Movie North By Northwest

North By Northwest

  A Thriller North By Northwest (1959) by Alfred Hitchcock is a perfect example of a thriller. To prove it I would start with a plot. Thrillers has a villain driven plot. In this movie there is a villain and a hero. 

Villain - Phillip Vandamm
(James Mason)








Hero - Roger O. Thornhill
(Cary Grant)

In thrillers, villain is usually wealthier and more resourceful than hero. In North By Northwest Phillip Vandamm is wealthier and more resourceful than Roger O. Thornhill as Vandamm has more money and men who are working for him. Vandamm makes Thornhill overcome a lot of difficulties as he is trying to get rid of him, while Thornhill has to do his best and stay alive.


In this movie there are guns and danger as it has to be in thriller movies.

  In this scene Roger O. Thornhill pretends to be shot down to trick the villain Phillip Vandamm to think that he died and stop coming after him.
















In this scene Thornhill had to overcome a difficulty made by Vandamm who was trying to kill him. Thornhill does not have anything to fight against the plain with, however he still manages to stay alive and move on towards finding out the truth.














  In this movie there is a frequent action. It starts when Thornhill get kidnapped by two men sent by Vandamm. 
  Then the men gets Thornhill drunk and makes him drive the car straight to the ocean. However, he realizes what is happening and drives away without Vandamm's men catching him.
  Later on, Thornhill has to keep on running from Vandamm and his traps as well as death that was so close to him.







This movie also has a climax as well as all of the thrillers. The climax starts when Thornhill find out why he was being hunted as an officer explains him the situation and the confusion. It ends when Thornhill finally 'beats' Vandamm and his men even though with the help of the others.
There is not always a happy ending in thrillers but after constant action and fear, Alfred Hitchcock gives the audience a rest.

Past Student Thrillers

Past Student Thrillers

We have looked through 5 student thrillers. We have been asked to choose 3 of them and talk about them. In lesson the class has been given a choice of 1-4 to rate the thrillers.

4 - Excellent

3 - Good

2 - Basic

1 - Poor

We have looked and rated these thrillers in order to understand and remember the main mistakes students make when creating their thrillers. This should help us to not to repeat the mistakes and know what is the best a student can do with resources provided from school.

These are the three thrillers I chose to write about:

1. Hidden

  I have rated this thriller to 1 point (poor). My opinion was based on Mise-en-Scene. There was a lot of mistakes and poor choices made when filming this thriller.

  The group of students has chosen to film their thriller in the evening which was a very bad decision as the thriller was very hard to see and understand because of the darkness. The acting in the thriller was not good enough and the setting was not well organised. To prove my point I could say that the actors in the thriller did not manage to cross the road together as the female actor had to push the male actor to cross.

  The use of camera was poor as in the thriller there was a one long shot of the actors walking towards which took about 2/5 of the sequence.

2. Hunter

  In my opinion this thriller was worth 3 points (good). The students has chosen a good place to film their thriller as it was related to the idea hidden in the thriller.

  The thriller was about a missing student and a police officer coming to school to question a teacher. I liked the fact that the thriller was filmed in school and it went along with the sequence. I was pleased with the acting of the actors in this thriller and the way it ends makes me curious about what is about to happen next.
  The camera work was done well however the sound was hardly possible to hear and understand. 



3. Watch Your Back




  This is a thriller I have chosen myself. I would rate it 4 points(Exellent). I really liked the presentation of this idea even knowing that the idea itself is nothing special.
  'Watch Your Back' expressed the name very well as it kind of made me feel unsafe. Good job was done when editing this thriller, it really interested me and got my attention. 
  Even though there was not a lot of acting I still was pleased with the actors. The thriller seemed interesting and unpredictable as well as drawing into.

Preliminary Exercise

Detention

 In this task we had to show our understanding in the filming techniques that we have learned in lesson. We have chosen the idea of detention as we to had film the sequence in school and the idea was matching the place. 
 We were told to use following shots/filming techniques:

• Match on Action
• Eye line Match
• Shot,Reverse shot
• 180 Degree Rule

 Match On Action
Match on action (or cutting on action) is an editing technique for continuity editing in which one shot cuts to another shot portraying the action of the subject in the first shot.
We had done this technique as the student went through the door to go to the corridor, and in the other shot she comes out to the corridor. We had also done this technique as the student stood up and pushed the chair back.

Eye line Match
 Eye line match worked for us pretty well. We have filmed the teacher looking at the paper, and then showed the paper she was looking at.

 Shot, Reverse shot
 We have not done the shot reverse shot. We could have done it when the teacher and the student were talking to each other.

 180 Degree Rule
We have followed this rule as when showing the characters they stays at the same hand side. However, we had to edit the video as we broke the rule while filming the sequence.