The rules of Thrillers

Thrillers should have;
An antagonist, resourceful protagonist, suspense, a magufin, an enigma, reason for conflict, a more powerful antagonist who throughout the film gets beaten by the less powerful protagonist and fast paced action.

Some features of thrillers are,
flash backs, mysterious phone calls, a false hero, the hero falls in love, weapons, high tech gadgets.

Chuck Jones, the rules for "Road Runner"

The Road Runner cannot harm or upset the Coyote except by going "Beep! Beep!"
No outside force can harm the Coyote only his own ineptitude or failure of Acme products.
The Coyote could stop anytime if he were not a fanatic.
No dialogue ever except "Beep! Beep!"
The road runner must stay on the road otherwise logically he would not be called the Road Runner.
All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters - the Southwest American desert.
All materials, tools, weapons or mechanical conveniences  must be obtained from Acme corporation.
Whenever possible, make gravity the coyote's greatest enemy.
The coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failure.

Thrillers and the 5 types

"The thriller is a very difficult genre to pin down because it covers a wide range of films. Thrillers are films of suspense that are supported to instill terror in to the audience." Susan Hayward, key concept in film studies.

There are five types of thrillers, these are:
Spy thrillers like Mission Impossible
Political thrillers like Manchurian Candidate
Conspiracy thrillers such as State of play
Legal thrillers such as Time to kill
Psychological thrillers like Psycho

"when u enjoy something, you must not let logic get to much in the way. Like villains in James Bond movies, whenever bond breaks in to the complex: ah Mr Bond, welcome, come in. Let me show you my entire evil plan and then put you in a death machine that doesn't work" Terry Seinfeld

127 Hours

The 2010 film 127 Hours is a film about a mountain climber who gets trapped by a boulder near the Grand Canyon in America. We follow the climber from the moment he leaves his house to the moment where he is home. we follow him through all the time he is trapped by the boulder and when he has to amputate his arm to save his life.

Director: Danny Boyle
Writers: Danny Boyle Simon, Beaufoy
Stars: James Franco

the budget for this film was an estimate $18 million. In the opening weekend the film grossed $264,851 from 4 screens n the USA alone.world wide the film has Grossed $57,547,568.

This film is not a convensional thriller but I am writing about it as it is a good example of effective build up of tension. In this film the threat is coming from nature and not a person. The resourceful hero uses everything he has with him to help him to survive. For example he uses his ropes to create a seat to stop him from using his energy. this is a very simple story which grips the viewer.

The film shows time going as the time on the video camera is shown several times and then the battery of the camera goes which shows that time is running out.

Source Code

source code a 2011 action thriller that sees a soldier who wakes up in a body of an unknown civilian and discovers his part of a mission to find out the bomber of a chicago commuter train. The story is not simple and at times can be very confusing. There are many points in the film where we get put off the track of who the bomber is.

Director: Duncan Jones
Writer: Ben Ripley
Staring: Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monoghan

The estimated budget of this film was $32 million and grossed $14,812,094 in the USA alone by the 3rd of April 2011. To date it has grossed over $54,696,000.

There are three types of thriller themes in this film, these are physical action, phycological thriller and detective story. the physical action in this film comes from where they are on the train searching for the bomber, the phycological part is how the film fits together and lastly the detective story is when we try and figure out who the bomber actually is.

AS coursework

the titles and opening of a new fiction film in the thriller genre to last two minutes. The coursework is 50% of the course. The production itself is worth 60% of the marks. The blog is worth 40% of the marks. 20 marks are awarded for planning and research, construction is worth 60 makes and the valuation is worth 20 marks.
marks are awarded for demonstrating excellence in the following criteria:
Holding a shot steady
Framing a shot
Using a variety of shot distances
Shooting material appropriate to the task set
Editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer
using varied shot transitions, captions and other effects selectively and where appropriate for the task set
Using sound with images

Preliminary task

On Friday we started our preliminary task, which is to show the use of eye line match, match on action, 180 degree rule and shot/reverse shot. 


We are following this plan:
character A walks towards the door.
Character A enters through the door, crossing the room to where B is seated.

Character A+B exchange a few lines of dialogue.
Character A exits the room


We decided that character A was going to be Jack, character B was going to be Sunnie and I was going to film it. We got through most of the scenes but still have a few more to do and then we will start to edit what we filmed.