The Manchurian Candidate;

During our lesson we watched the film "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) which is an American Cold War political thriller film. The general plot of this film is that a former korean war POW is brainwashed, a couple of the characters have reocurring nightmares; they see some of their colleages killing other colleages, this is as of a brainwash set off by a unknown person. The Brainwash is triggered by the character dealing a set of cards, they are brainwashed in and out of the nightmare.

Past Students Work;

Today in class we watched past students thrillers and had to discuss their ideas  and techniques they had used. we then gave the a mark out of ten, focusing on these main areas;

• Idea
• Cinematography
• Sound/Music
• Performance

These are the marks i gave it; 

Idea - 8/10
Cinematography - 7/10
Sound/music - 8/10
Performance - 8/10 
Grade - B

Preliminary Exercise (:

In order to get used to using the cameras, we had to produce a video that consisted of several different shots. we attempted to use over thge shoulder shots,  close ups, pan, point of view and mid shots.

After filming we had to edit together what we had filmed using final cut express, this helped us get used to the computers and how to put together the clips that we wanted and take out the clips that we didn't want. I was difficulf to graps at first but i think we eventually got the hang of it and below is our outcome:-

Storyboard;

Before filming our preliminary exercise we created a storyboard to help us plan what we was going to film;

My favourite thriller;

After watching the opening of 'Children of Men' during class, I really wanted to watch on so me and my friend went out and purchased the film to watch.
In my opinion I think that it is a great thriller as there are many scences filled with tension and suspence. I think the opening of this film is evidently effective as it left me wondering what was going to happen next and i really wated to watch on.
The film is set in the future. All women have somehow becom infertile and the youngest person on earth who was 18 has just died. However during the film, to our surprise, a pregnant woman is discovered and therfore, for the rest of the film the main character (Theo) is trying to protect Kee (pergnant woman) from the violence of London so she is able to deliver her baby safely.

Survey Monkey

In order to get some more infomation about what poeple like about thrillers i created a survey on surveymonkey.com

From my survey i hope to find out what things people look for in thrillers, however a disadvantage of this is that it is gonna take a while for me to collect the information as i will have to wait for people to do my survey. However i have posted it to my Facebook;

 Hopefully many of my facebook friends will tkae my survey, so i will have broader results so i know more about what the audience like about thrillers

Vox Pop

During lesson we learnt about Vox Pops and we created our own. 
Vox Pop (Vox Populi) comes form the latin meaning of voice of the people.  Vox Pops are interviews of many different people that all get asked the same question, this allows us to get a varied range of answers and many different points of view.

Creating our own;
To make our own Vox Pop we asked several people the same three questions, these were;

• What is your favourite thriller?
• What do you like about the thriller genre?
• What makes a good thriller

Unfortunately whilst carrying out our interviews there was a technical difficulty and our camera didn't pick up any sound whilst we were filming so when we watched our video back we couldn't hear what was being said ):
So during our next lesson we re-filmed some interviews and thankfully they came out successfully (:
What we learnt;
During our interviews we found out what people like about thrillers, we learnt that people enjoy cliff hangers and a LOT of tension & suspense and we will be sure to include them in our final film. This exercise also helped us get used to the cameras and help us avoid problems in the future.