opening conventions

Thriller can start in a variety of ways, they usually have some sort of confusion or cliffhanger to get you gripped and carry on watching. Another way they may get you gripped is by an accident or murder , which may then go on to be investigated in the film. Thriller openings are generally quite dark and gloomy as this sets the atmosphere for the film. Shot types vary in openings depending on the narrative (crime, action, psychological, mystery, drama), however there is generally some establishing shots followed by close ups and quick editing if there is action, or mysterious low lit, high angle shots if it is a mysterious thriller.

soundtrack

the soundtrack we have produces for our thriller was made by using lots of different sound effects and putting them all together using imovie. the sounds were downloaded from copyright free sites.
The main sounds we used were spooky whispers and chant songs over the top they are repeated to create tension. The other sounds were snakes hisses and breathing sounds used on images of the snake. on the shot of the snake eyes we have also used a piercing scream.

editing

When editing we had to cut out the shots of the feet stepping on the names as when put it it didn't make much sense and looked better without. We also found that we had to stabilize a lot of clips as they were not steady due to tripod issues, however stabilizing the shots didn't make them completely steady. We also edited a lot of the clips to make them darker and spooky, for the snake shots we added a pre-made effect. For the other shots we increased to contrast and lowered the brightness to make them darker and more mysterious. For transitions we mainly used very quick fade to black as this also made it seem darker as well as slowing the pace down in more hectic area. We tried to edit the clips so towards the end they very quickly change to build up tension.

ident

This is our movie ident, when we looked at other idents they were often based around mythical creatures or earth related images, we chose to go for a mythical image and decided to use medusa as it fitted in well with both the narrative of the thriller with the snakes and eyes, it also represents a female protagonist and it fits with the scary thriller theme. We used an image from google and edited it using photo shop to change the colours, make the eyes yellow and add our chosen name.

These are some examples of other idents.