The genre is driven by the main aspects of suspense, excitement, anticipation; the need to get the audience 'on the edge of their seats'/ alert. These films have a tendency to be fast paced especially the action thrillers, and nerving/ increasing the adrenaline in the audience; getting the audience to expect one thing and reveal that it isn't the case and something unexpected occurs to keep the story fresh by reveal.
The thing with Thrillers is that they have a lot of overlapping themes with other genres, and subsequently also due to the variety in which Thrillers come as, they are split into sub- genres of which I've reviewed both psychological thrillers and an action thriller for the coursework, but seeing all the sub- genres that exist, I realize just how many Thrillers I've actually watched generally in my life time including; Crime Thrillers, Legal Thrillers, Science Fiction Thrillers, Religious Thrillers, Action Thrillers, Film Noir & Psychological Thrillers & even Erotic Thrillers.
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After accomplishing the Preliminary exercise, I'm wandering whether our short film would fall into the crime- thriller genre as it involves the cold, dark, mysterious killing of a suspect by a detective who could be considered a bit contradictory to what a detective does and seemingly the potential of an anti- hero character in how he seems to be the protagonist except his dark words/ actions seem uncertain between moral and unmoral.
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I've begun to questionnaire people I know about their knowledge and comments on Thrillers i.e. my parents.
What comes to your mind when you think of a Thriller film?
-Scary, Tense, exciting
-sitting-on-the-edge-of your seat
-holding hands to love ones
-Suspense, unexpected parts of film (equally expected parts- cliche's, but thrillers can sometimes cleverly bringing you into thinking something else; drawing you away from expecting an upcoming event)
What makes a Thriller good in your opinion?
-good build-up/ story
-good characterization/ familiarization with protagonist from the usual thriller beginning being a normal day-to-day character with a causal/ normal day-to-day routine
-eerie music (psychological thriller)
-isolated, dark/ Gothic places- dark/ sinister
How would you start a Thriller off?
-daily casual opening introducing protagonist
-(action thriller)action/intense opening (007 films are similar but really a genre of themselves)- to catch audience attention
Name a few other sub-genres in the Thriller genre...
-Political thriller- how government works- popular dramas- certain politicians up to business they shouldn't be doing/ corruption- very popular for an older audience (older adults)
I also did a questionnaire which 10 of my colleagues where I developed a pie chart with every response from a person (they were allowed to say more than one thing hence why the pie chart do not add up to 10).
The 1st pie chart deals with my peers' first thoughts on the word thriller, which will help me think up of the direction we want to take for the opening titles e.g. more action packed over scary etc.
This 2nd pie chart shows what my peers expect when they are about to see a thriller- regardless of sub-genre. These are key words worth implementing into the final idea for the opening titles.
Recently, we have decided on taking a similar step to the main task as the preliminary in keeping the opening mysterious e.g. eerie setting/ music, and making the audience slightly nervous right at the end. The only ways we would emphasize or intensify the action concept (action packed being mentioned a quarter of the time from the questionnaire) would be in making jump/ hard cuts from frame to frame to increase audience interest in an increase of pace, as this piece isn't action based e.g. explosions, guns etc.
For the opening titles, we have taken on board aspects from this questionnaire such as dark settings making up a lot of a thriller's environment, but this will probably be challenged in our final piece as we plan to shoot in our school grounds in a couple of empty corridors (although in the editing stage we can dim the lighting if we wanted to).
Hopefully there are other ways of making it intense and exciting after than a dim lit setting e.g. sound; background music or effects.
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