Psychological thrillers- in addition to the aspects of a regular Thriller, a Psychological Thriller includes elements of drama and mystery film. The suspense in this sub-genre comes from the mind, rather than from a physical threat. The protagonists in Psychological Thrillers must rely on their mental resources to solve the situation. Because of their nature and how many psychological stereotypes are being considered mental, many Psychological Thrillers cross over into the Horror genre. Looking into the psychological thriller Identity I could analyse how they portrayed different types of mental disorders. A good psychological thriller leaves the audience feeling mind blown themselves, they tend to make you question a lot throughout the film to leave you with the overall answer at the final ending scene. Many films within this genre are often confusing such as, Identity but this works perfectly well with the man actually having multiple identity disorder but to the audience they're are only seeing the characters he made within the film. There is one overall character he created killing the others so this also links into a horror but still maintains all the suspense aspects of a thriller. Heres a clip from Identity when the main protagonist finds out that he is not a real person. My group should consider using psychological thriller as a sub genre in our final production, due to being clever in the ideas of making the film tense and interesting, whilst also getting and maintaining the audience attention. This would be very important to have, as well as many different camera angles could be featured perfectly into a psychological thriller. Also having the access of a variety of mental disorders we could use into our piece.
0 Comments
Action thrillers- often features a race against the clock, contains lots of violence, and an obvious protagonist. It uses physical action to create suspense within the film. Like a traditional Action film, this sub-genre will often have continuous motion and action including physical stunts, chases, fights, battles, and races. Often, these scenes will contribute to the overall sense of danger that the protagonist is facing.
This sub genre may not be the greatest approach to a thriller for my groups own production, due to not having the equipment to create a typical action thriller. Main aspects to action is having fast cars, guns, fighting and putting lives on the brink of danger. This isn't something we could contribute and if you were to take on an action it wouldn't work without it. There have been many action thrillers such as, Die Hard Divergent The Dark Knight Rises Kill Bill The Expendables Mission Impossible The Bourne Identity Hunger Games Inception Crime Thriller- involves the same suspenseful aspects of a thriller with a crime film plot. A crime thriller plot usually focuses on a serial killer, murderer, robbery, or manhunt. As opposed to traditional crime films, the storyline focuses both around the criminal and the protagonist. Crime Thrillers use both action and psychological aspects to build tension and suspense.
Some good examples of crime thrillers have been The usual suspects, Jagged Edge and The Fugitive. When we first created a short clip in our primary work to get a good feel on the camera angles, we mostly used a crime base to use these aspects well. This means it wouldn't be difficult for us to use crime thriller as the sub genre for our production as we were able to entail it into our previous work. It worked into a crime thriller through the use of kidnaping and had a lot of mystery to reasons why, these feature a lot into present crime films. As well as already having ideas of how to bring the camera work into this pacific genre for it to work well. A snippet of our own work, against one in a previous movie: To get a good idea of what type of thriller we would want to do, I want to focus into a detailed analyse of three different sub genres and why some would work/not work well for us.
There are many sub genres within a thriller, these being;
Before deciding on a sub-genre for our production, we felt it was best to look more deeply into the possible sub-genres. After researching, I found this video demonstrating definitions of many different sub genres which i thought was quite beneficial.
Horror thrillers have specific codes and conventions that add to the fear, anticipation and distress imparted by horror thrillers. Some of these being: - Canted angles to create confusion and disorientation for the target audience - Long, slow tracking shots to create apprehension - POV shots, usually parralleled with the non-diegetic sound of breathing to engage the target audience - Close ups and Extreme close ups to demonstrate emotions to personally relate to the audience - Quite scenes with sudden disruptions with either diegetic or non-diegetic sound which engages the audience by making them jump or shocked - Distored, slow motion or warped effects in editing to create a disorientated sensation - Props such as weapons, blood or abandoned houses - Colour schemes including low key lighting making the audience feel scared - Red to connote blood, danger and threat - Horrors usually include figures such as ghosts, zombies, dolls, clowns etc. Psychological thrillers usually consist of making the audience feel as though there is sense of moral abuguity, clouding the characters thoughts. They emphasise the psychology of the characters to create expectation and hope. The codes and conventions of a thriller include: - Close ups and Extreme close ups to create a connection/relationship between the target audeince and the characters. - Jump cuts and quick duration shots to demonstrate fast, unexpected actions to the audience - Long pauses in difficult situations. This allows the audience to put themselves into the characters shoes and work out their psychology - Non-diegetic sounds such a clocks ticking and breathing - Non-diegetic music with an eerie, high tension sound to them - Mise-en-scene will typically demonstrate a trapped enviroment (it's less common for wide shots to be used during psychological thrillers, unless demonstrating loneliness). This demonstrates the entrapment of the mind and brings the audience closer to the characters - Flashbacks to engange with the characters past - Cyclical narratives - Black and white colouring to emphasise shadows and isolation Action thrillers usually render a very far-fetched, semi-realistic story all in aim to excite the target audience. They aim to make the target audience believe that even the impossible is possible. Codes and conventions that make up an action thrillers are: - Quick duration and jump shots to keep the audience intrugued. These shots also mirror the fact-paced action occuring - Episodic narratives with smaller events occuring, leading up to the climax (characters and plot revolve around enigma) - Wide shots that almost tell a story in themsleves - Scenes typically located in big cities such as New York (urban areas) - Figures of authority, someone 'on the run' and car chases are stereotypes of an action thriller - Wealth is also demonstrated through action thrillers commonly. Luxuries and expenses are typical of an action thriller (conveyed through the mise-en-scen) - Obstructive editing to create a sense of reality - High-key lighting - Violence is a main aspect and so props such as weapons and blood are used Disaster thrillers main goal are to make the target audience believe that the anything can happen on a scale as small as their town, or as big as the whole world. Codes and conventions that are typical of disaster thrillers are:
- Relatable scenes/scenarios such as plane crashes, the world ending, etc - Special effects and makeup done to make the disaster appear more realistic - Main conflict is due to a natural or artificial disaster such as a hurricane, flood, earthquake or volcanic eruption - The anticipation of "are they going to survive?" - "Big" and "Small" elements ("big" being the disaster itself and "small" being the characters and consequences. This emphasises the severity of the disaster and keeps the audience interested as the slight exaggeration makes the disaster seem more realistic. - Cinematography and mise-en-scene making the disaster look realistic - Corresponding diegetic and non-diegetic sound to build tension - It is typical for characters to die in disaster movies to highlight the realism of disasters. This engages the audience further Burton's Sweeny Todd's opening sequence begins with one continuous shot. The entire opening is done using computer graphics and editing which means no camera techniques are used throughout.
