How we got to the final product

When our group thought about thrillers and the ones we had seen in the past, we concluded that many of them occur in places people usually consider as ‘safe’. In Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, a hotel is a typically comforting place, designed to look like a ‘home away from home’. Political thrillers are typically set in ‘The White House’, a building symbolising safety and leadership.

Our group decided we wanted the setting to vary, we wanted the appearance of a warm, welcoming pub – with a cold, eerie clinical kitchen. Emma worked in the pub, and the school kitchen classrooms provided the “too clean” atmosphere we wanted. We wanted the normality and quaintness of the pub to be put under question, as a pub is typically a friendly place – and most thrillers are set in seemingly normal places.

Our group wanted that warm/cold contrast to be reflected in our two characters. We wanted the ‘murderer’ to be the cold, clinical character, and the ‘victim’ to be shown as a friendly one, feeding into the warmth that the setting portrays.

We did this by showing that Alex (our murderer) was unemotional about cleaning up the scene where she has just killed her friend, Me (funny that, I’m the one that has to die). We included flashbacks of their friendship, showing them walking and laughing, sitting down and laughing, taking photos of themselves (ugh, teenagers) and genuinely looking as though they were best friends and totally hadn’t just met each other 5 minutes ago when Alex got roped in. However, the crime that Alex has just obviously committed throws the authenticity of her friendship with the victim into some question.

We wanted the audience to question Alex’s motives, question her friendship with my character and perhaps even question the supposed friendliness of my character. We didn’t want to answer any questions in our opening of course, otherwise the audience would be disinterested in the rest of the film (and if we gave it away, what could we possibly do with the remaining 90 minutes?). We incorporated a possible supernatural element with the shot of the graffiti on the wall - Did Alex write that? Who is ‘they’? Did they make Alex commit the crime? Will we find out who ‘they’ are?

The beginnings of our first idea are written to the side, we looked at the different thrillers we could get inspiration from – “Sev7n” and “Inglorious Basterds” films which have memorable opening credits. We specifically liked Tarantino’s opening, with contrapuntal music used to play with the audience’s expectations of a thriller.

We also looked at the events after the famous shower scene in “Psycho” – at how Norman Bates was so used to cleaning up a gruesome murder like that, without a shred of emotion or any noticeable mental repercussions (aside from his mother taking residence inside his head, but those are just minor details). This is how we decided that we wanted a cold character, who the audience could decide “She’s done this before” or “She really hated the victim”, the audience could take it from both approaches, or choose one. Either way, the character is represented in a way that is typical to the “villains” in thrillers.

We also used this opportunity to plan out some scenes, the props and the camera angles, to really get a feel for the opening we were going to make.

After deciding that this is a direction we’d like to take with our thriller, we then drew up a storyboard, which we used as a guide when making our thriller.

It details what music we’d like – “creepy music in-between these shots” and then “happy music” (our small homage to Tarantino). We decided what sounds should be diegetic and which ones should be non diegetic – so whilst editing we had a clear set of instructions to go by.

We also played around with the order of scenes, taking them out of logical, chronological order and placing them in a different order – cutting across tense scenes, coming before the crime, coming after the crime (after this, we decided to cut the actual act completely, we wanted to leave some ambiguity of how the victim died – playing into the vagueness of what type of thriller this actually is)