Chosen Genre and Genre Conventions

Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the wide-ranging thriller genre. However, this genre often incorporates elements from the mystery 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. This allows for the audience to experience what is happening to the characters within the films and attempt to understand what emotions are running through their mind.The mental state can be played with in psychological thrillers. Suspense can be created through character relationships and actions.

Sometimes the suspense comes from within one solitary character where characters must resolve conflicts with their own minds. Usually, this conflict is an effort to understand something that has happened to them. These conflicts are made more vivid with physical expressions of the conflict in the means of physical manifestations.

Conventions of a psychological thriller include:
Literary devices such as suspense, red herrings and cliffhangers are used repeatedly. This allows the audience to remain curious and leaves them time to really think in-depth about what they are seeing. The genre is a flexible form that can undermine audience complacency through a dramatic rendering of psychological tensions and encourages sheltered but sensation-hungry audiences, in Hitchcock's phrase, "to put their toe in the cold water of fear to see what it's like."
Within the films the conflict between the main characters is mental and emotional, rather than physical.

Possible Locations:
Usually thriller films are set in exotic settings such as foreign cities, deserts, polar regions, or high seas.
However, many directors may choose to set their films in what would be seen as a 'normal' family enviroment to allow the audience to see that even though they seem happy enough, they will have a much more deeper personality and depth to their character.

Examples:
The Alfred Hitchcock films Suspicion(1941),Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Strangers on a Train (1950)
David Lynch's and influential Blue Velvet (1986) are notable examples of the type of film we will be basing of film opening on.
As is The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith and The Good Son (1993) starring Elijah Wood and Macaulay Culkin.

Initial planning and changes we made

Location
We plan to shoot our film opening on a dark, sinister pathway. This is due to the impression we want the audience to receive, then we will contrast and film some of the opening in an everyday family home. These locations have been chosen as they suit our genre conventions and fit with the main themes to our film. When shooting we have had to think about whether to shoot in the day or at night, if we shoot outside when it’s light we can add some special effects in afterwards. This factor will be dependant on the whether and the environmental state on that day. To see which method will look more effective overall, we will have to text them both.

Production Concerns
When creating our short film opening we will have to ensure we follow the health and safety regulations. Everything we attempt must remain within these guidelines and we must ensure that everything is safe and will cause no harm to use or anyone else.

Technical Limitations
As our film isn’t on the same scale as a large scale Hollywood film, therefore things such as costume and props will be limited. Also, the equipment and machinery will not be available to us like it is within multi million pound productions. However, we will still be able to create an effective film opening which follows the genre conventions and fulfils the brief well.


Changes we made
We decided that we would change our orginal idea to include the attack on the young girl within our opening, although we kept the shots of her after/before her attack we decided that by limiting what the audience know at this point will allow for them to want to continue on and see more. The quick pace, repeated snapshots of her on the path were later added to allow for tension to build and for suspense to be created.
After editing our film we looked upon improvements we could make and I believe we have addressed many weakenesses to our film and I can confidentally say that we have changed them to the best of our ability to portray the correct message to our viewers.

Synoptic Treatment

Psychological thriller is a sub-genre of the thriller genre and horror genres. Many elements that you would find in both genres are incorporated into this. This genre concentrates a lot on the mind and focuses on the processes in which the mind goes through and how it works. By combining these two genres, the definition changes to a narrative that could change the characters exposed to danger on a mental level rather than a physical one. Characters are no longer reliant on the physical but rather are reliant on their mental resources, whether it is by battling wits with a formidable opponent or by battling for an equilibrium in the characters own mind. Films such as Sixth Sense (1999) and the more recent Vanilla Sky (2001) fit into our chosen genre, however 'Family Ties' will hopeufully add a new dimension to the conventions already evident within the genre.

The plot sees how a family is broken apart by the father's lack of mental stability leading to him blaming his daughter for the breakdown of marriage to his wife and the family unit. As the film progresses the father becomes more and more obsessed that his own daughter is the soul factor for the slow demolishion of his life. We track how his own demons and issues lead to the brutal arrangement of rape and phyiscal abuse to his daughter. Consequently, we see how the daughter becomes vunerable and needs her father with her, therefore allowing for him to regain his postion within the household. Oblivious to the culprit of the crimes, the daughter wants her mother to trust her father again, this leads to the father believing that the destruction of his daughter is the only way for him to be within the family unit once again. The mother develops a life threatening disease and becomes ill for many months and eventually passes away, this pushing the father over the edge and sending his mind into turmoil makes him positive that the daughter's lack of care was the cause of his wife's death. He decides that she needs to be punished and his twisted mind believes that its time for him to "teach her a lesson" and therefore sets out to abuse her humself. However, as he attempts to murder her she fights back and as she picks up a close-by weapon her father's identity is revealed but the consequence of the blow to her fathers head is not. This will leave the audience wondering if the father has been killed.

Key themes within 'Family Ties' will be: obsession; death; paranoia and disturbia of the mind. These themes fit with our genre choice and incorporate some of the key conventions, they therefore will help our ideas be put across and will portray the correct message to our audience who are watching.

Possible directors for 'Family Ties' could include, M.N Shymalan as he directed Sixth Sense and succeeded in creating a psychological thriller that has become extremely popular at the box office. Its interesting key themes and the way the plot was portrayed has helped it to do so. His excellent directorial skills lead to the film recieving six oscar nominations. Another director that could allow for our film to reach its full potential is Quentin Tarentino as he would add the dark, sinister techniques which would allow for the audience to see the father character as we would like them too. Any of these directors would allow for 'Family Ties' to have that unique edge over other films within the same genre and create an individuality about the film.

