Target audience for our thriller.

We've been thinking a lot about what is our target audience.

And, however, thrillers are more likely to be seen by males, we think this particular thriller might suit for females as the main character, main villain - is a woman.

The age of the target group will be approximately between 20 and 24 years old, so they are not too young to understand the idea about marriage and joint life, but also not too old to lose the interest in thriller films.

However, I personally still believe that gender is debatable in our case, as the film is not romantic enough to attract lots of female audience, however, males, might not want to see the film where their gender is getting killed and chopped by one 'weak' woman.

Discussion, development and the final outline.

Receiving feedback has really encouraged several big discussions about the plot and what should be done to respond to the feedback and make our idea perfect.

First of all, we've decided to drop off the cannibalism....

As I've been told - Matt said it's "too much" having her cooking his kidney in the shot. 

Well, I can't be objective on this one - I love cannibalism.

Anyway, others from my group's agreed with Matt that this might be a bit too cruel.

So...

We had to come up with a new plot, which will not include the cannibalism.
We've been discussing our new idea for 2 lessons + a bit in our Messenger group cause we really needed our idea done by the end of the week so that one of us can actually start story-boarding.

  Notes from the lessons: outline of the final idea:

This is a real nightmare to force a group of people with completely different opinions, experiences and views on the world to agree upon something that everybody would like. We've been changing our outline like 20+ times just because there's always been a person who would just randomly jump up with the weird idea like this:

Messenger group:

 

Honestly, nothing wrong with it, just..

I really want to create an idea which everybody in our group would like so I've tried to think about George's suggestion and how we'll fit cops into it, so I was like: alright, if cops, then:

1) How did they found out she's guilty?

2) What would happen in the overall film after she's arrested? 

3) What's the point of the film about villain-woman-murderer if she's revealed in the OPENING SEQUENCE?

And he was just like:

That's how the cops idea died.

After that kind of crazy discussions and quarreling we've surprisingly finally put together our final outline:

- The woman is cutting vegetables in the kitchen, radio is playing along as the diegetic sound.

-(we film her from different angles + a bit of cooking process with squeezing lemon and all that stuff)

-In the middle of cutting she tries to reach something, which is not there, so she leaves the knife and walks away to another room.

-There she walks to the cupboard to get salt(or smth) and we can see a blurry figure on the background sitting on the chair.

-She goes back to the kitchen and continues cooking.

-(at that point we reveal that she has bruises on her hands and a cut on her cheek)

-There is a noise of the chair moving from the kitchen.

-She notices it (we film a close-up of her) and turns off the radio.

-She takes her big knife and goes to the other room.

-There is a man on the floor, bleeding and crawling away from her, trying to reach the door.

-(at that moment the audience realize that she's NOT in danger, but she is the VILLAIN)

-The woman sees him trying to escape and goes mad.

-She grabs him by the legs and pulls him back, ties him to the chair with the rope/tape.

-Then she goes back to the kitchen, smiling and turns on the radio.

-(the sound of the knife beating the board is exaggerated).

-There's another loud sound from the room where the man is.

-She makes a loud cut (like if she loses it completely) and turns round with the knife in her hand.

After finishing the outline we could actually start drawing the storyboard.

As it's much easier if one person does it - H said she doesn't mind, so she started drawing and we carried on with other work like deciding on cast and locations. 

Final pitch feedback from Mike + Matt *-* ^-^

On the day of the pitch I was not in, so obviously didn't hear the feedback given from the teachers. However, my group has kindly send me notes they wrote on the day, so that I'm also aware of what is good about our idea and what we have to think about.

 Original feedback notes from my group:

"1) We need to make her look more miserable, she is fed-up, she is angry and what’s to kill him.

She needs to show how angry she is, how upset she is.

Maybe she could be cooking and he is trying to escape in the background, and when she see’s him she goes crazy, very angry, drags him back. She is shouting and screaming.

2) Matt said it is too much of a jump to go from vegetable to cutting up his kidney. If you want the kidney part in it, skip the vegetables.

3) Or you could show that there has been a struggle in the room and the woman has one. You need to show the clear signs of a struggle. Things knocked over, blood stained on the carpet (slip over blood).

4) Don't add too much in to the opening scene as it sounds like you are trying to fit the whole film into the opening.

5) As a group you need to decide if it's a struggle as she has stabbed him or if they are cooking, but I wouldn’t focus too much on the cannibalism.

6) Very good that it is only one location. Stay in kitchen, and a it is a good idea to have her with bruises on her face, cuts on her."

Inspiration from "Silence of the lambs".

In preparation for production I was looking for the inspiration in different sources: images, books, films, music, and George has advised me to watch 'Silence of the lambs' as he said it has the similar cannibal mood as we want to create in our thriller idea.

