to increase the ideas of isolation
• Following man/woman - you never see his face, he is dressed in black, we mostly see him as a silhouette 

6. Graphics

• Titles could appear on the paving stones as the girl walks past, disappearing as she steps onto that paving stone

7. Sound

• Non diegetic sound - quiet and minimal at first, begins to build and crescendo during the opening to a loud climax
• Diegetic sound - not much but enhanced footsteps, heaving breathing and a loud scream at the end

Silence of the Lambs Opening Shot Log

Shot no	Loc.	Shot type	Camera Movement	Description	Duration (seconds)
1	Forest	CU	Track woman	CU of woman’s face	1

Analysis of the Opening to Silence of the Lambs

Analysis of the Opening to Brighton Rock

Analysis of the Opening to Vertigo