Camera Work in Thrillers

The camera work within thrillers is very different to camera work in other film genres. Alfred Hitchcock was a famous British film director who specialized in psychological thrillers. I decided to research his techniques in his fiml techniques for when we film our thriller. This website was very helpful: http://borgus.com/hitch/hitch2011.htm


1.) Audience - Make sure everything you do is done for the audience and how it will affect them. It must be engaging and keep them interested. People go and see thrillers for fun, so as directors we could give them suspense to keep them enthralled.
2.) Emotion - Ensure that the camera is positioned in the right place at the right time to allow the audience to experience the emotion the actors and actresses are going through. Focus on the eyes of the actors as they show most emotion.
3.) Camera - The camera should take on human qualities and roam around playfully looking for something suspicious in a room.  This allows the audience to feel like they are involved in uncovering the story.
 This goes back to Hitchcock's beginnings in silent film.  Without sound, filmmakers had to create ways to tell the story visually in a succession of images and ideas.
4.) Point Of View Editing - Putting an idea into the mind of the character without explaining it in dialogue is done by using a point-of-view shot sequence. (Start with a close-up of the actor, cut to a shot of what they're seeing, cut back to the actor to see his reaction)
5.) Keep the Story Simple - If your story is confusing or requires a lot of memorization, you're never going to get suspense out of it. Remove all extraneous material and keep it crisp for a dramatic effect. Each scene should include only those essential ingredients that make things gripping for the audience.
6.) Characters must break cliche - Make all of your characters the exact opposite of what the audience expects in a movie. They should have unexpected personalities, making decisions on a whim rather than what previous buildup would suggest. These sort of ironic characters make them more realistic to the audience, and much more ripe for something to happen to them.
7.) Use Humour to Add Tension - Hitchcock used humour in his film to add tension. Pretend you are playing a practical joke on the main character of your movie.  Give him the most ironic situations to deal with. It's the unexpected gag, the coincidence, the worst possible thing that can go wrong - all can be used to build tension.
8.) Two Things Happening at Once - Build tension into a scene by using contrasting situations.  Use two unrelated things happening at once.  The audience should be focused on the momentum of one, and be interrupted by the other.  Usually the second item should be a humorous distraction that means nothing (this can often be dialogue.)  It was put there by you only to get in the way.
9.) Suspense is Information - "Information" is essential to Hitchcock suspense; showing the audience what the characters don’t see. If something is about to harm the characters, show it at beginning of the scene and let the scene play out as normal.  Constant reminders of this looming danger will build suspense.  But remember - the suspense is not in the mind of the character.  They must be completely unaware of it.
10.) Surprise and Twist - Once you've built your audience into gripping suspense it must never end the way they expect.  The bomb must never go off, lead them in one direction and then pull the rug out from under them in a surprise twist.


If we can try to encorprate at least some of these ideas then our film will be better, I must keep referring back to this when making our storyboard and when filming to keep in mind these factors.

Thriller Questionnaire

I have created our Thriller Questionnaire after gathering information from our Audience Survey and given these out to twenty people, aged 15-19. This is our Questionnaire;

We found that our questionnaire gave us much better responses than our Audience Survey because there were more open questions, however some people were indecisive about their answers and often answered with ‘not sure’ or circled both. Some were also unsure of the difference between a ‘Crime Thriller’ and a ‘Psychological Thriller’ so we had to define this for them and they could have been influenced by us in their answers. Many said they preferred 18 rated films because it doesn’t restrict anything, however they said that 15 were just as good and more happy thrillers compared to horror thrillers. They said they do not expect to see blood and gore in the first two minutes of a Psychological Crime Thriller so we must build up the intensity of the thriller. They also said they prefer to have a female protagonist and a male antagonist which helps us decide our story line better. They prefer modern films in colour that are different and new, but they must include the classic themes of thrillers too.
They like thrillers to be set in a normal home where something happens that is unusual, not a woods which is normally associated with thrillers. Our audience also prefer films that get you thinking and have the end resolved because it is more entertaining. They associate suspense, twist and danger with a thriller and the opening should start with a flashback, so we need to include these points in our thriller to enthral our audience, and by starting our film with a flashback it opens up different paths to our ideas of thrillers. People don’t like the characters talking about their thoughts and feeling during the film and they associate the colours black, white and red in titles, this will help us make our titles sequence. Overall they said that their typical protagonist looks healthy, attractive and an everyday person, compared to the antagonist looking evil and scary or they could be anybody so you don’t suspect it.
The answers they gave us to their favourite thrillers and what the last watched means we can go away and look at what they enjoy to give us ideas to include in our thriller.
The bad points to our questionnaire were that we didn’t get full explanations to our questions so they were quite limiting but they were better questions than in our audience survey. We again could record a group discussion with 15 and 18 year olds and go into more depth.



Camera

When we film our continuity task and Thriller opening we must include a variety of shots to engage with the audience and show interaction, place, and scene. The main camera shots are;

This has given me a good idea of what different effects different distances and angles can give. For example, a low angle shot will make a subject look bigger and strong, whereas a high angle shot will make the subject look small and weak.
We must use our camera wisely in our task to show meaning.

Previous Students Work

On the 3rd of November we began to watch previous students thriller films. We had to rate them on a scale of 1-4, 1 being the weakest. We saw some poor work and some outstanding work, but what really stood out for me was that it doesnt really matter too much about the story line, its about the execution of our work. Even if our story line is poor, as long as we have a variety of shot distances, shot angles, clear and still camera work, paired with good sound and good titles, we are able to get good grades. The poor work we saw always focused on the story line and making the audience interested, however the camera and sound was weak. However we do still need to keep our story line interesting and not stereotypical of thrillers.

Continuity Editing Task

This is what we had to do in our continuity task, this helped us prepare for our actual filming of the task and editing. It also gave us an insight on how we need to prepare before our real Thriller task.

Audience Survey Research

We are going to create a questionaire for our thriller research, but before we create the survey, we had a group discussion with 5-10 people to find out what questions we could include in our questionnaire and to find out to what depth we needed to go into, these questions were ;

1. What do you expect in a 15/18 film? 
2. What is your favourite type of thriller film- horror, crime, psychological, drama, romance etc? 
3. What do you like your film to be set? 
4. Do you get bored of watching the same thing? 
5. Do you prefer black and white films or colour? 
6. What type of music do you like in thriller films? 
7. Do you like films to have a slow introduction, quick introduction or a film that unravels throughout?

These questions briefly gave us an idea that our thriller was to be a crime or psychological thriller because this was the most popular in out target audience. We also discovered that the 15 or 18 age rating was very similar to our audience, so we need to go into more depth in out questionnaire to get a solid answer. The locations to a thriller were very broad and got different answers, so we may have to restrict this when writing out questionnaire. Most people prefer colour films and tense music so we need to stick to the traditions of thriller movies, however people did answer question 4 saying that they got bored of the same thing and prefer new material. Our particpants also said they preferred a film that unravels, so in our opening we musn't give too much away, but be able to grip the audience into wanting to watch more.
By completing this survey, it showed us that we need to go into much more depth with our questions so we can get some clear, precise answers that will really help us with making the movie and coming up with ideas because the answers we got were too limiting. We could also film a group discussion to be able to record every detail said.