The project

The project we had to do the opening sequence of a new thriller which included titles, lasted for approximatley 2 minutes and would be aimed at either a 15 or 18 certificate:

When we came about deciding what we wanted to do with our project we decided that it was going to be a horror/thriller called Crucifix, we cam to the name Crucifix after debateing wether to go for other names such as 'Relic' standing for the traces left behind from the Monk, the definiton of relic is "an object or a personal item of religious significance" We came to this name because after every move made by the monk he would leave behind a personal belonging so there death was more significant to him. Other names included 'Sacrafice' this was more of an obvious name because in our film theMonks method of killing people was to persude them to sacrifice themselves therefor we considered calling our film Sacrafice. After all the debating we eventually went for Crucifix which is the object of significance tho monk would leave behind after each death and the part it would play later in the film.

After the group had decided what we wanted to call the film we then had to make a choice on what age certificate we wanted to aim our film at, and looking at what films of our genre had been released at we decided that our film should be aimed at the 15 certificate in England and 12 in the USA because there are no scenes of a sexual nature, there is violenco only to an extent and the use of bad language is kept very low.

When we had decided on all this we had to decide what we should show in our opening sequence, our 1st instict was to go on the internet and look at the opening sequences to different thriller films, whilst we were doing this we realised that there were many different types of thriller ranging from action adventure to sci-fi such as Alien and horror thrillers such as Halloween! Once we realised this we decided taht a horror thriller would be a good direction to go for especially seeing as the rest of our group wanted to do it before we were told the project brief. Following our decision to do a horror thriller we then decided to do some reseach into what the opening of these films looked like, we looked at films such as Physco and Halloween which were extremly well known but when we watched them we realised that they werequite old and wanted to do some reasearch into more modern horror thrillers that had been released. The thrillers i then went to go on and reseach were films such as : The hills have eyes, Wolf Creek, Eden lake and the Strangers, from looking at these we realised that the opening sequences did not give too much of the story away but you were still able to acknowlege cues that were left for egsample in Eden lake and the strangers the film starts off at a slow pace telling us a differnt story were couples go off to enjoy themselves and then find out that they are beeing stalked, especcially in strangers were it takes atleast half an hour before the 1st attack of the strangers. From wactching the clips we were also able to work out that the characters used in horror thrillers were often inocent victims, psycotic individuals psycho fiends and would often be world weary. Watching the opening sequences also gave us examples off what locations were often used and in the films they often came accross haunted houses, abondoned villages and the setting would be given a very eary and cursed feel to it to create suspense and tension. When considering how lighting and camera were used me noticed a cosintancy of dim littet settings and slow camera shots with lots of sharp and quick cuts which helped create that suspense as we do not know when the next quick cut is coming, especially in the film Strangers which i focused on which had slow cuts but when it came to representing the villain the cuts became quicker and occured alot more often to give the impresion that the victims heart is racing and that they are on the edge and focusing on how to get away from the villain.