Pre Production

Planning was vital for our exam piece, it was clear that thriller would be a good choice due to our decided location in Ashridge woods. Hours and hours of brain storming and written planning, piles of scrapped story boards and potential location photos and a final plan emerged. We found a suitable day to walk out into the woods to take photos of our location and the places we thought it would be best to place the camera. As we had a rough plan of the storyline we needed to find a location to film.

We knew that we wanted a certain type of atmosphere. Also, it would need to be a safe area that wasn’t public so as to reduce the possibilities of background noise; but accessible and close to where we lived so as not to take over a day to film.

The location choice was very important and it was essential to choose the best area to create the scene we wanted. A dark area of Ashridge Woods, off the beaten track was the most obvious choice, it was close to our homes and we felt that it would help us to provide the desired atmosphere.

After collecting all our photos we started filming. However, after a couple of hours filming it became very clear that the locations were not suitable for our story and even that was lacking excitement. Back to the drawing board…


Narrative

Todorov suggested that stories begin with an equilibrium or status quo where any potentially opposing forces are in balance. This is disrupted by some event, setting in chain a series of events. Problems are solved so that order can be restored to the world of the fiction. The story needs to be structured to help the viewer understand the messages given throughout the film and this is done through the chronological structure.

Levi-Strauss looked at this narrative structure in terms of binary oppositions; values which reveal the structure of media texts. An example would be GOOD and EVIL – we understand the concept of GOOD as being the opposite of EVIL. Levi –Strauss was not so interested in looking at the order in which events were arranged in the plot. He looked instead for deeper arrangements of themes. For example, if we look at Science Fiction films we can identify a series of binary oppositions which are created by the narrative:

Earth - Space

Good - Evil

Humans -Aliens

Past - Present

Normal - Strange

NARRATIVE - TIME & SPACE

Narrative shapes material in terms of space and time - it defines where things take place, when they take place, how quickly they take place. Narrative, especially that of film and TV, has an immense ability to manipulate our
awareness of time and place e.g. flashbacks, replays of action, slow motion, speeding up, jumping between places and times.

Restricted narrative can be used to surprise an audience, e.g. when a character does not know what is waiting around the corner and neither does the audience. Stories are very important in helping us to make sense of our lives and the world around us, which supports our film structure of thriller. Most of the films we see at the cinema are narrative films, films that tell a story. Even films which are factual often employ story methods to get this point across, for instance a documentary may follow the 'story' of a group of environmental warriors over a period of six months in their fight to prevent a road being built. We are so steeped in the narrative tradition that we approach a film with certain expectations, whether we know anything about the story or not.

For example: We expect the opening to give us information about who, what and where. To see a series of incidents, which are connected with each other. The film shapes the particular expectations by summoning up curiosity, suspense, and surprise. The viewer also develops specific hunches about the outcome of the action, and these may control our expectations right up to the end. The ending has the task of satisfying or cheating the expectations prompted by the film as a whole. This is the type of narative we have chosen to use, as it is conventional to the thriller genre.

Finally, Cause and effect occurs according to a pattern of cause and effect; finally a new situation arises that brings the end of the narrative. Todorov's narrative theory is based on this; an equilibrium is set up which is then disrupted, causing disequilibrium, which is resolved into a new equilibrium by the end of the tale. When we are watching a film we try to connect the events to make sense of what is happening, to see a line of cause and effect.

This is by far the most important factor in narrative because even if there is no obvious connection, we still try to make one. This is a natural reaction because making connections is how we make sense of the world around us. What we are aiming to achieve within out film is to connect the images that the audience will see in both to createa causal effect between them.

We, as the directors can create a mood or atmosphere by choosing certain shots in a certain order, to build a picture in our minds. We wanted to cause an automatic link with what is happens in one shot with what happens in those either side of it, as this is what happens in real life.

Previous examples

Some directors have exploited this idea to extremes. Lev Kuleshov, a Russian filmmaker in the 1920's experimented by showing people shots of an actor in-between shots of different objects - food, a dead woman and a child. The audience interpreted the actor's expressions,Sergei Eisenstein, another Russian filmmaker of the same era, believed that it was more effective if consecutive shots were not obviously linked as the audience were forced to think and interact more to make the mental jump from shot to shot. Montage can be used effectively in propaganda, where the filmmaker wants the audience to believe in a certain idea or concept.

Our film is in a linear form of narrative, we have chosen not to include any flashbacks or scenes from either the past or the future. It is just a standard narrative including the disruption and the attempt to rectify.