Introduction to coursework

In my courswork, i was asked to create a film, or start of, with any genre i so choose. However, instead of using video footage, we had to show the film in stills, or photographs. We had a limit of 20 stills in which we should create something that the audience can follow without any confusion. The genre I have chose for my stills movie is thriller and in my 20 stills, I am trying to tell the opening scenes of a thriller film. The preface of my story is this: A hit man following a girl into her house to extract information from her and then kill her. As these are the opening scenes, the audience does not understand why he does this, which I feel left a very nice cliffhanger.

Sequence shots

Shot 1: Medium Close Up
The first shot in the sequence is a medium close up of our first character. Her name is Louise and she lives in the house she is about to enter. She is seen in the middle of the frame so that you can see more of what is around her, such as her hand opening the door.

Shot 2: Extreme Close Up
Whilst you cant see it due to the extreme close up, the hand in this still belongs to the hitman, Mark, who is following the girl into her house. He has taken his chances in hope that she hadn't locked the door and he got lucky to find it open.




Shot 3: Medium
This is the first time we see the hitman, Mark. He is entering up the stairs of the house and is portraying all the usual signs of a hitman. He is wearing all black, and in his right hand, he has his weapon of choice: in this case, it is a knife.


Shot 4: Medium Shot/ POV shot
In this photo, we do not see any of the characters in the sequence. However, we have a POV shot from the hitmans perspective. He has found his way through the house and into the young girls bedroom who he wants to extort information from.



Shot 5: Long Shot
The girl is focused right in the middle of the frame, so this shows it is another POV from the hitmans eyes. The white room and light in the corner shows the innocence of the young girl. She is a symbol for everything that is good whilst the hitman, all in black, is a symbol for evil.


Shot 6: Medium Shot
In this shot, the girl realises who the hitman is and she can see the weapon he has pulled on her. Her facial expression shows she is scared she is, not only by the knife, but by the hitman himself.


Shot 7: Extreme Close Up
The hitman has grabbed his victim and has her where he wants her. The mirror shot is clever as it shows her facial expression again as the knife is next to her throat. However, the hitman does not want to kill her just yet, he wants some information from her.


Shot 8: Close up
In this shot, the hitman has led his guard down for just a second so he can get the information he needs, however, the young girl has seized upon the chance to escape and grabbed a weapon of her own as she is determined to stay quiet and not give in to what the man wants.


Shot 9: Close Up
The girl, using her new weapon, turns the tables on her hitman and attacks him with a can of hairspray. The killer shields himself from most of the spray so is not wholy effected.


Shot 10: Close up
The girl thinks she can escape but the hitman wasn't blinded by the hairspray so he chases her out of the room and grabs her back and throws her into the adjacent bathroom.



Shot 11: Medium Shot
The hitman has the girl cornered now and advances on her with his knife. The white of the bathroom is significant here because it implies that the girl lives a good life in a nice house.



Shot 12: Extreme Close Up
This shot is simply, the killer turning the scolding hot tap on. He is going to use this to torture his victim with a drowning technique. This is the best way he feels to extort and extract the information that he needs from her.


Shot 13: Close Up
The hitman has his victim by the hood of her jumper and is plunging her face into the scolding hot water. Repeating this sequence, he finally gets the victim to come clean and tell him what he wants to know



Shot 14: Close Up
The hitman has stopped with the torture as the girl is ready to talk and tell him what he wants to know. He hands over a piece of scrap paper and a pen so she can write down what he wants to know. The clever thing about this is the audience are still none the wiser as to what he wants from her, though that is realised in the next few stills.


Shot 15: Close up
Just to be sure, the hitman holds his knife to the girls throat whilst she writes down what he needs, still this is not known to the audience.



Shot 16: Close Up
Finally, the audience finds out what it was the hitman wanted. It is an address of a hideout currently occupied by a man named "Smith". The hitman seems to have what he has come for now.


Shot 17: Extreme Close Up
It was not enough for the hitman to get his information, he did not want to be found out if the young girl was to phone for help. Instead, he tries to cover his tracks and kills her, starting with a slit to the jugular vein in her throat.


Shot 18: Extreme Close Up
Another slit to the face and the girl is nearing the end. The hitman does not stop but instead keeps stabbing her untill she is dead



Shot 19: Close Up
The penultimate shot in the sequence is the killer ripping his knife out of the body of the girl. He has left her for dead, got his information and is now about to flee the scene.



Shot 20: Medium Shot
The killer, information in hand, is leaving the scene. His knife, stowed away in his back pocket is a symbol of the casual manner in which he has just killed. The evil man in black, about to step out into the light.

Evaluation

The sequence of stills I created for my storyboard was used in the thriller genre. Because of this, I had to keep with codes and conventions of a real thriller film. I used a hitman, a usual character in this genre and I dressed him up in all black to denote evil. I used a girl who lived in a white house and wore a flower in her hair to denote she is good and innocent. The film I have created would be mainstream, if of course budget would not have been an issue. I imagined it as a large budget film with well known actors. My target audience would have been 15-25 year olds as it would be fast paced, quick action and lots of explosions.
My source of inspiration in my film was from well known actor Matt Damon in the Bourne film trilogy. He plays a spy figure which is something I enjoy in films and i tried to incorporate that into my sequence. Another huge piece of inspiration I took was from the bathroom scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Phsyco. The scene takes place with an innocent woman being stabbed repeatedly in a bathroom which is something i tried to mimic in my own work whilst not copying it and stealing the idea.
Another thing I tried to do in my film was use symbolism. The way I did this was to use props and identify good clothing choices for the two characters we see. In reference to clothes, I dressed the hitman in an entirely black outfit because, as i mentioned earlier, this signals evil whilst the young girl had a flower in her hair to denote her innocence and purity. The house she lived in was white on the inside, including the bathroom and a lot of light was shining in through the windows so this would signify the angelic and golden side to her.
I had an idea for my film if it was to hypothetically be developed into a major film. Due to the audience not really knowing why the hitman has gone into the girls house to get information, I was going to play along with that idea. I would show the hitman chasing his target throughout the film and encountering him a number of times but never being able to kill him do to one thing or another. Finally, they would have a big showdown and the hitman would get his man, then going on to reveal in a way, he was only after the man because he killed the hitmans family and he was out for revenge. He would then feel satisfied and could die a happy man, or be jailed and he would accept with no arguments. This would show that the death of his family had an odd effect on him and he had mental instabilities.
Throughout this coursework I have learnt a lot, including how to frame shots at an advanced level. In previous projects I have used a film camera instead of a stills camera so I have always tried to frame shots in a manner that would make the project look good. This project as showed me that by taking the same still 3 or 4 times, even though it is the same thing in the shot, if one is framed better than another, it instantly looks better. I enjoyed creating this project as it has taught me a lot more about how a director would go about the pre production of a film. He would not just grab a camera and start filming, he would take stills of his props, and settings and scenery to give the crew and himself, a good idea of what he wants to do in the film.