Thrillerwork - Costume and Make-up - Sophie Miller (Victim) - Inspiration

Our victim should represent the stereotypical blond and attractive female victim in thrillers or Horror-films like "Scream", American Psycho", "Psycho" and "Inglorious Basterds".
We want to present our victim as innocent and weak to make her pitiable and let the audience sympathise with her. That will create a moral conflict in the audience, because they will like the funny and charismatic killer, but they also will sympathise with the innocent and helpless victim.
Moreover our target audiences, men around 30 and around 18, will fancy a young and attractive woman.
However we want to show clearly that the killer has completely has desecrated the victims innocence. So we are not going to present our victim with clean blond hair and a white dress. We are going to present her in a dirty, bloody and worn dress, the hair dirty and messy as the face is.The inspiration for our victim is the young Shoshanna Dreyfus  running away from Hans Landa. ("Inglourious Basterds")

Thrillerwork - Castlist

We have chosen to use Alice Heappey  as our victim because she is young, blond and attractive, which are the characteristics of a stereotypical   thriller and horror-film genre.  We’ve also chosen her, because our target audience, men from 20 to 30, will fancy her.

We’ve chosen Simon Wood as our killer, because he has the same age and gender like our target audience, what will make it easier to make the audience slightly sympathize with the killer like in “Man Bites Dog”.  He also has a lot of experience of standing in front of a camera, which will make it easier to film him. Moreover has he played similar characters before and knows exactly what we want him to do.

Thrillerwork - Synopsis

Just a short summary of what our thriller idea looks like right now:

The movie would be  about two police officers hunting a cannibalise serial killer, who makes a cooking show at the internet, where he explains how to cook the people and how to create different kinds of meals.                                                          
Our opening sequence will present the killer in one of his shows. The whole sequence is separated into three parts:

1. Preparation: different shots showing the killer preparing his set and the food
2. Show: “Camcorder” (Sony NX 5) shot showing the show
3. “Camcorder” shot showing the killer feeding his victim with her own hip on toast

Thrillerwork - Recipes

In the research for our thriller we looked at different recipes for meals with meat, which you can make in a short time. We found a recipe for meat from the hip on toast, which fits perfectly into our concept, because it is simple to make doesn't need a to big amount of meat and it is easy to feed someone with it. :


To keep everything as realistic as possible, we are really going to cook this meal during our thriller shooting. So we will need the real ingredients, which are:
- 3 onion (s)
- 4 tbsp. oil
- 100 ml broth
- 3 tablespoons sour cream
- 400g steak (s), from the hip
- 8 disc / n toast
   
This will be enough for 8 toasts. However we might need more, because we don't know yet how often we have to film different things,

 

 

 

Thrillerwork - Costume - Jeremy Jerad (Killer)

We want to present our killer as a smart, intelligent guy. So we want show his good education and upper class status through good and expensive clothes, which also looks smart. This will subvert the audience's expectations of an stereotypical upper-class man.
We want to reinforce that effect of subverting the audience's expectations through presenting the killer in the colour white, which stands for innocence.
 

Thomas Pink Cutaway slim fit solid white shirt
£ 89.00

 
 
 
So we decided to customize our killer in a white shirt (slim), which we will order in the internet.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Although we're going to present our killer in way, that subverts the audience's expectations, we also want to show his "dark" side. So we decided to cloth his legs and feed  in black. That creates a binary opposition to the white shirt and also represents his literally "black" side of his mind. 



Chinos £19.99
H&M

 
 
 
 
 
So we decided to use black chinos, which we will buy in H&M... 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

black leather shoes
£120.95

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
...and black leather shoes, which we also will order in the internet
 












Because our killer is cooking he is going to wear an apron. We want to use a white waist apron to present our killer hiding his "dark" side (black trousers) behind a white mask of innocence and.

White Waist Apron
Pub Shop
9£

We are going to order this apron in the internet.

