Genre/audience Research

Thrillers refer to an emotion, this differs from other genres with refer to a particular location (western) or plot device (science fiction). Thrillers are also known to promote intense excitement, and nerve racking story lines to the audience. A typical thriller usually concentrates on the plot and what is going on around the characters rather than concentrating on the characters. This is why in many thrillers you see a lot of editing, point of view shots and very much of different lighting within the film.

One thing that is very noticeable within the audiences of thrillers is its high number of males in its market. The fasts pace movie with massive concentration on shots, props and scenery has been proven to go down well with the male population. Moreover a huge number of the audience for thrillers are teenagers and young adults. For our film the target audience would be teenagers and young adults, this would be mainly through the use of the sound, characters, props and most Importantly a more modern style of music.

Thrillers tend to also use the actions and sense of humans to build emotion through out their sequence. One way they do this is by almost engaging the audience into the film. For example if there was a murder and the director shows us the scene where the murderer killed his victim, the way in which the director had successfully engaged the audience into the film is by giving the answers to the audience through the sequence.

In the sequence we are doing we are going to use the method of confusing the audience into thinking a stereotypical person with be an antagonist. This is another method a lot of thrillers use. A good example of a thriller that does this is 24. at the end of the first episode where we find out who the real antagonist was, while the audience was thinking it was somebody else.
Below are some key elements that thrillers use within a scene that hopefully we would come around to using within our thriller.


With the picture thrillers use:-
3 point lighting
Key light- main light source
Full light- to take out shadows
Backlight- to take out background
Uses low key light, dim and shadowy which is another way of withholding information from the audience.
They also use continuality editing to add to the expense.
Some thrillers have restricted narration, and hence the audience know more than the protagonist and is equally confused. Thrillers have a complex narrative structure which is non linear, and are multithread.

From our questionaire we have had a mixed response about our ideas and what we are going film. Many people feel that the script doesn't suit the genre of film, as people think this we will have to either change the script or as we film we will have to improvise and try to add more suspense as we film.

Our facebook page also gave us some criticism though it was constructive and helped us change our blog and work. However we also recieved some good feedbacks and this has encouraged us to expand on our idea and take it to the next stage.

From what we have learnt from the questionaire and the facebook page is that our 2 mintue sequence should be aimed at an audience for 15 year olds and above. Also the majority of people who have looked at the blog is male thus making the film generally interesting an young male audience.