Character Research

Traditionally, in thrillers there are two different types of character; the victim and the antagonist.
The antagonist is traditionally an older male, and the victim is normally a young, vulnerable, female.
We have decided to use on these conventions as we think it's the best way to portray our genre in the first two minutes most effectively.
We will portray the 'villain' as an elderly man, with mysterious clothing so that their face is never seen, and the victim will be in bright, casual clothing to represent their age and vulnerability; this will be in the form of a hoodie and jeans, as is typical of a teenager.
This can be seen in many films, such as The Lovely Bones, Silence of the Lambs and Psycho

For our antagonist we were thinking of a dark, baggy trench coat and a 'bowler' hat type, to cover the face which is also quite menacing.

This can be seen in The Cheap Detective in which the outfit is similar to what we are thinking of, as can be seen here:

This helps to create an element of mystery, and suggests that the have something to hide as you never see their face and their body is thickly covered, not giving anything away.

Actors Research

We wanted to stick to the conventions of a thriller; a young, female victim and an older, male antagonist.

Female Victim

For this we turned to our friends, who are all 17-18 year olds, which is the target age for our victim.
We don't want her to be too young as this would change the story, making it more a child-hunter antagonist - Which we didn't want.
We looked at a few different people, including Katie and Aimee.

Katie

Aimee

These are both within the age range of our female victim.
They are both blonde, which is typical of a thriller victim, however we want to challenge the idea that blondes are the best victim and show that our antagonist is slightly different.





For this reason, we looked at people with darker hair, but still within the age range of 17-18 years.
We again looked at a few different people, including Hester and Louisa.

Hester

We think that these two people are very good choices, as they are young, females, with darker hair to challenge the blonde hair convention.
For our production, we need two victims; one for the newspaper showing past victims, and one for the main piece of acting whom is being 'stalked'.
We have chosen to use Hester as our previous victim, and Louisa as our main actress. This is because we feel that she has a more youthful look and is more willing to act on screen.



Male Antagonist

Preferably, this character would be played by an older male but we do not have access to this age range.
Therefore, we looked at males within our own age range and thought that we could portray as older once filming, with the use of costume and behaviour.
For this we looked at Louis, who we thought would be good to play our villain.

Louis

This is our option to play our antagonist,  he is in our age range and is a male who could possibly play our villain.
We plan on dressing him up in order to make him appear older, as is the typical convention of a thriller, to have an older male pry on young females.





In order to challenge the conventions, we have actually decided to use a female actress.
This is to challenge the conventions of a real media product.
We will dress here up in male clothing in order to portray to the audience that she is male. In our opening two minutes, her face will not be seen, keeping her gender from the audience in order to play on conventions. However, through viewing the production of the opening two minutes, she appear as a man to the audience, as is intended.