Past Student Thrillers

During the research process of making a thriller, we had to look at lots of different clips from famous block-buster thrillers. However, we have been at the thillers made by past students. In this post I will be analysing 3 different past student thrillers. I will be doing this as if i were a teacher marking them. There are some main things i will need to look for, things such as;
-Does it look like the opening to a film?
-Can you see any thriller conventions?
-Have they made good use of mise-en-scene?
-Is there a combination of non-digetic and digetic sound?
-Have they made any technical mistakes?
-Is the quality of performance at a high level?

Thriller 1 -Rated 4



This thriller is a high quilaty thiller for a student production. To start, their ident is very professional, it suggests to any audience that this is really a real production, not just a student thriller. The start is very mysterious, and doesnt give much away. This is a type of a thriller convention as it leaves the audience asking questions. The camera angles thoughout the thriller are very good. All have been shot using a tripod or other device. Another thriller convention is the music used in the background. This music is very different to the action going on in the thriller as the music is calm, church-like music when the main character is shooting someone from a window. A piercing high-pitch sound also suggests death, which was put into this particular thriller. The other boy running is also a common occurrence, something you would see in 'James Bond' types of films. The actors in the film also stay focased throughout the entire thriller which shows how professional they was about this project. Once the boy running has reached the car, he finds his partner 'dead' and this is when the music changes and the boy speaks. This shows that the group used both digetic and non-digetic sound. The killer then is revealed to be in the back of the car and suddenly kills the other innocent man who witnessed the kill. This is also another thriller convention. To the audiences suprise, there is a little boy sitting next the the killer who would have winessed the killing in the car. This is something that would really startle the audience, using a child in this sictuation is very different and really gives the audience a sense of involvement as they would want to help the child. This then makes the audience think that the rest of the film would be about the life of the little boy, making it feel like a real opening to a real film. They used another aspect of a thriller by using the card/chip on the floor as the McGuffin.

Thriller 2 : Rated 4