Thriller Planning // Mise-en-Scene

Whilst Planning for our thriller, I played with several ideas and themes for the piece, before formulating them into a complete, cohesive idea. I thought about which thrillers I found the most exciting or engaging, such as Battle Royale, No Country For Old Men and American Psycho and thought about what themes and techniques were prevalent in these films and how they are effective in creating tension and intrigue. Thus we see many different images and ideas within this moodboard from many different sources, and many emergent themes. For example, the idea of an unexpected killer such as Patrick Bateman from American Psycho was a large inspiration for me in formulating ideas so he has been included on the moodboard (bottom left corner). Other inspirational themes that can  be seen within the moodboard are that of a Peaceful and idyllic yet sparse and empty location, such as seen in No Country for Old Men and the Photographer/voyeur Archetype such as seen in Rear Window and Blow Up. This helped me to visualize and create a variety of ideas (that I will discuss in further detail later) during the planning stage, something that I found useful.

My group and I decided to call our film "Flashpoint" because of the double connotation. Camera's quite commonly come with a flash function, so the 'Flash' section of the title is related to the camera element of the narrative. Flashpoint is a military term and is defined as "The point at which eruption into significant action, creation, or violence occurs" so it links to the point of action of Grace finding Fred's Corpse. We chose to name our production company "Rear Window Productions" in reference to Hitchcock's classic thriller which, as mentioned previously, has a similar narrative hook. We chose to use the sans-serif font Bebas for our title as it reflected the alienated and detached nature of the murder and complimented the classy, high brow look we were aiming for.  

I aimed for the lighting of the opening to be quite natural, relying on the sun and natural outside ambient light and this was for several reasons. Primarily, with the location that I was using, lighting would be limited to natural lighting due to lack of lighting budget, but was also, to create a desaturated tone to the film, similar to realist, dark thrillers such as "Kill List" and "Dead Man's Shoes". In addition, using the sun, I would be able to get some aesthetically interesting Chiaroscuro shots, with the bright sun casting silhouettes of the characters, which also allow an air of mystery to be created, further enhancing tension.