ideas for my thriller

From looking at numerous thriller films over the past couple of months, most recently Layer Cake, I am beginning to get some ideas for my own thriller opening.

Many of the thrillers I have seen start with something drammatic, for example an explosion in Layer Cake, someone being shot in Sin City etc, and so think this would be a good aspect to include in my own thriller, as it creates mystery and intrigue, whilst also sticking to the theme of crime and corruption. When discussing this, we suggested to start with a chase. I feel very influenced by the chase in Layer Cake, and so we aim to create a chase scene similar to that. We want to mix both handheld point of view camera shots with panning shots, with fast paced editing, to increase the excitement in the scene. We have also considered adding some postproduction editing to create the effect of someone looking through binoculars/a gun by only showing the middle circle of the shot. This would add to the mystery, and also make the sequence more interesting.

We have also had the idea of introducing the male protagonist in our opening, but have not yet decided on whether it should be in the traditional setting - a brown office with wooden furniture and pictures, books and a fan around the room, or whether we should have a more modern clinical theme, with a very clean setting, full of white and bright lighting.

As alot of thrillers, including Vertigo, Chinatown and Essex Boys, use shots inside a car- either looking through the windscreen at the driver and passenger, or positioned in the back seats, it would be good to use a scene in a car. However a shot through the front window would obviously be very hard and dangerous, so we would need to use a shot from the back of the car.

We also discussed our camera skills, emphasising that we need to remember the rule of thirds when filming, abd should use a range of shots. We will also hopefully take some clever shots using things such as reflections to make our film more interesting.

My group and I talked briefly about possible locations and found that we all think that settings such as a hospital (if we get permission) would be excellent if we were to follow the clinical idea, a park early in the morning or at night would make a good deserted setiing, and Norwich city centre would be good if we needed a busy urban setting. I also thought that old cobbled streets like elm hill, especially at night or in the rain would be an effective thriller location.

Over the next couple of days we are hoping to achieve some more definate ideas for our opening, and also to create a detailed story board.