Conventions of Thrillers: Use, Develop and Challenge.

There have been a lot of thriller films made yet every one seems to be different, we need our film to stand out from others too, yet we still need it to be part of the thriller genre, to keep it in this genre we need to use as many of the conventions in my mind map as possible but we need to develop and challenge other conventions to keep it original and interesting to the audience so our group has discussed the conventions we plan to use, develop and challenge. Here is the mind map i made of Thriller Conventions.
Our group has got together and discussed how we can use the conventions to create a short opening to the thriller film we picked in my last post, we listed conventions we could use, ones we could develop and most importanly ones we could challenge to give our thriller film an edge over others, to make it unique and most importanlty interesting to the thriller demographic, here are the lists we made:


Conventions to use:
  • High Pitched Violin Screeching
  • Dark Locations / cloudy / overcast
  • Smart Dress
  • Violence
  • Detective (school teacher investigating)
  • Attractive Woman
  • Footsteps
  • Close-ups


Conventions to Develop:
  • Using a mix of faster and slower editing to create tension rather than fast editing
  • reducing the amount of shot-reverse-shot, have speech but camera panning away to show more significant items to audience
  • Using short sounds of loud noise, shouting, crowds etc. and adding more silence to un-nerve audience
Conventions to Challenge:
  • 'Bad Guy' will be School Children to create a sense of insecurity in the audience.
  • Busy city will be a School instead
  • Teachers, (normally inoccent) will be in control of 'brainwashed' children
  • School bell ( normally good at end of lessons) will be the action to cause Children's trance
  • No weapons

After this discussion we decided we should try to create a film which initially lures the audience into a false sense of security, the normally comforting surroundings of a school reveal a hidden secret, we would like to aim our film at over 18's who would have recently left school as they would reflect on good memories they had from school during the first introduction to the school in our film but when the secret is revealed and the more violent and dangerous content is unravelled, it would create a very emotional and interesting film, we would not show this content in our short clip we are going to produce as it is only the introduction and we want it to be suitable for under 18s considering its an A-level production.
This discussion helped our group to refine our idea and focus it more specifically on the thriller genre, i believe our group can now create a more appealing thriller film to the target audience we highlighted.


We also discussed what age-range we would be aiming our film at, we want it to appeal to young students and young adults who have recently left school as they will be the easiest to manipulate in the school environment, they will be reminiscing about past memories and that relaxed feeling of the school atmosphere would make the cliff-hangers and scary sections of our film more effective, so our age range is between 17 and 26.
These are the classifications that films are put into by the BBFC,

We feel our film would be best suited to 15, it doesn't reduce our main target audience and stops young teenagers from seeing the more mature content.