Warner Brothers, Dream Works is the institution that this film was produced by and the establishment of this institution has been edited in the credits sequence. Usually Dreamworks presents their trademark in a fun, colourful and memorable manner, whereas in Sweeny Todd it is presented in a dull, gloomy way to mirror the film itself. This is done to attract their target audiences and give the viewers a feel to what the film is about. The music at this point is quite intense and the use of an organ connotes the idea of an evil, deranged and hair-raising plot to the film. Once the music has calmed and become almost muffled, the credits start to appear. The editor has used a black background with white text on it to make it stand out. The first frame beings at 0:46 with the portrayal of roofs of houses and buildings, which are quite clearly located in England due to their rustic appearance and the redbrick buildings. The weather also backs this up as it appears to be raining in the shot - which is what England is known for. This gives the audience a brief idea of the setting of the film. The use of lightning connotes the idea of fear which is an ongoing theme throughout the film. The entire title sequence never appears to be bright or well-lit and is always mysterious and untrustworthy which also reflects the film. All of these forshadowments make me consider the elements of our opening sequence and how we should incorporate a vague story line into the opening. Throughout the sequence we follow one drop of blood, and this drop acts almost as a narrative as it runs through the whole story. The sequence doesn't show any of the characters in the film, although they are iconic figures, and this suggests that they are even recognisable by their names. Linking Sweeny Todds opening sequence back to our production, it has inspired us to look into using graphics to create our opening sequence as well as camera shot. It also gives us an idea of how tension is built throughout the opening sequence as the outline of the story is told. The codes and conventions establishes how different elements can be shown to the viewer through characters, sound, editing and elements in the genre. When you think of codes and conventions it's what you believe would be to identify the genre, such as for a thriller, you would start to think of how the characters would act and behave. As well as how it would make you feel yourself, in thrillers it would create a big amount of suspense. The sound in thrillers are typically high pitched, eerie, loud and tend to be quick fast snapping sounds like the banging of a door. The elements in a thriller mostly revolve around danger, violence, tension, excitement, suspense and uses a lot of cliff hangers. The characters often used are murderers, criminals, victims and always end up with similar endings to the stories. Different sub genres have different codes and conventions. From looking at different clips I can get a clear detailed analyse of what code and conventions will be used. We need to make sure we contribute most code and conventions included in a thriller into our production and that we connote the aspects well for the audiences purpose. Psychological thrillers- This is a trailer from Shutter Island a typical psychological thriller. In this mise en scene the codes and conventions that are clearly presented mostly in this sub genre were a mental institution, a strange creepy character, clothes stereotypically set in the 40s when psychological thrillers were most popular and frequent. The sound is eerie and quick short duration to create the suspense needed for a thriller. This code and convention links greatly into all areas of a thriller and not just this one sub genre. However this continues with more aspects like needles, nurses and doctors, detectives, pipes, blood but some areas could also be insinuated with horror thrillers. Comic thriller- For a comic thriller I researched into was Shaun Of The Dead, it is a very funny turn onto a zombie movie. The codes and conventions which tend to feature into a comic thriller and is shown in this clip were jumpy, gory, cliff hanger moments, left the audience drawn but also left them laughing with different deaths and script work. This is what identifies it into the genre of still a thriller instead of just a comedy. However they still have codes and conventions of comedy with the double act of partners, one tends to be rather dumb in choices, typical fat guy being unfit, funny props and stupid deaths. Tilted Angle - This angle can be used to convey many different emotions such as confusion, anxiety, commotion, obscurity, demoralization and many more. This angle is a lesser used one and therefore when it is used it engages the audience further.
|
Archives
February 2015
Categories
All
|