Props

In our Thriller we used several props, including simple desk utilities to some more complicated props to acquire. To begin with for the first shot in the office we needed normal desk utilities such as a mug, a book, pens/pencils, a chair, a hard drive and a laptop to work on. We needed these props to be able to set the scene and show that this is where our character worked in her house, we thought that the props which we selected would make that clear, luckily most of these props were available on set, at the house we were filming at. As for the laptop and the hard drive, I brought my own Apple Mac book, a few days before when I was creating the pin boards I equally created what the desktop would look like on the computer when she would be working on the computer; My group and I decided that we wanted some sort of connection between what was on the pin boards and what as on screen so i found a 2 different photos of the same fugitive and put one on the pin board and one on the screen. The desktop also featured a government document in the form of a “Pages” (the Apple equivalent of Word) file, so that our character could actually be working on it and typing it up. Also on the on screen was two photos taken from drones of different people which adds to the effect of our character being a person who works for the government or an agency.

Computer desktop 

Photo of fugitive both on screen and on the pin board

Mood Board of props needed for office scene

Apple computer needed for shoot

Our main prop for the fight scene between the intruder and the main character is a sugar glass bottle in the shape of a Smirnoff Vodka bottle. We wanted our character to fight with a common household item to show that the use of this weapon was in the spur of the moment and that our character is a quick thinker because we thought that this would dd to the effect that this women was possibly trained to fight because she is a detective. We also wanted something to add a “WOW” factor and some individuality to our thriller and we believed that we would be able to get this from this sugar glass bottle. According to Wikipedia sugar glass is: “… also called candy glass, edible glass, and breakaway glass. It is a brittle transparent form of sugar used to simulate glass in movies, photographs and plays. It is much less likely to cause injuries than real glass, and it easily breaks convincingly, making it an excellent choice for stunts.” Sugar Glass is created by dissolving sugar in water and heating this to about 150 degrees celsius, then letting in cool down in the mood of water ever you want to create, in our case a Smirnoff vodka bottle.

Tutorial on how to create sugar glass.

We ordered three sugar glass bottles from the company Flints, Flints describe them selves on their website as “Flints are the major retailer of theatrical goods in the UK. Our buying power allows us to pass on excellent value to our customers and our unrivalled experience ensures that the products we stock are perfectly suited to the industry. In recent years we have expanded our client base to include schools, shop display, museums, the film, television and marine industries.” We were tolled that the bottles had to be mailed to us because they could not be picked up in store, we were also tolled that the bottles are very fragile and that there was a high probability that they would brake whilst being mailed to us, but we decided to take the risk and order the bottles. Bellow is a video of my group member called Zell ordering the sugar glass bottles:

Ordering Sugar Glass bottles

The 3 bottles ended up arriving to the school not broken and in perfect condition, they were in a box filled with protective material to ensure that the bottles would not break on there journey to the school. we received the bottle 3 days before our shoot day and we were successfully able to use two out of the three bottles on our shoot day. We only used two out of the tree bottles because we believed that we had gotten the shots which we needed and that it looked good, and that we might be able to sell the third bottle and get some of our money back. Bellow are photos of the unboxing of the sugar glass bottles: 

As for the detective type Pin Boards, I created them myself, the process began by me doing some research into what these detective type inboards usually look like, i find things like terrorist information type pin boards or simply some for a murder, I saw that stereotypically in movies most photos were connected with what seemed to be red string but I looked into it and apparently this technique is not often used in the actual profession. So I started searching google images for certain things which I thought would come up with some good results which i could use on the pin board, I searched such things as: fugitive, drone photo, terrorist, maps, jail photo’s, CIA/FBI files, confidential files, etc. Once I found the photos which i wanted, i copied the photos on to a pages document, normally with several photos per page and then i printed it out, unfortunately the printer in our school could only print in black and white. Once I had printed the photos I cut them all out and started drawing on them with highlighters and and pens as if the detective started writing notes on them. I also drew on postit notes to add some more notes to on to the pin boards. Once I had laid out the photos on the board in an arrangement that I liked i pinned the photos down. Bellow are photos of how the inboards turned out:

Pin Board No. 1 which went on top

Pin Board No. 2 which went on the bottom

Actors

For our Thriller we are using two actors, Cressida Bullough and Mike Niland. Originally for our second thriller idea based inside the mental asylum we had asked bot Franchie Webb and Cressida Bullogh too be actresses and they had both agreed, but after we changed our idea we had limited time to find new actresses and costumes, so we simply had to pick our actress between Cressida and Franchie. We looked at both girls and looked at their facial attributes, height, style etc. to see which one would fit the role the best meaning look the oldest because the character is meant to already be a working woman (but of a young age). We decided to go with Franchie and decided to have Cressida as our backup actress. We picked Franchie because we believed she had an older looking face and was quite tall and we thought she would look even older with the help of make-up and costume.

