I'm Rosie Rattray and this is my blog; I am a Year 12 student at The Leigh Technology Academy and this blog will be used purely for my AS Media Studies.
From watching numerous thrillers, I decided to that using a large major city as a suitable location to shoot a thriller film in. I chose London as it is a recognizable city and has many iconic features and characteristics to determine that the location is in fact London, for example London buses and telephone boxes. Also the London Eye etc. Thrillers are generally set in a busy business type area, and London can be an example of this. In this photo you can see office blocks, making the audience that it is a business orientated setting. There is also St. Paul's Cathedral in the background of the photo which is the iconic structure in this particular photo. The River Thames is also visible, though one might not necessarily notice that without seeing St. Paul's Cathedral first.
The Butterfly Effect is a famous psychological thriller that succeeds in many ways at keeping viewers entertained with a serious of mysterious scenes that bring suspense and tension upon the audience, making them sit on the edge of their seats. The Butterfly Effect is based around a boy called Evan, who throughout the film audience sees at various different stages of his life. Evan suffers from black-outs which cause him to forget certain, mostly traumatic events in his life; the blackouts are said to be stress related.
As teenage Evan takes a girl back to his dorm, he finds a collection of his old journals which he had written in as a child and beyond; Evan starts to recall the events to the girl and finds he can travel back in time and finds out previously hidden information and potentially redo all of the events in the journal account. As he goes through his accounts, he finds many different scenarios once he has changed his events, and he comes back into several alternative futures including a student, a prisoner and lastly an amputee. Each of the changes he makes to the events are an attempt to save (including saving her from being molested by her pedophile father) and win over his childhood sweetheart Kayleigh. All of these attempts seem to come with a negative consequence so he is forced to change some events more than once.
The confusion of memories in Evans brain cause him to have frequent nosebleeds throughout the film which leads to the diagnosis of brain damage later in the film. In several consequences from changing his past, he hurts many of his loved ones along the way, which he soon comes to realise. During the end of the film, Evan decides that the best thing to do is to go back to the time he met Kayleigh and scare her away, that way she will never be a part of his future life which does lead to him saving her life. He burns all of his memories and journals to destroy the evidence of ever meeting her. In the end scene we see Evan and Kayleigh pass in the street, they acknowledge each other but neither speaks.
The film is a successful thriller as it hits the expectations of what a thriller is. The blackouts are mysterious and the audience wish to know how he is going to change them and whether the change will bring good or bad consequences. The audience wonder also if Evan is ever going to succeed in saving Kayleigh and end up being with her. The effect of moving forwards and backwards in time ensure that many different events unfold, which the audience is anxious to follow until the end.
This collage demonstrates the iconography of a typical thriller movie. Thrillers are most famous for their mystery and suspense. All of the items I have chosen above are mysterious, there is no explanation to them and the audience would have unanswered questions towards some of these screenshots above. The disc on the far left of the collage is an unidentified DVD and the audience will want to know the contents of the mysterious disc. The words 'fuck you' bring a negative vibe to the DVD so therefore the audience know immediately that the disc isn't going to be pleasant.
In the shot below that there is a man that seems to be angry and holding a syringe. The liquid contents is unknown to the viewers, this therefore brings a sense of mystery. The photo of the phone with '1 missed call' displayed on the screen is also mysterious as viewers would ask the questions 'who rang him?' and 'why?'
Moving onto the picture of the autopsy, these take place after a murder has happened to determine the cause of death, this also begins to confuse viewers minds making them wish to find out how this woman was killed.
All of the remaining images also bring suspense and mystery upon the audience to make them question Who? What? When? Where? How? All locations pictured are dark and dingy which is a typical iconography of a thriller.
This is a photograph taken of a mind map we did as a group. It demonstrates and answers the question ' What Is A Thriller?' Group discussions help to congregate ideas to end up with a huge list of elements included in a thriller film. This activity was carried out in order to help during the process of making our own thriller movie later in the course. I can use this mind map to refer back to when thinking of ideas of my own.
