Film Studies Cinimatic Ideas

“Reaper” Cinematic Ideas


The cinematic idea behind our film ‘Reaper’ was to create an atmosphere suitable for the thriller genre. To achieve the atmosphere that we wished to create, we used conventions seen within the horror genre. We used still shots to emphasis time to generate suspense and extreme close ups to throw the audience straight in.In post-production we researched a number of films within the horror genre we looked at films such as both Hostel films and the Saw franchise, after looking at all these films we got an idea of the lighting that we wished to use and also decided how we wanted our set to look like. Using the software “Adobe Premiere Elements”, we adjusted the contrast of the picture to give the footage a darker tone which darkened some areas making it completely black such as the plughole. We wanted to very much exaggerate the darkness in our sequence and make it very uneasy on the eye. The darkness slightly distorts this symbolizes the darkness that our character ha walked into. The music also added to the atmosphere by creating tension with its slow, gradual, build up and then hitting the audience with loud sound effects to gain a reaction of shock and fear.The idea behind the killers look was to completely dehumanize him, giving him no features. Our inspiration very much cam from the character of Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise. The white emotionless face was very good at creating fear because the audience was completely unaware who or what he was. For our killer we wanted to have the same effect as Michael Myers and create the question of who and what our killer is. To do this we decided to cover our killer in bloodstained bandages, we also did this to suggest that underneath the bandages was a ugly deformed figure.

When it came to selecting the weapon for our film we felt that it would have been very cheesy to go with the conventional knife. We felt that the audience would have expected this due to its popularity within the slasher genre (Myers’ Knife, Freddy’s fingers, Jason’s machete) so instead we decided to go with a completely different weapon. Firstly, the killer uses his hands to displaying his pure strength and power over his victims. To finish his victim off, we believed the most effective way would be one huge single blow from a sledgehammer instead of multiple hits to the body. We didn’t want to glorify or use gore but instead exaggerate the power of the killer.

Overall we feel very happy with our cinematic ideas and we believe we have planned all possible to create a great thriller film.