Thrill us!

Film. noun:

a recording of moving images that tells a story and that people watch on a screen or television

Short Film:

A Film that has a total running time of 40:00¹ 2:15² or less.

Me. pronoun:

Someone who probably isn’t qualified to make a short film.

Yep, that’s right, we made short films, quite a few of them as a matter of fact, which resulted in this being a bit of a long project, this combined with the incredible force of chaos and disruption known as the winter exhibition³ has led to this project ending rather unceremoniously, and a bit later than would be ideal, either way, let’s get into it.

Now, as I mentioned before, this was a long project, and it consisted of two distinct parts, the launch, and the rest of the project. each of which could a mostly separate project, so, I’ll call them “Subprojects”.

The first “Subproject”(Launch) consisted of us learning some very basic cinematography skills, and then trying to remake a short horror film as closely as possible. I already did a post on it, which you can find here, so I wont go into any more detail about that.

The second “Subproject” is the one that is going to take up the bulk of this post.⁴ It’s final product was to be once again, a short film, this time, a thriller, ⁵

We started by looking at what makes up a thriller and what a thriller actually is. A thriller is a plot-driven story that uses excitement and suspense to keep the viewers engaged. While a horror movie might intend mainly to create fear and suspense with plot sometimes being less crucial, a thriller uses those elements to drive the story forward.

After learning the basic idea of what a thriller is, we then learned about the core elements of a thriller: The 3 C’s, Contract, Clock and Crucible. The 3 C’s are storytelling devices used to create the suspense and excitement that thrillers are built around. The first of the 3 C’s; Contract, represents a promise made to the viewer, which is usually completed, the promise can something that the main character actually agrees to, like in The Princess Bride when Westly promises Buttercup he will always return ⁶ or something more inherent, presented only to the viewers. The second of the 3 C’s is clock, which represents time pressure given to the characters, which often spurs action and drives the plot forward, such as in Home Alone where the burglars announce they’re coming back to rob the house at 9:00, causing Kevin to create an elaborate set of traps and pitfalls to stop them[8^]. Finally is Crucible, which is where characters are placed under pressure in some, creating a sense of urgency, for example, in Die Hard Nakatomi plaza is the crucible with pressure being supplied by the germans with guns.⁷ Anyways, those are the 3 C’s. Besides the three C’s, we also covered some things that a thriller should probably have such as character types like “Hero”, “Villain” and “Sidekick” or plot elements like cliffhangers, red herrings and plot twists ⁸ And of course, Suspense.

Once we had learned what makes up a good thriller, we started to analyze a few different short thrillers, to further our understanding of the core ideas of what a thriller is, and gain inspiration four our own thrillers, which we would be making shortly.

And because this is a blog post, shortly is actually now, so lets get into it.

We were allowed to choose our own groups for the thrillers, so I teamed up with Caelum Matteo and Parker. The first thing we had to do to make a thriller was, well, come up with an idea. After a day or two of brainstorming we came up with an idea for a story about people interviewing residents of …somewhere about a large building that had appeared over …some timeframe, and the strange events surrounding it.

As I’m sure you can tell, our idea needed some work, so we started refining it and putting together a “Pitch package” for the teachers, we decided to use craft, so we could also use it as a space for project management and organization, and organize we did. While we were writing the script we were also thinking of who should do what, we decidied that Caelum would be the director, I would do storyboard and editing, Matteo would do filming and Parker would do sound.

After we finished up the script, I made a storyboard, and we put together a schedule for filming editing and all the other stuff that needed to be done, and after approval from a teacher, we got moving.

And get moving we did, starting off filming the “interview” shots, then we moved on to some shots of the workers in the forest, we stayed after school to get the office shots and, despite trying to rewrite the script while filming and temporality losing everyone else in my group on day 2 after trying to record some forest sounds, we looked like we were very much on track.

After day 2, I had begun editing what we had together using good old DaVinci resolve, which is basically just a port of its desktop version to iPad, which I think needs to happen more, because what’s the point of putting an M1 chip in an iPad if there’s barely anything that actually takes advantage of it. ⁹ the editing was my favourite part, as I could make problems, then fix them and then after a good chunk of editing, get some feedback from my group and repeat until it was pretty good, my favourite thing to edit was the match cut between overhead and coming out of the monitor.

After we were done the film, we held viewing party as a class, and saw everyone’s videos, which made one flaw in ours pretty apparent, we did lean a bit on the dialogue heavy side, if we had more time I would have probably trimmed the script and added more shots of the workers and the building, as well as the man behind the desk, and maybe even more about his employers, either way, we somehow ended up placing second at the viewing party ( people voted for their favourite ) so it can’t have been that bad. Overall, I think we organized really well, and did a good job of project management, the story just needed a touch more work ( and time ), Anyways, this blog post is probably late by now, so I’ll wrap it up with the video.