Goodfellas

Goodfellas

Dir: Martin Scorsese

Starring: Robert diNero

New York, 1970

Credits - sound like traffic

Camera on car

Shows time and place

Sets the tone of how the film is going to be throughout

Meets the main character

Natural lighting

Narration on the main character

Shows that the whole film is going to be violent

Shows the mens status, powerful / criminals

Cast is all men

The music juxtaposes the scene as the music is upbeat and happy whilst a murder is occurring.

Brutality throughout

Ashley, Jordan & Rebecca

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGs-yzWrjdI

Almost there on our final idea...

So far our plot consists of the following, this could either be a narration/ voice over during the beginning scene which tells the story or just be there for the plot.

In October 17th 2003 a 10 year old girl is taken hostage and treated inhumane. This story follows her life through the years of her captivity, her abuse and her flaunted attempts of escape. Whether or not we will let you know who has taken her has yet to be decided - silhouettes mainly our key idea... this way the audience will carry on predicting whether we are going to give the identity of this unknown character/group or not...

We have a mixed view upon where to set our film, however all locations of filming must be relevant to our story-line. There will be pictures of our setting up on our blog as soon as possible after editing and further discussion of where everything is going to be filmed... We are also trying to work out whether to play a backing track or to keep with a narration...

Jordan, Rebecca and Ashley

Camerawork

Camerawork

Close-Up
Shows very little background, and concentrates on either a face, or a specific detail of mise en scène. Everything else is just a blur in the background. This shot magnifies the object and shows the importance of things, such as words written on paper, or the expression on someones face. The close-up takes us into the mind of a character. In reality, we only let people that we really trust get THAT close to our face - mothers, children and lovers, usually - so a close up of a face is a very intimate shot. A film-maker may use this to make us feel extra comfortable or extremely uncomfortable about a character, and usually uses a zoom lens in order to get the required framing.
Extreme Close-Up
As its name suggests, an extreme version of the close up, generally magnifying beyond what the human eye would experience in reality. An extreme close-up of a face, for instance, would show only the mouth or eyes, with no background detail whatsoever. This is a very artificial shot, and can be used for dramatic effect. The tight focus required means that extra care must be taken when setting up and lighting the shot - the slightest camera shake or error in focal length is very noticeable.
Medium Shot
Contains a figure from the knees/waist up and is normally used for dialogue scenes, or to show some detail of action. Variations on this include the two shot, containing two figures from the waist up, and the three shot, contains 3 figures. Any more than three figures and the shots tend to become a long shot. Background detail is minimal, probably because location has been established earlier in the scene - the audience already know where they are and now want to focus on dialogue and character interaction. Another variation in this category is the over-the-shoulder-shot, which positions the camera behind one figure, revealing the other figure, and part of the first figure's back, head and shoulder.
Long Shot
This is the most difficult to categorise precisely, but is generally one which shows the image as approximately "life" size i.e. corresponding to the real distance between the audience and the screen in a cinema, the figure of a man would appear as six feet tall. This category includes the full shot showing the entire human body, with the head near the top of the frame and the feet near the bottom. While the focus is on characters, plenty of background detail still emerges.
Pans
A movement which scans a scene horizontally. The camera is placed on a tripod, which operates as a stationary axis point as the camera is turned, often to follow a moving object which is kept in the middle of the frame.
High Angle
Not so extreme as a bird's eye view. The camera is elevated above the action using a crane to give a general overview. High angles make the object photographed seem smaller, and less significant (or scary). The object or character often gets swallowed up by their setting - they become part of a wider picture.
Low Angle
These increase height (useful for short actors like Tom Cruise or James McAvoy) and give a sense of speeded motion. Low angles help give a sense of confusion to a viewer, of powerlessness within the action of a scene. The background of a low angle shot will tend to be just sky or ceiling, the lack of detail about the setting adding to the disorientation of the viewer. The added height of the object may make it inspire fear and insecurity in the viewer, who is psychologically dominated by the figure on the screen.
The Bird's-Eye view
This shows a scene from directly overhead, a very unnatural and strange angle. Familiar objects viewed from this angle might seem totally unrecognisable at first (umbrellas in a crowd, dancers' legs). This shot does, however, put the audience in a godlike position, looking down on the action. People can be made to look insignificant, ant-like, part of a wider scheme of things. Hitchcock (and his admirers, like Brian de Palma) is fond of this style of shot.
Worms eye view
A worm's-eye view is a view of an object from below, as though the observer were a worm; the opposite of a bird's-eye view. A worm's eye view is used commonly for third perspective when you put one vanishing point on top, one on the left, and one on the right.
Tilt
Moving the camera up or down without raising its position; like panning, to follow a subject or to show the top and bottom of a stationary object. With a tilt, you can also show how high something is. For example, a slow tilt up a Giant Sequoia tree shows its grandness and enormity.