Looking at the box office takings of Sixth Sense and the extremely positive response to the film, i would hope that 'Family Ties' could achieve the same.
Sixth sense produced $672,806,292 in its lifetime grosses worldwide.

Based on many other films that would be judged in the same way as 'Family Ties' i believe that the expected certification for our film will be 15. This will be suitable for our film as the restrictions within a 15 certified film are parallel with the content of 'Family Ties'.

History Of Film Research

Birth of Film
The history of film spans over a hundred years, from the latter part of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century. Motion pictures developed gradually from a carnival novelty to one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment, and mass media in the 20th century. Motion picture films have had a substantial impact on the arts, technology, and politics.

The silent area
In the silent era of film, marrying the image with synchronous sound was not possible for inventors and producers, since no practical method was devised until the late 1920s. Thus, for the first thirty years of their history, movies were silent, although accompanied by live musicians and sometimes sound effects and even commentary spoken by the showman or projectionist. In most countries the need for spoken accompaniment quickly faded, with dialogue and narration presented in intertitles, but in Japanese cinema it remained popular throughout the silent era.


Animation
The most important development in this area of special techniques did not happen until 1905, when Edwin Porter made How Jones Lost His Roll, and The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog. Both of these films had intertitles which were formed by the letters moving into place from a random scattering to form the words of the titles. This was done by exposing the film one frame at a time, and moving the letters a little bit towards their final position between each exposure. This is what has come to be called “single frame animation” or “object animation”, and it needs a slightly adapted camera that exposes only one frame for each turn of the crank handle, rather than the usual eight frames per turn.
In 1906, Albert Edward Smith and James Stuart Blackton at Vita graph took the next step, and in their Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, what appear to be cartoon drawings of people move from one pose to another. This is done for most of the length of this film by moving jointed cut-outs of the figures frame by frame between the exposures, just as Porter moved his letters. However, there is a very short section of the film where things are made to appear to move by altering the drawings themselves from frame to frame, which is how standard animated cartoons have since been made up to today.

The sound era
Experimentation with sound film technology, both for recording and playback, was virtually constant throughout the silent era, but the twin problems of accurate synchronization and sufficient amplification had been difficult to overcome (Eyman, 1997). In 1926, Hollywood studio Warner Bros. introduced the "Vita phone" system, producing short films of live entertainment acts and public figures and adding recorded sound effects and orchestral scores to some of its major features. The sound film was invented by the Hungarian Dénes Mihály in 1918. During late 1927, Warners released The Jazz Singer which was mostly silent but contained what is generally regarded as the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film; but this process was actually accomplished first by Charles Taze Russell in 1914 with the lengthy film The Photo-Drama of Creation. This drama consisted of picture slides and moving pictures synchronized with phonograph records of talks and music. The early sound-on-disc processes such as Vita phone were soon superseded by sound-on-film methods like Fox Movie tone, DeForest Phonofilm, and RCA Photo phone. The trend convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that "talking pictures", or "talkies", were the future.

Anaylsis of Film Openings

What choices are open to film makers in how they begin their films – what techniques are employed, and what effects are created? You should refer to the opening minutes of several films in your answer, exploring specific techniques, sequences and effect in your answer.


The techniques used to help film makers begin their films and allow for an interesting opening are diverse. An example of this is in the beginning of Sleepy Hollow, we see how the first few minutes is full of either close ups or extreme close ups, they have chosen this for their shot composition as it creates a sense of mystery which leaves the audience wondering what will happen next. This fits into Sleep Hollow as the genre includes mystery. Sound also played a part in creating tension within the opening minutes as a lot of non-diegetic atmospheric music was included. Many of this being orchestral and high pitched.
Another technique that could be used by film makers is a lot of different editing; Bourne Ultimatum includes many different shot lengths. These consist of fast jump cuts as it allows us to see that the film is adventure based and it also speeds up the pace of the film. At the beginning it could also have been used to create tension and therefore intensifies the mood and the audience is more intrigued.

Flags of our Fathers, uses a range of narrative techniques, one of these that stood out in the opening to the films was analepsis. The analeptic scene allows us to realise that the character is having a dream and we get to experience it. The sound is distorted and muffled which leads to believe that what is taking place isn’t real. The mise-on-scene included an unidentifiable landscape which emphasised on the confusion of the man’s dream. The background is muted and almost monochrome, the lack of colour just reinforces the mystery within the flashback.

Narrative techniques prove popular in film openings; in Last Samurai there is a prolepsis in which there is a vision of a battle that contains a rare white tiger. We can see how the colours have been made dull by the saturation to allow us to see that it is only a vision from the future. The tiger is depicted as surreal and therefore could be interpreted as metaphorical. The location is split, the beautiful and tranquil landscapes of Japan contrasting with the loud hustle and bustle of San Francisco.

City of God is another film which consists of techniques such as narrative devices, the split framing and then later the merge of shots create the effect of understanding all the characters point of view. Within the opening there is a slight concept of threat and humour combined, the brutal idea of the chicken chase and the young boys carrying guns is matched with the escape of the chicken and the adrenaline rush over the capture.

As we can see, many existing films have used a variety of techniques within their film openings as they need to capture their target audience's attention striaght away otherwise they won't find the film as interesting or overall a compelling film.