Intertextuality in our Thriler (Lauren)

 Intertextual References (Lauren)

Intertexuality is an important convention to take into consideration when filming any genre of film or television show. It cross references popular culture and amplifies meaning within the media product. A show that utilizes this convention frequently is American cartoon Family Guy, that adds intertextual references for comic effect. 

Here Family Guy mimics a shot practically identically from the Thriller film North by Northwest, by Alfred Hitchcock in order to make the scene more humorous and attract a wider audience due to the 1959 release date of the film. Widening our audience is something we want to achieve with our intertextuality, hence using current immensely popular film, The Hunger Games, hopefully attracting a similar demographic of viewers.

Along with The Hunger Games, we also took inspiration from Inception and Sin City. Whilst studying the opening to Inceptionan idea was conceived in my mind to use an outdoor, daylight setting to film our Thriller, as well as having a character washed up either on a shore or a bank somewhere. Once we had established our plot it was decided this washed up character would be a corpse on the bank of a stream in making intertextual reference to Leonardo DiCaprio's character washed up and alive on a beach. The handheld camera shots used in this scene in Inception are to be mimicked when we film our Thriller opening, the canted angles intended to show confusion and disorientation. 

There are a series of shots we intend to lift directly from the opening of The Hunger Games and recreate for our Thriller with our protagonist. When we had decided upon the location, the woods, and that our character Georgewould use these woods as a playground we had to establish what kinds of things he would be doing and playing with. Once I had suggested we cast my cousin as George, who coincidently does a lot of archery, the idea of him playing with a bow and arrow fell into place. In current films it is characters associated with forests and woodlands who utilize bows and arrows, Merida from Brave, Legolas from Lord of the Rings and of course, Katniss from The Hunger Games. Because The Hunger Games is a dystopian Thriller, it has similar conventions that we wanted to explore in our Thriller as well as a very similar location setting. So we lifted the following shots and aim to mimic them in order to attract a wider modern young adult audience.

Finally we took inspiration from Thriller Sin City, and the equilibrium and disequilibrium that is shown within the film, or more simply worded, the ordinary meets extraordinary convention often explored in Thriller films. An ordinary moment in the beginning of Sin City is when The Salesmen offers The Customer a cigarette on a balcony looking over the city. The extraordinary moment is that he then turns and shoots her for no immediately established reason. The ordinary we want to show in ours is obviously our character George playing normally in the woods, all light-hearted and happy, this contrasting with the extraordinary moment at the end of him finding the corpse. We also took influence from the colours used in Sin City, the colours of red and black particularly, hence the red scarf and red gloves we will use whilst filming. Red connoting danger.