Reflection on influences, and how they affected our take on our film

As a group, we wanted to create a thriller that would use various aspects of the thriller genre from its creation to the present. This would lead us to create a thriller that would appeal to a wide target audience, and would use successful techniques that have already been proven by their success. We watched various thrillers, choosing them for their success, release date and sub-genre. To name a few, we watched: The Third Man: Possibly the most famous thriller of all time, we were inspired mainly by the clever camera angles and mise-en-scenes used in the film, as well as the contrast between black and white to create a very powerful image. Vertigo: Hitchcock is often referred to as the "father of thriller", and Vertigo is among his most famous. We were mainly looking for the use of camera angles in this, and we took several shot ideas from this film, in particular the staircase shot we used. Layer Cake: A very conventional modern thriller, Layer Cake uses some very powerful, effective camera techniques and its use of music made us realise that music could be very effective in our film. From Dusk Till Dawn: The first half of this film is a thriller, and is very edgy and quirky, which gives it a unique flare which separates it from the crowd. We wanted to make sure that our film was not conventional in every way, and had a different feel about it. Ichi the Killer: This Japanese thriller also has a very unique style, created by its odd sense of humour and our relationships with the character, as well as a confusing narrative. Its use of crime syndicates and how the people in them operate was interesting, and gave me a lot to think about in terms of how the members of different ranks communicate. This led to the choice of our two characters, and how the son of a crime lord communicates with other characters. Sin City: This the comics which the film was directly based on was heavily inspired by the film noir subgenre of the thriller genre, which we wanted to incorporate in our film. As this film was inspired by so many other famous thrillers, taking ideas from this saved us a lot of time. For example, the use of black and white, the theme of corruption and the birds eye staircase shot. The boss's son in our film was also closely modeled on Roark Junior. Se7en: This film gave me the most inspiration, and this is clear from many features of our film, such as the style of text and music. Its nihilistic narrative was also inspirational - I find that too many films have happy endings, especially in thrillers, which should leave the audience with a lot to think about. Se7en had an ending which made me really think.