Genre research

Psychological thriller:

'Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the wide-ranging thriller genre. However, this genre often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre in addition to the typical traits of the thriller genre. Also, occasionally this genre will border into the also wide-ranging Horror genre.

Generally, thrillers focus on plot over character, and thus emphasize intense, physical action over the character's psyche. Psychological thrillers tend to reverse this formula to a certain degree, emphasizing the characters just as much, if not more so, than the plot.

The suspense created by psychological thrillers often comes from two or more characters preying upon one another's minds, either by playing deceptive games with the other or by merely trying to demolish the other's mental state.'


This is similar to the genre of our film as we have a character, the mother, who plays games with others minds to distract them away from the fact that she has mental problems and committed a crime.

Our new film idea - final

Over the Christmas holidays and the new year our group has been carefully thinking about our new film idea and have almost finalised the ideas for it. We recieved the cameras today and have been allocated them for just 2 weeks before we must hand them back and finally start to edit. We have also completed a storyboard for this new idea which I will upload a photo of shortly.

Our final film idea is:
* We will have a person (most probably one of our group members) laying asleep in a part of a forest we found at Forty Hall and thought looked effective
* The person will have flashbacks of the day before which will start to explain why they are asleep in this random place
* The person will then wake up and we will see their confused and bewildered expression of why they are there

The camera shots we aim to use are:
* A close up pan of the body on the floor so the audience can see the person is asleep but can not see their location
* Close up and extreme close ups of the person and different body parts such as their hands and feet twitching to show they are asleep or dreaming
* A zoom into their eyes just before the start of the flashbacks to let the audience know they are about to see their dream
* A range of different camera angles including wide, medium, long, low angled and high angled for different parts of the flash backs
* A zoom back out from their eyes to show they are coming out of the dream and shows their eyes opening
* A series of 3 shots getting wider and wider out, keeping the person in the middle of the shot to show their location and to represent their realisation of where they have just woken up

We also discussed the idea of having the flash backs in black and white or some kind of other effect whilst keeping the actual sleeping person in colour to represent the difference in time and to show it is a dream. We have decided to film it all in colour though and edit it in imovie so we have a variety of options when editing.

We feel that this will be a better film opening than our first idea and think it will look effective. It will also be more of a film opening than a mini 2 minute film which is what we did before as we concluded our story.