Inspirations - Miss Miller

When creating your own opening scene to a thriller it is important to gather some inspirations to include in order for it to be successful. My group and I have got inspirations from different films that we felt were strong and contained successful conventions that if we incorporated in our own opening sequels, would create atmospheres of our choice in order to create shock, surprise and suspense.

The films that my group and I have chosen inspirations from are: Halloween town (1974) where the point of view of the killer when passing through the house cleverly is blacked out apart from two eye slits allowing the audience to only see what the killer see's. My group and I believed this to be a strong idea because it helps create a sense of enigma and allows the audience to feel vulnerable.

*insert picture of Halloween town (1974)*

Another film that we got our inspirations from are sixth sense. This will be evident when victim 2 (the husband) is about to get killed, and as he comes face to face with the killer, his breathe turns hot against the cold air. We thought this would be a good idea as it emphasises how scared the character is feeling which is clear to the audience.

*insert picture of sixth sense*

Scream 2 is another big inspiration to our opening sequence because it's what our thriller is based upon, with the theory of a phone call and the great use of a knife as part of the iconography. We felt this would be a perfect inspiration to make our audience jump and feel tense because by creating a tense atmosphere it would engage the audience more.

*insert picture of scream two*

Lastly, we have used inspirations from shutter island when looking at the music. This is because we felt that in shutter island when a character is scared, there is a non diagetic sound of the characters heart beating fast, we felt that including this in our own opening sequence it would allow us to emphasise on the theme of fear and really convey this idea to the audience that it's something that could happen to any of the audience.

*insert picture of shutter island*

As listed above, we have chosen various inspirations to include in our thriller, we chose these inspirations because we felt that they would work well with our idea in order to achieve the best reaction from the audience in order to make our opening sequence memorable. Though these inspirations are featured in our opening sequence, and may come across as something that is not our idea, we have made sure to make these features our own. We done this by mixing all of these inspirations together to create a new idea to base our opening sequence on. We felt by using these inspirations in different scenes it would show our understanding of how to create a specific atmosphere and our ability to turn these inspirations in to our own ideas, therefore showing how we were able to make these inspirations our own.

We felt that these inspirations were important because they all belong to well known thrillers. This means that these techniques used were successful, and therefore that means if we include them in our opening sequence, it would allow it to be a successful opening sequence also. By making them all our own it makes the effect of the inspirations even greater and more effective.

Our research was useful in the terms of getting ideas for our narratives because we was able to gain knowledge on how to incorporate affective techniques within our own openings sequence. We will take these ideas and develop them within our own opening sequence thrillers by adding a unique twist to them in order to sustain more concentration and feelings with the audience to the characters in the film.