Emily Grasby (2016) AS Foundation Portfolio

Welcome back everyone! How would a student create an opening to a thriller film without analysing other thriller openings? Well, during a theory lesson we were recommended to look into the film opening of 'Se7en' as Sir believed there were lots to talk about - so that's what I did! I went back to the basics and created a powerpoint, for you all to view, including as much detail as possible. 

Since our final task is to create a thriller film opening, it would only make sense to ask myself - what really is a thriller? A thriller is a broad genre of literature, film, gaming and TV. It also involves numerous, overlapping sub genres. The whole point of a thriller is to create anticipation and suspense, keeping the audience alert and on the edge of their seats. Usually, the protagonist is set against a 'mystery' and and no matter what the sub genre is, it will emphasise the danger that the protagonist may face during their mission.  Some sub genres of a thriller and an example of them are: Action thrillers - Die Hard & The Bourne Identity Sci Fi thrillers - Inception & District 9 Spy thrillers - James Bond  Religious thrillers - The Da Vinci Code & The Ninth Gate  Supernatural thrillers - The Conjuring & The Sixth Sense Crime thrillers - Jagged Edge & The Usual Suspects  What should we expect to see in a thriller? Main con...

When it comes to filming, lighting is very important as it creates the atmosphere for the specific genre (ours being thriller of course) and always plays a key role in the mise en scene. Without the correct lighting, our thriller task will lack verisimilitude - how realistic the piece of film looks. So, as part of the planning stage, I will be looking into how to create different types of lighting with examples that me and my group have taken! Natural Lighting Natural lighting is what it says - from a natural source such as the sun or fire etc.  As the sun wasn't out (typical British weather), our source for this photo was simply the very blinded white sky! High Key Lighting High Key photography uses unnaturally bright lighting to blow out most of all harsh shadows in an image. High key methods were originally developed as a solution to screens that couldn't properly display high contrast ratios, but has developed into more of a stylistic choice.  ...

Back to our theory lessons, for section A of the exam we have to explore the ways in which different topics are represented. I previously created a Prezi on how age is represented, but this time I will be discussing sexual identity. I chose Emily Fields from the show Pretty Little Liars to discover how her lesbian role is represented. 

Here we have a very short clip taken of me and Holly walking, which has been edited on After Effects to add the text to it. We created this as a group to give ourselves an introduction to the programme itself, ready for when we'll use it for our final thriller task.  

Even though I created my preliminary evaluation via Sway, as a trio we decided to film ourselves having a real discussion about our task. We chose to chat about what we liked, disliked about our film and how we managed to work so well together. I'm really glad we filmed this as it's another way to show you our opinions towards the preliminary task! (Hopefully you appreciate the palm trees behind us too)