Forecast Says It's Brainstorming!

We finally decided on our film's genre: THRILLER. Their purpose is to make the audience feel suspense and excitement throughout the duration of the film. I did some research on thrillers to see what the genre's conventions and what most thrillers contain. This is some of what I found:

• It usually consists of a battle between the protagonist and antagonist 
• The plot shows a series of bad events that build up tension and suspense for the film's climax
• The protagonist's intentions are to restore justice, while the antagonist's are to destroy it
• Low-key lighting, quick cuts, shadows, high-tension music, etc. are usually incorporated in a thriller
• The story line is usually created so that the audience believes it could happen to them, causing them to be scared
• Close-ups and extreme close-ups are used frequently and quick cuts are used with antagonist in order to hide their identity and tot focus on the emotions of the main characters.
• Jump cuts and cross cutting are commonly used editing techniques 
• Music is a key component in a thriller, correlates to what the people in the film are experiencing and portrays that feeling to the viewers. The music often starts out at a slow pace and increases to dramatize the scenes for the viewers, helping to create tension and suspense that is conveyed to the audience.

So that's a start. We still haven't selected our sub-genres though. Those will be selected as soon as our story fully develops and we have a clear idea of what we want to do with it. For right now though, my group has come up with a couple ideas that we are considering. We also have some elements we want to incorporate into our film but that we haven't built upon yet and developed into full-thought out ideas. Our possible film ideas are:

• A girl confuses a murderer as her boyfriend, we liked this idea but we thought that it was too similar to another iconic horror/thriller movie featuring a young Drew Barrymore.
• Then another idea was proposed, in this concept, a guy dives into a pool with several people surrounding him and comes up for air in the middle of the ocean, completely isolated. This could be filmed with a drone that Nico has, but the idea hasn't been developed at all yet, but we could definitely build a story around this scene.
• There's a type of alien/government take over or invasion and the main subject is compromised and becomes a mind-controlled drone. This idea sounds familiar so we have to do some research to see if it's been done before and make it more detailed because some aspects could be changed to make it better and more original. 

Those three ideas listed are what we're bouncing off of right now, granted we still have to choose one and then develop it a lot more and take into consideration all the filming and props we'd need to do our idea justice. This is as far as our brainstorming has taken us, but stay tuned, next time we'll (hopefully) have our idea down and already have started developing it.

--Blogger Buitano


JasonsA2Media Follow. "Codes and Conventions of the Thriller Genre." LinkedIn SlideShare. N.p., 10 Sept. 2013. Web. 12 Mar. 2017.