Cressida Bullogh (our female actor)

After we told our Media teacher who our actress was he came back to us a few days later to tell us that Franchie could not be our actress because she had already been casted in another thriller with Mike Nailand as the male actor. We were  told that it would be beneficial to us if we went with our backup actress so that there were not too many similarities between the two thrillers. We took on board this advice and decided to go with Cressida as our female actress. We sent Cressida an email asking if she could shoot of Wed/28/Jan/15 and she wrote an email back to confirm that she had asked her teachers and that she was free to spend the day being our actress in our thriller.

Looking back with hindsight our group has agreed that Cressida was actually the better option because she has a very innocent look to her, with the blond hair, blue eyes and gentle looking face which will contrast with the way she manages to defeat the intruder in our thriller. 

As for the male actor in our thriller, as previously mentioned we have casted Mike Niland, We picked him because he is a large, tall and strong man and could fit the role of an intruder very well because of this, we think this because stereotypically intruders have to be strong to do demanding tasks or be strong enough to take somebody out. 

Mike Nailand (our male actor)

Another reason we picked him was because he heard our group discussing who our possible options for male actors were, and offered him self saying he was definitely free on the day of the shoot and could be our actor. Because of limited time and limited choice we accepted his offer and casted him as our actor. As well as with Cressida we sent Mike an email just to confirm that he could definitely be our actor on Wed/28/Jan/15 and he replied saying that he could.

Location

When our group was deciding where we wanted to film our thriller, we new that our options would probably be limited because we needed a house or anything similar; We need this because we need several storey’s because there are shots downstairs, shots going up stairs and shot on the higher story. This ruled out few options such as building a set because as we discussed with the school construction crew it would be a lot to complicated. One thing that the whole group agreed upon was that we wanted our location to look realistic (meaning that it looked like an actual lived in house), this ruled out possibly using the school because we felt it would look unrealistic and look like a location for a bad school project. We then thought of possibly using one of the schools several boarding house’s to sea if it could possibly used, Perry would look at the Peaslake boarding house, Zella would look at the Cornhill Manor boarding house and India and I would look at the Beatrice Webb House boarding house; The next day our group met up again and discussed what we had observed and we had each came to the conclusion that each boarding house would look too much like a boarding house rather than a normal house, we came to this conclusion due to many reasons, the size of the houses were to big for somebody who lives alone, the rooms were decorated like in a boarding house with numbers on the room doors and desks fitted around the beds etc. We also came to the conclusion that in any of the boarding houses there were no spare rooms which were not already being lived in and decorated like a students room, we concluded that because it would be to hard to dismantle a room and make it look appropriate for the scenario and that the different boarding houses were to big and to differently decorated from a normal house that we would not want to film there.

    Peaslake Boarding house                                                  Cornhill Boarding House                                              Beatrice Webb Boarding House

     

After we came to this conclusion our group was discussing in class where we could possibly film, and one of our class mates over heard this conversation and told us that he lives very close to school un-like most students who board, and said that he could take some photos of his house for us to show us how it looked so that we could possibly use his house for the shoot if we liked the look of it and thought that it would fit well with our thriller. These are the photo's he sent us:

            Photo of outside of house.                                     Photo inside facing the front door.                                  Photo of downstairs office.

        Photo of downstairs living room.                                           Photo of staircase.                                                       Photo of hallway.

            Photo of upstairs bedroom.                                    Photo #1 of upstairs living room.                                Photo #2 of upstairs living room.

Upon reviewing the photos of his house we thought that it was the most realistic looking option we had, with limited time till the shoot so we immediately accepted the offer. We had to get confirmation from his mother to make sure we could film there, we also had to cast the boy as an extra in our thriller so that there was a member of the family present.

                                                                        Email from parent, permitting us to shoot at their house.