Group Planning - Miss Georgiou

Group Planning

My group consist of three members, Kane Faulkner-Wild, Malu Pillai and myself. Group meetings are essential so that our group can come together weekly with different and new and improved ideas for our sequence that we may have thought of in our own time and want to share with the rest of our group. Group planning is essential to carry out in our groups because it helps us to stay organised and gives us the opportunity to discuss and evaluate all our group members ideas.  Group planning also helps to develop ideas as all the group members can combine all the different individual ideas to produce better ideas.

In our first group meeting on the 13th of October we discussed each members of the groups individual narrative and their ideas for our own opening thriller sequence. Here we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of all the members different individual ideas and figure out how we could portray them into making a successful short thriller clip. We evaluated each members narrative and picked out the conventional parts of a thriller film in all of the ideas. We then tried to combine all of the ideas together to come up with our final group narrative. We took the idea of the forest setting from Kane's individual narrative. The idea we took from my own individual idea was the idea of using an unusual cannibal antagonist. We finally looked at Malus individual narrative and found that she also included a cannibal idea and a forest setting. Therefore we came to the definite decision of a cannibal antagonist as this is quite an unusual narrative and we we're going to film this in a forest setting. We decided that a forest setting was conventional to the thriller genre as it makes the characters seem vulnerable.

In our second meeting which was help on the 24th of October we discussed what sort of image we wanted to create in our opening sequence and what our final narrative would be. This is where we created our final group narrative of a group of friends who lose their dog in the forest and split up to find it, this is where the unidentified cannibal who is in fact one of the friends attacks the rest of the group. We wrote down and brainstormed all our different ideas onto paper and started to begin thinking what we would include in the different elements of thriller : cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing and sound. On this meeting we came up with the idea that we wanted low key lighting during our sequence and also wanted to use tense background music and also sound effects that would create jumpy parts to scare the audience. We also decided that we would use a close up shot and sharp sound effect on the reveal of our antagonist as this is a key part of out sequence. We discussed within the group our favourite thriller films and why these where our favourites due to the different elements included in them.

In the third meeting which was on the 6th of November we had a discussion on mise-en-scene. This included discussing lighting and colour, costume, iconography, settings and positioning of characters. The main ideas we come up with from our discussion was a forest setting, low key lighting throughout our sequence, we will put our characters in normal casual clothing so the audience can relate to them and identify the as students as this is hoe we want to represent the characters. The only use of iconography we decided to use was the dog, this is because due to our cannibal antagonist idea we don't need a use of weapons.

The next meeting we would have was for a discussion on editing techniques and this was held on the 10th of November. We looked through our books on the notes we had made previously on different editing techniques and when they were used and in what way to make an effect on the audience. The editing techniques we decided were most effective was montage editing and filters. We felt these were effective because the montage editing creates tension and makes the audience feel on the edge of their seat and the filters created an eerie and unsettling look. We also decided that the timing of the shots were very effective as they decide what feeling to give towards the audience and create suspense and scary parts for the audience which is conventional to the thriller genre.

In the next group discussion we was discussing sound. On a piece of paper all the members of my group brainstormed what sound techniques we found the most effective combined with the different shots of our opening thriller sequence. The techniques we came up with was diegetic and on screen sound as we can see where the sound is coming from which can sometimes portray a more frightening moment for the audience. We also all agreed as a group that sound effects were very effective in a thriller film, especially using a high pitch sharp sound effect on the reveal of our antagonist as this will scare our audience which is a convention of thriller films. We brainstormed on a piece of paper and wrote our ideas under four different headings which where non- diegetic sound, parallel sound, off screen sound and diegetic and on screen sound. We decided we would include all these different elements of sound in our own opening thriller sequence.

Our final group meeting was held on the 12th of November and we had a discussion on characters. We discussed how many characters we want to include and what they would be like, look like and what their background information would be. We decided that our own sequence would include 6 characters including me and Kane and 4 of our own friends from our media class. We decided we wanted to represent our characters as they are, students and of our same age group of 16 and 17. We decided to do this because the audience can relate to them as we have a target audience of teenagers roughly the same age as us as we have included elements that we enjoy ourselves so therefore will hopefully have the same effect on our audience. We decided that I would play the cannibal antagonist and Kane would be my victim. We decided that the other 4 characters would be our friends who reveal the narrative and that I am the antagonist and then be involved in a chase scene which is conventional to the thriller genre because it keeps the audience on the edge of their seat and creates tension in the opening of our thriller sequence.

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Group meetings and discussions are imperative to carry out as it gives us time as a group to develop concentrated ideas and also time to improve them. It helps us to plan out our thriller so it is as professional as it can be and so there is limitless amount of mistakes. I think that my group worked really well together as we stuck to all of our ideas unless we improved or developed them in some way. We was constantly discussing how we could improve our ideas and thinking of ways to make our thriller production better.