Thrillerwork - Costume - Jeremy Jerad (Killer) - Inspiration

We want to present our killer as a smart, intelligent guy. So we want show his good education and upper class status through good and expensive clothes, which also looks smart.

So our biggest Inspiration in terms of costume for our killer is Hannibal Lecter, an upper-class and very intelligent psychiatrist, who is actually a sadistic serial-killer and cannibal.
He's wearing expensive suits, which present him as an upper-class, well educated person with an high status.
We want to present our killer not in exactly the same, but in a similar way.
 



Thriller Titles

We decided that the name of our thriller is the name of the cooking show the killer makes. So the name we are going to choose for our thriller will be strongly connected with the topic food.
Because our opening sequence has a very black humoured and disturbing side we want to choose a name, who creates a black humoured atmosphere.
We are not going to use the title Cooking for Children, because we changed our idea and the killer is not cooking children anymore.
Here are some potential titles for our thriller:

Breakfast in America - this title refers to the song "Breakfast in America" by Supertramp and so is quite amusing for the people, who know Supertramp and this song. A disadvantage is that Supertramp is not very popular anymore and a lot of younger people, which are our target audience, don't now the band and the song and won't get the joke behind it.

The Breakfast Club -  this title refers to the film "The Breakfast Club". As the title "Breakfast in America" does this title creates humour through linking the whole show to another film/song. But as the Song "Breakfast in America" the movie "The Breakfast Club" is not very popular for our target audience anymore.

Cookery Club - this title is an alliteration, which makes it easy and comfortable to say it. It also creates humour through linking to old people having a breakfast meeting/club every Sunday.
It also gives us the uncomfortable and a bit disturbing feeling of having a real society of organized cannibals around.

The Last Supper - this title is the most serious one as it references the bible. The title's advantage is that it's a well known title is so a possible audience will not forget.

We haven't decided yet which post we are going to choose, We are probably going to do that when we start editing our thriller.

Thrillerwork - Set and Lightning

Because our opening sequence is going to be a cooking show. The main part of the sequence, the actual show, will be set in a kitchen. The location for the  other part, the feeding scene, will be set up in the studio.

Kitchen Location

Jamie Oliver's Online Cookery Show, Food Tube

I have looked up some online cookery shows and especially had a look at the kitchens that were used in them. I noticed that there all are using kitchens with islands. Moreover they're all pretty spacious and look very professional, but still home, and neat.
 
 
I also looked up some kitchens of cannibals in movies and TV-dramas like "Red Dragon" or "Hannibal". However these kitchens look far too sinister and noble. Therefore we are not  going to take inspiration from these kitchen designs.

Hannibal Lecter's kitchen in the TV-drama Hannibal

 
I had a look in some of our kitchens in the boarding houses, but they were far to simple, they didn't even have stove plates.
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
So I had a look I had a look in some of the kitchens in some friends houses and there we found the kitchen we wanted to use for our thriller. Because we know the owners of it, we saved money we would usually have to pay for renting or even building the set.
 
We have chosen this kitchen, because it's a well equipped kitchen and it looks designed but the wooden style will make the audience feel comfortable as they would be in their own kitchen at home. 

