Characters

Within our thriller opening there are two main characters, an unseen character and a character with an extra's part.

Character 1:

(Holly Dove) Femme Fatale. This Character is played by Holly Delaney. Her role is one that appears to be quite helpless within our opening. However, her character is a victim of abuse and someone who has mixed with the wrong crowd and so there is room for her deviant, dangerous behaviour to come out.



Character 2:

(Jason Viper) The Killer. This character is shadowed and not fully visable throughout most of the opening of the thriller to create tension and fear. His character is involved in money and is a mafia type. he is seeking revenge on the femme fatale's lover and social circle.


Unseen Character:
Lover. This character is the femme fatale's lover. He is murdered by the killer due to involvements in gambling, money etc. He is a apart of the bad crowd that the femme fatale is connected with.


Extra:
Running man. This character is used as part of a red herring in our plot and merely runs by the femme fatale suspiciously, bumping into her.

Femme Fatale Character & Film Noir Conventions Within Our Thriller

In our Thriller, we have tried to make the femme fatale character conform to the conventional film noir femme fatale. In order to do this, we looked closely at the costumes used in existing film noirs that suggest a devient and glamorous woman. Looking into 40's costumes helped rather a lot. In the end we decided to put Holly in a faux fur coat, tights and slightly heeled vintage shoes. To accessroies this we made her wear a pearl necklace and a small black and gold clutch bag. As far as her hair goes, the group decided that she would look a lot more feminine with her hair down and the continuity when filming would be more precise because we were filming different parts on different days. The fur coat is very 40's and conforms to the film noir sub genre. Making her look very feminine created more of an illusion of the seductive, inticing woman that a femme fatale is defined as. A lot of inspiration came from the femme fatale in Once Upon a Time in America. Something we did not use was red lipstick, this is frequently used on femme fatale characters but we decided not to use it because when editing we are going to convert the footage into black and white.

Film noir primarily describes Hollywood crime dramas and they are filmed with a low key black and white iconic style. Both the narrative and cinematography of our Thriller opening conforms to this definition and there are certain generic convention that we utilised in order to create an authentic interpretation of the sub genre. The lighting, shadows and costume all have clear resemblences of the genre and the soundtrack that we are goint to use makes the era and sub genre even clearer. Elements of crime fiction are evident in our narrative and the inclusion of a femme fatale is something that solidifies the clarity of the genre.

Expectations of Characters in a Thriller Film

There are a lot of generic character types within the thriller genre. They make up tension and suspense and the development of their character and behaviour often is the main focus of the film. Conventional characters within the thriller genre include: criminal, stalkers, innocent victims (on the run), characters with dark pasts, down-on-their luck losers, defiant women, cops and escaped convicts, psychotic individuals, private eyes, femme fatales, terrorists, drug addicts and people involved in twisted relation ships.

A range of obvious characteristics are used to present the characters in quite a conventional and sometimes exaggerated way. Greed, jealousy, envy, pursuit, political conspiracy, murder and romantic entanglements are often the themes apparent within thrillers, relating to characters motives etc.

Shooting & Intitial to Final Ideas

As far as shooting goes, we got off to a bad start because of the weather. The snow meant that we could not film as we had scheduled; this created minor problems but has not affected the process. Everyone was able to make the filming however another problem occured when a member of our group quit sixth form. In order to resolve this, we have had to change around character parts and the cast list.

Our initial location idea was to have the opening to our thriller filmed down and around Elm Hill- this is somethign we have stuck to because it fits so well with the sub-genre of our film. The costumes and character planning has been followed and so the final outcome reflects our inital ideas quite well. We no longer have the 'lover character because of the problems that occured prior to filming- in order to keep our orginal plot we have just decided to leave him as an unseen chacter; he is still a key part of the story.

When finishing our filming, we are going to shoot at a slightly later time so that we can use lighting to create shadows. This is very important as it is a generic convention of film noir.