Thriller is a genre where audience get that adrenaline rush and curiosity satisfied. When it comes to the opening scenes, chains of action or a puzzling or perplexing could happen, making the viewers intrigued into knowing what could happen next, putting them through the entire movie. While only the opening scene couldn’t make the whole movie, it’s an important component in pulling the viewers’ attention.
First of, for my fonts, I used a very different type of font for my title as well as casting introduction. The letters are written in blocks in the font Blackout-2AM. I saw many films when someone got black-mailed threatned them to do some thing or reporting a missing of their loved one, and on the letter, the letters are attached individually or in blocks (E.g. Detective Conan - Moonlight Sonata EP). I figured that this is a fun and new font to use for film title, especially when the font looks modern and aesthetically pleasing, which is suitable for my primary audience - young adults, instead of using the classic sans-serif or serif font.
I decided to choose my main character as a quiet girl that has a very “mysterious” background. One aspect of thrillers that could pull the audience to stay through longer is the questions threw at them at the opening. Therefore, I decided to have a girl who seemed to got into a drama with her friends, and then ended up killing them. The audience would want to know more about what happened between these girls and whether the motive behind the main character’s action of killing. This could also be relevant to today’s issues with bullying, which is becoming very common in Vietnam these days, and both the victims and bullies were girls, so I decided to use this in my opening scene as well: fights between girls. This could help pulling attention from my secondary audience: adults and parents. As the bullying issues are rising, many parents are raising their awareness and concerns on this specific topic.
I tried to keep the color of my opening scene as natural as possible (except the filters to make some shots look darker like night time), because I want to bring a sense of realism to audience, so that they could have an honest atmosphere throughout the film, like they’re experience the situations themselves, enhancing the thrills and edginess. Even though most thrillers usually have a bit of blues or green tinted colors to make the atmosphere darker and more threatened, I think the day-night look had already help with the building scary atmosphere. Other than that, I tried to keep the filter as natural as possible to create an honest and real vibe for the audience.
For the camera shots, I used quite a few close ups in my opening scene, as close-ups are very common in thrillers, to express clearly the expressions of the actors. At the beginning of the scene, I want the audience to see clearly the emotions of panicked, rushed of the main character slowly turns into relief and satisfied. This combines with brief flashback of a girl fight shows them that she has just done something terrible yet she has no regrets nor remorse. By this the audience could some how have a brief image of her character, someone who just took a revenge. This is especially significant, as through the title of the film “The Quiet Kid”, we know that the main female lead doesn’t speak much, so the only to know more about her is by the close-ups giving us full details of her facial expressions. I also used shaky tracking camera shot and for my chasing scene to create suspense and satisfy the adrenaline rush that people want to find in thrillers, combining with raging music.
The music used in this opening scene is mainly atmospheric music. Instead of going full blown dramatic music from the start, my main target is to make the audience feel real and honest when watching the film. Therefore, dark atmospheric and ambience sound is a better option in creating an earie atmosphere.
Overall, I think that I’ve stuck to conventions of thrillers quite well, from camera work to color correcting to music used. However, the only that’s different is the font, which I think is much needed to stay fit and unique towards my targeted audience (young people), and the fonts also driven towards mysterious, alarming font which is a different way of using a thriller font.
My film’s main character is a girl, involves 2 other characters which are also girls (and a male extra). Because the setting is in the school, my characters are all students - which is relevant to my target audience; teenagers and young adults. Another reason, is because of some bullying cases been happening in VietNam for the past months. The victims and the bullies are mostly girls. I wanted to raise awareness of school bullying by borrowing the image of these bully cases recently in Vietnam, so that people are more curious and intrigued in watching. People have been so used to boys fighting and boys manipulating others since they are known to be the more “violent, rough” gender. However, as been proved in recent cases, many girls are participating in bully fights, and brought many scars from physical to mental to victims. That’s why I chose mainly girls for my characters, to stay relevant to my audience.
However, in my movie, I decided to have the main character choosing a very different option in handling her bullies, killing them. This is, first of all, for the good of my thriller convention and effects, and second of all, to make people think on the other side of the story. These days, on the news, they talk about how victims commited suicide because of their bullies, ending their own lives. While in my film, I have the character taking revenge in a violent way. What consequences could bullying lead to? Is the girl 100% wrong for doing this, after being bullied brutally by her friends?
Through out the whole movie, I would want the story to develop in a way that people could witness the horrorsome of bullying, the fights, the pain, that leads to the killing at the end. There might be people disagreeing and some people could sympathize with the action of the girl. But my major, final want is for people to think carefully about school bullying and how much impact it could have on the victims, and lead them to do terrible thing, even if it’s taking their own lives or taking revenge like in my movie.
I think that these ideas could be some big pulling factors for my movie, as the school bullying issues had been some pretty hot topics recently. With the Kdrama The Glory also highlights this issue, many people around the world, especially students and parents are getting more and more conscious and awared of this. There fore, people would be more attracted in watching media products related to this problem.
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