Previous Year 12 Thrillers

From watching last year's year twelve's thrillers, we noticed a few things which we though could be improved or avoided:

Firstly, we discovered that when the thrillers were filmed at night, the cameras were not very good. In many of the thrillers that we watched, they had tried to create a ‘scary’ or 'creepy' atmosphere by shooting at night, however it turned out that when we watched them it was simply difficult to see what was happening.

Some of the thrillers we watched included an isolated location, which is a good way of creating a tense atmosphere; however this is ruined when something which is out of place can be seen on screen. For example there should not be somebody walking a dog in the middle of an 'isolated' forest. Also, we should make sure that our iconography matches the genre, e.g. if a knife is used it should be a sharp butcher knife, rather than a butter knife.

Many of the thrillers included panning shots which were unsteady, somewhat ruining the quality of the film. We will practice panning with the cameras and also do multiple takes to prevent this from happening.

As mentioned in a previous post, when filming we will avoid using too much, if any, dialogue as the cameras are not good at picking up sound.

Another thing which we thought could be improved in many of the videos was the acting and casting. Many of the groups simply acted themselves, however it just doesn’t look right when teenagers are in a thriller, so we will try to use older actors who match the iconography of a thriller film.