Thriller - Extra Cast and Dialogue

The changes to our scene meant that we would need more actors to provide voices for the radio. We chose the following people:

• Assistant - Amber Donoso
• Radio presenter - James (Psychology teacher and actor)
• Caller - Missan (A student)
• Psychologist - Claire (Another teacher)

Also, we decided to make some dialogue for the radio show in script format over the Christmas Holidays, I put this together:

"Morning, morning, morning. You're joining us live on the air where we're continuing our extraordinary story on the 'One Way Trip to Mars'. We want to hear your ideas, what do you think? Call us up on 03 333 444 544.

 

'I think it's absolutely ridiculous, man. I mean, these people are gonna go into space and never come back? All for some stupid TV show? How desperate for attention do you have to be?

Well, we’ve got a lot of different opinions but one thing is certain: This may well be the most significant event in television history ever. Already, over one hundred thousand people have applied which is - quite frankly - astonishing. We're joined now by behavioural psychologist, Claire Hastings. Claire, do have anything to say about this.

 

'Well Graham, these people are going to be living on a different planet for the rest of their lives. I think it's important that they can understand the psychological damage that isolation on that scale can cause.'

 

Thank you, Claire. We'll come back to you but first, let's hear some music."

Sadly, my writing skills are kind of terrible but its okay because this is not the final piece. We are all going to put in a collaborative effort and come up with something. We can play around with the dialogue in the editing process to make sure everything fits.

Thriller - Props List

Below is a compiled list of props necessary for our thriller.

• Make up - Melissa has generously offered to provide her own makeup.
• Radio - Dmitry has an old fashioned, interesting radio which we can use.
• Computer - We will use my laptop for the scene with the computer.
• Toaster - B Webb (one of the college boarding house) will have this in the kitchen.
• Knife - B Webb
• Bread - B Webb
• Butter - B Webb
• Shoes - Chloe (Our actress) can use her own shoes.
• CD - We can easily buy or borrow a blank CD.
• Envelopes -  These can be bought from a stationary shop.
• Box - We can borrow one from the school supplies.
• Camera - Massimo has agreed to bring a prop video camera.
• Tripod - Again, Massimo will bring one of these if necessary.

Thriller - Changes

Through group discussion and with the help of a great deal of stress and frustration we made lots of changes to our thriller. Primarily, this involved three major alterations:

1. Cutting down to two characters, Jimmy and Tiffany. This makes the sequence simpler and gives us more space to concentrate on two people - we added a scene in a kitchen amongst others.

2. Increasing the effort spent on the office sequence, to make the scene more interesting and help explain it a little better.

3. Probably the biggest change was to add the radio. The idea being that the scene opens with a black screen and multiple overlapping snippets of dialogue about the One Way Trip to Mars and then continues as one radio program in which the DJ discusses the One Way Trip show and interviews different people (behavioral psychologist, public member, etc). This gives us more content and allows us to explain the story in an innovative and interesting way. It will add the task of writing up the radio show and finding actors to provide voices but that shouldn't be too difficult.

Thriller - Pilot Evaluation

'If I were to guess, I'd have to say that this film is about some sort of paedophile grooming children on the internet' 

- Feedback on our pilot

The feedback on our Pilot was pretty discouraging. We thought that in order to gain a lot of feedback we would show it to as many people as possible and record their feedback.

The obvious conclusion was that the thriller was not clear enough and a bit boring. Disheartened and frustrated, we've decided that we will definitely have to make some changes to the scene before going ahead and filming the final thing.

I'm glad that we managed to get this feedback because it allows the public to point out the flaws that we might not have seen. The result of this is that we will have to arrange multiple group meetings to discuss the necessary changes and organize the resultant props/locations/etc. 

Thriller - Pilot

Below is the fully edited pilot.

Thriller - Shot List

After a whole load of storyboarding, group discussion and sleepless nights, we finally managed to work out what changes we must make to our shot list. Below is a basic series of events. We tried to make it as loose as possible so that we weren't at all limited and felt like we could still experiment and improvise if we needed to.

• Black screen - radio sounds
• Chloe makeup - radio background
• Shot of radio
• Makeup
• Archie - making toast - pop up, spreading close-up.
• Chloe - puts shoes on.
• Archie - googling: 'One way trip to mars application'
• Chloe - walking out of room. Stops, reaction to radio.
• Archie - sets up camera - Sits down
• Chloe - sits down
• Archie - starts talking into camera
• Hallway - walking with the envelopes.
• Gives to producer at laptop.
• 'They're going crazy, we got 500 applicants just this morning. Here's a few more'
• Takes disc. Puts into laptop.
• Archie comes up on screen.
• Producer's eyes.
• Black screen -radio sounds come up again - Title. 

