Music is an important element to a thriller. Music can be used to create suspense, in a thriller music mostly indicates something is about to happen. The music typically used in thrillers is normally slow music which tends to build atmosphere. Usually the atmospheric music is non-diegetic, this is when the sound is not in the characters world meaning they cannot hear it. This makes the audience engage as they feel they know something that the character doesn’t.. Diegetic sound is also used this is when sounds happen in the characters world. All films including thrillers use a combination of diegetic and non- diegetic sound.

In my thriller opening there was an exploration of the use of music. Our group decided that we wanted the whole opening to be underscored with music. Our piece starts with a slow soundtrack which sounds sinister and then we added the nursery rhyme “twinkle twinkle” with this and the sinister music combined it made the nursery rhyme sound distorted. I think this was successful as we wanted it to be abstract and to provoke enigmas. I think the sound of the nursery rhyme and the sinister music breaks the stereotypical sound of this nursery rhyme and with this it challenges the forms and conventions of a thriller, as nursery rhymes are not usually used in thrillers to create suspense but we used this in ours. We also used a screaming soundtrack in the flyer section this was a very intense scream and this made it feel quiet suffocating so in our final editing sessions we had to adjust this.

embedded&v=mRgkx4PkrEE&safe=active I would compare my thriller to “The hand that rocks the cradle” as the storylines are very similar. They both have a female protagonist and both focus and obsess over children. I would say that both films have a very dark theme which run through them. After watching the film I realised that the music at one point in the film is very similar to the music in Locked. Both films manipulate nursery rhymes. I think this an effective tool as the typical forms of a nursery rhyme are reversed and the song changes from an innocent song to a song with deep twisted meaning attached to it.

The typical forms and conventions of lighting in most thrillers is low key lighting. Low key lighting is used to create an atmosphere in thrillers. If the low key lighting is over used the film could fall into the horror genre. And example of when I used low key lighting in my thriller opening is in the final scene. I used this lighting to create a creepy atmosphere, to film this we used night vision on the camera. We also challenged the typical conventions of lighting in thrillers. As most of our footage is shot in day light. I thought this would be effective as the audience isn't expecting the thriller to be set in day light. It also adds atmosphere to the piece as it give the impression to the audience that this happens in real life. As it is set in a realistic location making the plot more believable

From my thriller research I have found that a lot of thriller films use close ups. This is to create an intense atmosphere. In my final piece I didn’t want to use too many close up shots as I didn’t want the opening to become overwhelming and therefore the audience may not want to continue watching. From my research I also found that some thriller use jerky/ shaken camera movement to show a frantic situation. This was not applicable for our thriller therefore we didn’t use this technique. In my final piece I did use a fast zoom into the newspaper, this was accompanied with a screaming audio this did add a very intense atmosphere. In my final piece we also used a slow pan shot of the locker. My group and I decided this would be good as it would mean the audience could see inside the locker in detail. And the fact that the pan was slow meant that the audience had time to think about what they were seeing and the meaning encoded behind this.