Several thrillers that I have researched have influenced the development of my opening sequence in the planning phase, as well as my primary and secondary audience research.
Firstly, in Task 1 I researched three thriller posters, for "Shutter Island", "The Dark Knight", and "The Silence of the Lambs". These three posters provided inspiration for a variety of different aspects in planning. Firstly, I found the conventions in the poster for "Shutter Island" to be very effective - the combined use of portraying mystery and the connotations within the poster, i.e. split personality, secrecy and concealment created a very eerie and strange atmosphere that I wanted to emulate in my thriller planning, through use of plot and mise-en-scene. In the "Dark Knight" poster, the character is very conventional to the genre, wearing all black, which is commonly associated with evil and darkness- however other aspects of the poster suggest the character is actually the hero, such as the low-angle shot to indicate superiority. This is something I thought I should include in planning; that the character was an enigma, to make the audience question his moral standings. I thought this was a very important aspect of the thriller as it would maintain the audience's attention and add to the plot depth - this is something that I discovered from my primary research to be very popular with my audience.
For my Task 2 I explored three title sequences - these would be the most important to reference considering I am tasked with producing an opening sequence. I looked at "Seven", "Skyfall" and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and found things I would endeavour to use and also things I would not include. In the title sequence for "Seven", I particularly liked the font used for the titles - the handwriting was written in a 'sketch' type manner and then in a typewriter-esque font. This made me think that clearer titles could be juxtaposed with slightly less neat fonts to create an effect of disruption and an almost disturbing atmosphere. I also thought that the mise-en-scene in this opening sequence was very effective, cutting to several objects for very brief periods of time, some of which were indistinguishable to me - I thought this was a very good technique for confusing the audience and was the inspiration for the "flashback" idea in planning, that the action should be broken up by brief flashes of documents, photos, maps and places to disorientate the audience. The use of sound in the sequence for the "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" had the greatest influence in planning for me - the loud bass noises and strange sound effects ensured that the audience's attention was captured for the duration, and sound is a very important aspect of any scene so it is important the soundtrack is appropriate. However the title sequence for "Skyfall" did not offer much for planning, I thought it was far too complex and long to attempt to match it, although the fonts were clear and easy to read which I think is also beneficial as the information is clearly conveyed to the audience.
In my third task I studied three scenes from thrillers and looked in depth at a particular aspect in each. "The Dark Knight" and "The Others" both informed my planning with regard to characters - in The Others, the lead character [Nicole Kidman] is portrayed as a vulnerable, through both her costume and the narrative - this is conventional of thrillers to portray females as more vulnerable and to a sense weaker than their male counterparts. However in the scene she also shows some signs of strength. This informed my planning as I thought it was important to have a woman, in a similar, outdated costume to portray vulnerability - I then thought it would be even more effective to have a young girl in this situation to conform to thriller conventions. By contrast in the Dark Knight scene I looked at the portrayal of the antagonist - although I wanted the antagnosit to be speechless so that absolutely nothing can be given away about his persona, the character of the Joker helped influence the costume design in a way; I decided it was important to maximise the element of fear in the audience. The Joker's actual face is concealed by make up and we are never aware of his true motive in the scene, something I could use in my thriller: i.e. "why is the character there?". I also looked at "the Box" scene at the end of Seven to analyse sound. This influenced my planning as the scene made good use of silence to build suspense and then very loud, startling noises to capture the attention of the audience, something I want to include in my thriller.
I have mainly detailed how my audience research has informed my planning in their respective posts but to clarify and summarise, I discovered that my target audience preferred films with a good, complex plot and an effective cast in a film, and preferred action and adventure to a stand-alone thriller. Combined with my secondary research, where I found thrillers were mainly successful in the last year as a sub-genre, i.e. they were mainly action, science-fiction etc but had elements of or could be classed as a thriller, I decided that in my own piece I needed to include elements of the action/adventure genre to engage my target audience.
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