Shot reverse shot
Shot reverse shot is a film technique where one character is shown looking at another character (often off-screen), and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character. Since the characters are shown facing in opposite directions, the viewer assumes that they are looking at each other.
Point of view shot
A point of view shot (also known as POV shot or a subjective camera) is a short film scene that shows what a character (the subject) is looking at (represented through the camera). It is usually established by being positioned between a shot of a character looking at something, and a shot showing the character's reaction (see shot reverse shot). The technique of POV is one of the foundations of film editing.
Over the shoulder shot

In film or video, an over the shoulder shot (also over shoulder, OS, OTS, or third-person shot) is a shot of someone or something taken from the perspective or camera angle from the shoulder of another person. The back of the shoulder and head of this person is used to frame the image of whatever (or whomever) the camera is pointing toward

The 180° rule

In film making, the 180° rule is a basic guideline that states those two characters (or other elements) in the same scene should always have the same left/right relationship to each other. If the camera passes over the imaginary axis connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line.

Ashley, Jordan & Rebecca

Discussing other thrillers...

... Carrying on our search for a base to our thriller film we have been looking further into the comparison between the way that the layout of a thriller TV series to a Thriller film. So far we have looked at 'Supernatural', 'Heat', 'Se7en (seven)', 'Sin City', 'Goodfella's', 'Resevoir Dogs' and personally we have take many ideas from each of these films and tried to convey a situation that would fit what we want in our opening two minutes of our thriller. Now we have started to look into other types of thriller: psychological and horror thrillers, we have been looking at even more openings of thriller TV series, such as: 'The Walking Dead' and the 'CSI' chain. 'The Walking Dead' started off as a massive hit that was meant to stay in America only, however because it was such a massive hit, they decided to bring it to the UK and then to follow in the rest of Europe 6 months after. The pilot episode for me was completely essential for the rest of the series, because of the way they introduce you to the characters and give you this amazing story layout. Personally being a big horror-thriller fan I was intrigued to carry on watching within the first 30 seconds because it was just perfect for camerawork and the editing. 'CSI' on the other hand is fairly straight forward because it tells you whats gonna happen throughout their episodes within the first scene - which is what we want ! but obviously not having sufficient access to the same sort of CGI and props means that we can't really base it on this, however we can look at the layout of the opening scene.

Jordan

se7en

Se7en

Dir; David Fincher

Starring; Morgan Freeman - order meticulous (ODC)

Brad Pitt

Diegetic sound

Meets main characters

Pathetic fallicy

Film is based through seven days

Sets scene - overly clean house (because of Morgan Freemans ODC)

Rains throughout the film until the last scene

Neo Noir - modern film noir

opening credits is part of the film

Ashley, Jordan, Rebecca

Taking Ideas From Supernatural...

Okay so now we have started looking at TV series' as well as films to get a wider perspective of the word thriller. The first one we have started to look at is 'Supernatural' and what we decided to take were ideas from the way that they open their episodes. We know instantly what happens within the first two/three minutes, most of them are opened within a dark, nightly atmosphere - which conveys its plot throughout the rest of the episode, which ends up solving the msytery. Still trying to think about the key TV series/ Films to base our thriller on....

Jordan

More Ideas for our thriller ...

... Carrying on from our last blog, we have been thinking more in to detail about take certain elements from films, for example: The film-noir base, grainy effects, dominant colours, types of shots we want to use in our opening two minutes of our film. So this time we looked at another idea, this time taken from Frank Miller's grainy, film-noir creation 'Sin City'. In this film us as viewers intrigued at the opening scene, so bringing up a past experience of watching the film we decided to sit down and watch the whole film to refresh our memories. The points that we loved during the film personally was the subtlety of the killing in the opening scene and the 1950's grainy, film-noir layout with a dominant colour, Red. We also picked up on the narration which evaluates and scrutinizes the other characters during the film, we thought that it was really clever and the fact that it indicated what the reader couldnt taste or smell. 'Sin City' would be perfect to base our thriller film on however we are looking to go for the opening of the film, where straight from the start, the audience is put into the situation where they need to analyse what is going on and what they think is going to happen in the rest of the film.

Jordan 

Top 10 Selling Thriller Films (In Order)

1) Pulp Fiction

2) The Dark Knight

3) Inception

4) Goodfella's

5) Rear Window

6) Psycho (1960)

7) The Silence of The Lambs

8) The Usual Suspects

9) Se7en (Seven)

10) Memento

Jordan and Rebecca

Heat

Heat 1995
Dir: Michael Mann


Starring: Robert De Niro & Al Pachino


Setting Starts with a train station using an Establishing shot
Pan and tracking shots
Low angle
high angle
Birds eye and Worms eye view
Setting Hospital
Focus shot
medium shot
Close up of DeNiro's face to show importance of the character to the film
the shots of the camera in the hospital is based on what DeNiro is looking at

the hospital is busy which makes DeNiro look invisible
16 different cuts of DeNiro with in 3 minutes
uneasy music
Melancholy music
Diegetic sounds of people in hospital (no music)
no dialogue only background noise
music comes back on when he exists the hospital
DeNiro discreetly puts gloves on before going in the ambulance.