Thrillerwork - Evaluation Of Developing The Timeline And The Storyboard

To create the storyboard was a little bit difficult, because we hadn't planned every detail of our thriller and had to discuss quite a few things about the exact order of events and actions and other details of setting, props, etc..
So, for an example, we had to discuss what the killer is going to cook  to plan the shot by shot timeline and the dialogue of the show.
But after we had discussed everything it wasn't that hard to develop the storyboard. Moreover it helped us fundamentally to understand our opening sequence as we know exactly what we want to do and from this base we can easily develop our idea if necessary.
During our development of the storyboard and shot by shot list we have made some slightly changes:
We are now going to add another sequence after the preparation shots and the show. This sequence will also be filmed by the "camcorder" (which we decided will be the Sony NX 5 and not a proper camcorder) and will show the killer feeding his female victim with her own hip on toast.
We decided to use a blond and female victim, because they represent the stereotypical victims in thrillers.   This part of the opening sequence will be the serious part of our opening sequence. We won't use any non-diegetic sound at all in this sequence to create a very strong contrast to the happy mooted background music of the show. This will create an uncomfortably calm atmosphere and an incredible strong tension. (like the first scene in the Hollywood movie "Inglorious Basterds")
We have also given our characters names:
The killer is now called Jeremy Jerad
and the victim is called Sophie Miller 
 but developing our storyboard didn't help us to understand our characters better, because we already had a very clear image of our characters. Especially the way we want to present our killer was very clear from the whole beginning.
The main titles will be shown during the preparing sequence. But there won't be any title in the show and in the feeding scene.

Thrillerwork - Storyboard

 

 

Thrillerwork - Contrapuntal Music

Contrapuntal Music is  either diegetic or non-diegetic music, which creates an opposite meaning to the actual action on screen. On of the best examples for the use of contrapuntal music in thrillers is the torture and ear eating scene in  "Reservoir Dogs" ...

as well as the "singing in the rain" scene from "ClockworkOrange":

A happy mudded music playing with nearly sadistic violence on screen creates this kind of funny, but also perverse atmosphere, which makes you feel a little bit sick.
Because we want to create the same atmosphere on screen of this guy as killing and cooking people the same way as drinking a cup of tea in the evening, we are also going to use contrapuntal music.
We looked up different songs and finally found the title of the German TV-show "Löwenzahn", which is exactly the kind of music we want for our thriller. Because of copyright we are not aloud to use this song, but we're already looking around to find a music producer

Thrillerwork - Mise-en-Scene - Presentation

Thrillerwork - Timeline - Shot by Shot

Preparation
The whole preparation sequence is very calm and the killer is doing everything precisely. We don't see the killer's face at all:


Big close-up of a sink. Killer is turning on the water and washes his hands. - diegetic sound of the running water (5-6 sec.)

Big close-up of killers hand being dried with a towel.(4-5sec.)

Medium close-up of killer's side putting on a apron (could have flowers on it or something different which also creates a contrast to the act of killing, cooking and eating children.)  (4-5sec.)

Big closed-up panning shot of knifes, wooden spoons and other kitchen equipment being put on the table/working plate. ) (4-5)

Close-up of the pan being put on the heater/fire, oil gets put in. (4-5 sec.)

middle wide-shot of killer cutting the onions. Seeing him from behind;  seeing his back and occiput (4-5)

Big close-up  of onions being cut and put into the pan. - diegetic hissing sound (4 sec.)

high angle  close up or point of view tenderizing the meat (3-4 sec.)

over the shoulder shot or point of view cutting the meat into stripes (3-4sec.)

middle close up  of killer watching himself on the display of the camera, pressing the record button, goes back into the kitchen while still facing the camera. (5-6 sec.)

or

wide shot (camcorder view) of kitchen and killer :" Well, I think I'm ready. Would you mind to press the record button? ... Yes go on". Red " rec" appears in the right top corner of the screen. "Thank you"

Cooking Show:

constant wide shot of the camcorder filming the show (about 1 minute)


wide shot of camcorder
"And now, would you mind to press record button again to stop recording?" the "rec" disappears.
"Thank you very much"

Trying the toast

- camcorder wide shot of killer coming closer
- killer grabs the camera and positions it on a table - we see in a wide shot victim sitting on a chair by a table
- zoom into middle wide shot showing the two chairs, table  and victim - "rec" appears again
- hearing the killer going back to the kitchen, he comes back and sits next to the victim
- feeds the victim like a baby ( spending  much time on that to constantly confront the audience with it)

end of opening sequence and blending in title of movie, which will also be the title of the cooking show




Thing to be remembered
point of view






http://www.chefkoch.de/rezepte/875988277088/Fleisch-Toast.html