Thriller - Locations

We sat down and worked out all of the separate locations where we would need to film. The list goes as follows.

• Chloe's bedroom - We will use one of the boarding house bedrooms (probably, again, B Webb) for this, or the bedroom of somebody who lives close to the college. I feel that it is very important that the bedroom actually looks like it could belong to a teenage girl and has been lived in. Makeup, a mirror and girly posters, etc.

• Archie's kitchen - Apparently the B Webb kitchens looks like an proper house kitchen so considering that we are already filming a lot in B Webb we will most likely use it for the Kitchen scene. I want the kitchen to be fairly straightforward and neat to show Archie's personality.

• Archie's bedroom - Again, either B Webb or another boarding house. I was fairly adamant that we use a different boarding house or a real teenagers bedroom but the group seemed to be more geared towards filming the whole thing in one boarding house

• Producer's office/hallway - We tried to call various offices in the local area to see if we could use them for filming but we had no luck. We will most likely use the college's editing suite for this scene.

Thriller - Casting

When in came to casting actors in our thrillers, we decided that we wanted to use students and teachers from the college with pretty good acting skill and experience, especially in front of cameras. Fortunately, the fact that we're in performing arts school helps considerably. I wanted to have a mostly teenage cast so that our characters could represent different varieties of youth culture. Below is a list of all the characters who require actors and possible actors/actresses who might be suitable to play them (obviously, we have to check with these people as to whether they're available or not).

(as a sidenote, although the character's names aren't actually mentioned - Jimmy being the exception - we still decided to give them names for the sake of simplicity - It's a lot easier to be able to refer to a character by their name rather than a vague description.)

(another sidenote, these photos are taken from the school database and - like all school photos - may be incredibly embarrassing and not do complete justice to the actors/actresses)

Jimmy (Protagonist)

Jimmy is the protagonist. A teenaged social misfit who wants to go to Mars simply because he feels that he has nothing to lose. He has never fitted in and is slightly strange - wide eyed and tense, as if constantly on edge.

We chose Archie Repin to play Jimmy. Archie's had a lot of experience working in front of camera and studied at the New York Film Academy. We chose Archie because, not only is he a good actor, we all agree that he kind of suits the role.. In the nicest way possible. He's also Russian, so his accent adds a little bit of believability to the story as opposed to all of the contestants being English.

Tiffany

We chose Chloe Tannenbaum to play Tiffany, the attention seeking, dumb blonde. We chose Chloe because - obviously - she is female and blonde. She also is a very talented actress. We thought she could play the dumb blonde stereotype without making it too over the top.

Aiden

We settled on two options to play the attractive jock type character: Theo Bhat and Harry Griffiths. Both are attractive, sporty men who can act and would be pretty well suited to the role. My first choice would be Theo, who looks older and I think would fit the role better, however due to him being a second year student, we may not be allowed to use him. 

Harry is still a good choice and I'm told has a brilliant six pack which we would try to show off for a littled added sex appeal.

Michelangelo

Michelangelo is a flamboyant, failed celebrity desperate for attention and publicity. He is arrogant, yet fabulous and is to be played by the equally fabulous Santi Giraldo. Santi is a good actor and a very colourful personality who would fit the role perfectly. The above photo doesn't begin to do him justice.

Thriller - Storyboards

Our thriller underwent several changes through group discussion. We decided to film multiple contestants - rather than just one - preparing to film themselves. I want to see how much we can say about the characters who the film will center around. We felt that we should focus less on dialogue in order to direct our attention more to what we can see through the language of film - e.g. Mise en Scene, ambient music, camera shots, etc.

We also made considerable progress in planning our storyboards. This allowed our group to get together and put a lot of mutual thought into what kind of shots to use and where. I was very keen on the idea of using a lot of nice close-up shots and not to be afraid to get really close up.
I found, as we discussed the shots, that I would like to be the cameraman for the final shoot as I'm interested in photography  and incredibly anal about lazy camera shots.

We sketched out the different shots using storyboard templates. I want to try to create an ominous and disturbing atmosphere using very little dialogue and very little plot but lots of interesting camera angles and filming techniques.

Storyboarding is a very effective method of planning the sequence of shots in a film. Personally, I found that it was a good way for all of us to communicate our ideas clearly. The only downsides of storyboarding being that it somewhat limits you when it comes to actually filming and requires a certain degree of artistic skill. However through our courageous use of stick figures and messily scribbled close-ups, we actually came up with some nice ideas and I'm pretty pleased with the group's efforts and creativity.