2. Deciding on a genre
• As we were introduced to the coursework I
knew in my head that a thriller film would be
the best type of film as it is such a wide
spectrum that it can easily be made and plot
and storylines can be constructed at ease. The
first decision to overcome was the sub genre
to pick.
3. Now thriller itself has many sub genres, probably
the most of all main genres.
They include: • Religious
• Conspiracy • Spy
• Crime the list goes on.
• Disaster
• Mystery
• Political
• Psychological
4. • My partner and I had the tough decision of
choosing between Spy Thriller and Crime
Thriller. We eventually chose crime thriller as
seeing as though we have no budget or cool
props on hand, we figured it would be easier
as Spy Thrillers tend to be very ‘gadgety’ and
exotic, with lots of action – and that just
seems like too much compared to a crime
thriller where we can set our own pace.
5. • Once we decided on crime thrillers, we
watched a few different crime thriller films to
get an idea of types or themes we could
follow, some of these films included:
Taken, No Country for Old Men, Bangkok
Dangerous and Se7en.
6. Common Codes and Conventions
• Crime thriller are rather simple and are all
usually carbon copies of each other – just
changing the type of crime:
drugs, murder, kidnapping, etc. – and they all
use the same conventions.
7. The most common
conventions include:
• music to create
atmosphere or pace
• quick cuts
• the mystery of the Obviously we can’t
bad guy include all of these in
• low key lighting just two minutes but
• disorientation we tried to fit in as
• flashbacks many as possible.
8. Challenging the Genre
• We tried to follow the genre
as strict as possible making it
a proper stereotypical crime
thriller. One thing that I
noticed once editing was
complete was our use of
blacking out the picture but
keeping sound – i.e. the
rustling of a bag. This was
used to take a plain ordinary
situation and place a layer of
mysteriousness over it. This
was probably the only thing
that ‘challenged’ the genre.