However, I was a bit dissapointed after I've watched it, cause, of course, the main character - is a cannibal, but there were no actual 'cooking' or 'cutting' psychopathic scenes, which I expected and which I wanted to replicate in our thriller.

However, there still were some good shots and ideas, of which I took a note for myself. 

The pitch.

This is the presentation we've made as a group and introduced to Mike and Matt to describe our idea:

Reflection of the test shoot.

Our group has done a decent amount of work in pre-production for the test shoot so we were ready and organised on the day. However, we've still faced some barriers and difficulties which we had to overcome in order to finish filming.

Me and Aiden were acting and George and Harriet - filming. 

As the whole thriller is set in the kitchen - we decided to go in our school canteen, cause we needed some sort of a kitchen table due to the plot. However, it was not actually like we wanted it to be, as the way the tables are arranged there has restricted our camera movements, what resulted in us loosing some important shots we wanted to take. 
For example, we could hardly do any close-ups of the woman's face, as there's been a wall in front of the place, where I was standing and imitating cooking. Her facial expressions - is an important part in our idea, which we couldn't replicate in the test shoot. Another shot we didn't do - is when she walks to the cupboards to get something for cooking, and we can accidentally see his unfocused figure on the background, leaning on the table. We failed to film it for the same reason - the location of our school canteen doesn't really fit our expectations and our plan.
However, it gives us something to think about - we should be really careful in choosing the place to film our actual thriller in so that we get all shots 'just right'.

Moreover, it took us two periods to film, as at every break people started to come into the canteen so we had to stop and continue the next day. Apart for that, even before breaks - there were people coming into the kitchen(cleaners, e.t.c), even other media groups, which has been filming their test shoots also. That was so annoying to had to stop in the middle of filming when somebody walked past and was caught in the shot, or started talking after "action" has been said. 

Somehow, we managed to finish filming in two periods.

 

To be honest, during filming we've faced some typical 'team-work' problems about who should be doing what. As me and Aidan were acting and George has brought his own camera to film - Harriet was left with no task to do, which disappointing her. Luckily enough, George's camera has ran out of memory, so Harriet had a chance to film a bit on her phone, which came up really obvious in editing due to the quality of the video.

However, as time goes by we seem to be working quite well as a team. 

We've also created our group chat in Facebook messenger to keep in touch and meet if there is a need to discuss anything, which is very helpful, to be honest. 

During filming the test shot we were not allowed to use any 'dangerous' props, like knives or guns, so we had to improvise:

fruits = vegetables

spoon = knife

box with gloves = kidney

toilet paper = rope

ketchup = blood 

 Afterwards, we've moved on to editing. As most part of the footage was on the George's camera - he took it home to transfer it into his laptop and edit. Harriet has send him other shots from her phone through our messenger group, so that he can finish editing. 

We then altogether started working on our pitch presentation, to have our idea wrapped up nicely so we can have a 'green light' straight away. 

Harriet has finished the presentation during prep(as it was on her laptop) and e-mailed it to all of us.

At the same time I was busy trying to find the song that would best match and juxtapose the situation in the opening sequence. We needed a song that would sound nice and support the bright picture at the start - of the woman peacefully cooking dinner and then completely contrast with the following bloody part, which would shock and attract the audience.

In one of my previous blogs I've reflected the process of finding the song, however it didn't came to success at that point as not everyone in my production group thought that "You make me crazy" by Gnarls Barkley - is the perfect song for such idea...how come, its perfect!

(We've used it in our test footage as at that point we hadn't yet decided upon our song)

Anyway, the solution came unexpectedly. While we've been discussing the song choice in the classroom together, our classmate Andrew has heard us struggling and kindly advised a song; "Who's loving you" by The Temptations...and we all loved it! 

It just sounds so right in my head when I'm thinking about our idea and this song(not as good as "You make me crazy", but...unlikely I'm not the only one deciding;)

Finally, I would say the test shoot looks horribly bad and funny. Like old action movies with bad editing and lots of continuity mistakes. 

However, that's definitely a priceless experience, as we now can look back at it - analyze - in order to identify our mistakes and get rid of them, improve our idea and keep in mind the difficult parts.

P.S. Thanks very much to my production group - they all have been so far very ambitious, supportive and hard working! So, guys, I expect our thriller sequence to be amazing!

Keeping in touch with the squad ^-^

We've created a Facebook Messenger to discuss ideas and issues about our group thriller task.

That's really helpful if we need to share photos/videos taken through the working process or to arrange a quick meeting to discuss ASAP questions.

 

So in the chat I'm - Dora the explorer, Aidan - is Malfoy,  George is - Pappy and Harriet - is H...well, Aidan has probably ran out of imagination for that one :3

    

George advised me to watch 'Silence of the lambs' so that I get inspiration on the theme of cannibalism, however, it's already way after midnight and I'm writing this blog instead of watching a film, so......................

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