The Research and Planning processes

Research and Planning

Various amounts of research went into how we would get our thriller opening to reflect other real thriller films. One of the researches we did was looking into the conventions of a thriller film. For example low key lighting, quick cuts, mystery and suspense.  Another piece of research which we did was primarily about the type of audience that attend thriller films typically. This is why we used a free online questionnaire making website in order to make our questionnaire the reason why we did our questionnaire on the website is so that it could be accessed publicly and we wouldn’t have to waste time going around asking for the answers in person. From the questionnaires we found out the age range of though who typically watch thriller films also found out what they expect from a thriller in order to make sure that we added the right components so that our film would appeal to the audience’s expectations.  This later helped with our planning as we planned out our target audiences using the results we found out from our questionnaire. More importantly another piece of important research which we did was looking at the age restrictions which helped us confirm our target audiences after deciding on everything that we would include. For example we wanted to include blood in our thriller opening we were only able to do this with a 15 age restriction anything lower mean that we would not be able to have blood in our thriller opening. This is why this research on the age restrictions in terms of what you can or not can include was very important because in real thriller openings they would have to abide by the rules of the age restriction.  Also the shape of a thriller opening whilst researching this we got to view examples of thriller with a certain type of opening which follow an order of both titles and credits first along with the title or just the title of the film with the credits at the end.  For our preliminary task we didn’t have enough time for research or planning at all so we just improvised more than we planned.

One of our best planning posts were our story boards  this is because we had made our storyboards by hand during the pre-production stage of our thriller opening,  and the blog itself as a shared resource helped to plan because we were able to look at previous work to find inspiration or ideas that we could develop on.  In addition upload our own so that it could be automatically saved and available to share. Additionally, the location of our thriller opening was very important as I had to fit in with the event that would be taking place. And this helped to plan the thriller opening by giving us a target of what to look for. For example for our thriller opening we needed and inside bathroom the reason for this is that both our character would need to have a conversation in a bathroom and this location gave up a plan for production day as we had to travel to the house that we were going to shoot in.  The animatic plan helped to plan by getting our shots in order so that we can know what comes first and what we would have to shoot. But also our sot list did this also by clearly giving us direction as of what to shoot this helped planning because we were clear of the shots and how we would take them.