PROPS AND LOCATION

In thrillers there are always themes and conventions that the film follows to a certain extent, in regard to the props and location. Here are some of the parallels between out film 'The Investigation' and other generic thrillers.

In thrillers there tends to be a weapons, usually due to most thrillers having a theme surrounding murder and crime (much like our film). Weapons (props) used most commonly are gun and knives but more unorthodox thrillers mat use more obscure weapons that may be more symbolic of the film or character in the film.

Here are some of the props that were significant in our film:

Murder Board/ suspect board-

this was a quintessential part of our film and is featured quite a lot. it really encompasses the theme of our film- crime thriller, as it both creates suspence (typical of a thriller) and shows the audience the criminal investigation aspect. We also had to make sure that it looked fairly realistic as we really wanted to accurately portray a murder investigation.

Police badge-

The police badge was used in our film as a way of explicitly depreciating who the law enforcers were from the rest of the characters and again to make the film more realistic. This realism would be achieved by the police characters wearing the badges as that is what a real officer would wear.

Here are some of the locations that er significant in our film:

Woods (park)-

We decided that we wanted to have a scene in a wood area as this is a place used frequently for thrillers as it is really effective in making the atmosphere creepy. 'The woods' seem to be a good place to set a thrillers as the shapes of the trees and shadows created can be quite eerie and also the fact that the woods are seen as quite vast there is an element of fear/ apprehension to do with the idea of being lost or trapped. There were also some practical issues we faced with shooting a 'wood' scene which was the fact that as we live in Central London there not really an actual wood. we over came this issue (quite simply in fact) as we do have access to public park such as Hyde and Battasea Park where there are some woodland areas. lastly as we were filming in a public park we did have to ask for permission from some people in the park as they could potentially be in the back ground of our film.

Suspect room (classroom)-

We used class rooms as the room where the suspects would be 'lined up'. This was really convenient upon reflection because we were able to use the interactive white board to project a police line up back ground instead of going though the trouble of making it ourselves. In addition we had quite easy access to that one particular class as that is where our media lesson takes place.

police station-

The police station was a more tricky location to secure as some of the stations that attempted to film at did not allow us to due to lack of supervision and not being entirely sure of what our project was. Eventually we did find a police station that allowed us to film outside with the squad car.