Film Studies Evaluation.

In my group I have been working as the cinematographer, in our crime thriller, we decided to give it a crime thriller genre as the idea we had of a murder taking place, is a crime. We didn’t have a specific film that had inspired us to do this genre/style of clip, but we did get further ideas, from such films as, Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ we looked at the shower scene, and used the tension building idea’s as it kept us engaged and thought this would work well in our extract. Our clip is in the middle of the film just after the dilemma has happened. The clip is after a man has killed his wife, we don’t yet know he has killed his wife, but the flashback within the clip shows he may have the clip, the clip begins with a car driving up a backtrack in dark lighting this builds anticipation as we don’t know what is approaching us, to make it look eerie , next is a shot of the man, which is introducing the character at this time we think he is a normal man. then the clip leads to a shot of the boot, and we don’t know what is in the boot, or what’s going to come next, then the man drags a body around the car,
this has clarified to us that the man is about to do something with the body, and also suggests to us that he has murdered the person in the bag, making the audience watch on and see what happens, also it creates the fear of the unknown. It then leads on to the man digging a hole, and then putting the body in the hole, and then has a flashback, which adds in extra narrative, giving the audience more of a understanding about what the man is doing in. Also in the kitchen scene, we felt using a woman would make the audience feel for her more, putting the woman in peril, as this strange looking man is standing behind her with a angry looking expression on his face, making the audience think he may of murdered her and she is the body in the bag.



We put a lot into our sound, we deleted all original sounds off the clip and added in other sound effects we wanted to make the sound much more intense because we had no dialogue we wanted to sound to be great, our sound doesn’t sound out of the ordinary but it has made a lot of difference to our clip. Below are just some of the 30 layers that we added on, I think deleting the sound was a very good idea, because we were outside there was a lot of unwanted background noise, and tapping of the camera, and very unprofessional noises, so replacing the sound made it sound much better, and also we could add in things that were necessary to a thriller, like a very quiet “ghostly roll” which gives it a very sinister freaky feel.
If I had a chance to do this again, we would of recorded far more shot types, because most of them were mid/long shots, but the few close up shots we did were very effective and made the clip less boring, as it was just a very slow tension building clip, so maybe adding in some more close up shots, to show the emotions on the man’s face would be good.



We didn’t really get any influence off any films about our clip, we just thought of some conventions of a thriller, and used them to make our clip, some of the conventions we took were the dark lighting, tension building, seeing the woman character in “peril”, eerie locations, a fear of the unknown. These all helped with the construction of our clip.
The lighting we used, was natural lighting from the car that was in the background of the shot, the car that we saw approaching us in the start of the clip, we felt this gave it a very sinister dark look, which adds in with the dark lighting convention, the only problem with this lighting is in some shots we couldn’t see what was going on, so we had to cut them out, but other than that this lighting decision was a very good one.