Thriller Anaylsis: Se7en

Se7en (1995)

Director: David Fincher

Writer: Andrew Kavin Walker

Stars: Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gweneth Paltrow, Kevin Spacey

Plotline

 A veteran detective takes a rookie under his wing on his last case, to hunt for a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as his method of murder.

Storyline

 The movie takes us from the tortured remains of one victim to the next as the sociopath "John Doe" sermonises to Detectives Sommerset and Mills -- one sin at a time. The sin of Gluttony comes first and the murderer's terrible capacity is graphically demonstrated in the dark and subdued tones characteristic of film noir. The seasoned and cultured but jaded Sommerset researches the Seven Deadly Sins in an effort to understand the killer's modus operandi while the bright but green and impulsive Detective Mills scoffs at his efforts to get inside the mind of a killer...

Opening Title Sequence

 

The opening title sequence to Se7en is full of diegetic sounds such as scratching as well as a random noted score which has been set to the scene (distortion and reverb effects are used for this - possible use of hexachords). Mass low key lighting used to give the start (and the rest of the film) a dark and chilling look. The main camera shots are that of extreme close ups and close ups of the film's unclear antagonist with straight cuts and fading transitions. The actually credits are hand written twice over in black and white and flicker on the screen to create tension with the screeching music.

The Exchange - AS Media Studies [Preliminary Task]

Preliminary Task - Planning

For our preliminary task we had to create a short film that displayed the technique of shot-reverse-shot and contained conventions of a thriller. We had to work in chosen groups. In my group I had Ellie and Matt

Before we could shoot our film, we had to plan out:

• A basic storyline
• Props
• Camera Angles
• Dialogue between characters
• Movements
• Costume

We planned this out on a storyboard template. Matt came up the general outline of the story - a drug deal gone wrong; whilst Ellie drew the storyboard to the camera angles and prop I envisioned.Below are images of the storyboards we produced.

Preliminary Task - Shooting

After Planning out our final storyboard, we could start filming. Our Group used the Canon 550D to film in the Me5 classroom next door to ours. Ellie produced the filming whilst Me and Matt were the actors. I played the thug purchasing the drugs whilst Matt portrayed the undercover Policeman. After getting the colour balance correct for the low key lighting we were using to give the film a  LA Noir type feel, we began shooting. We used several props including a toy gun, a fake cigerette and a FAKE bag of cocaine (I repeat fake - flour). We had several lines of dialouge and included a working shot-reverse-shot. We had a few incidents where we couldn't get the camera working to standards but eventually we filmed all 13 shots of our short film. The shots we used were:

• A close up shot
• 6 over the shoulder shots
• An establishing shot
• An extreme close up shot
• 2 medium shots
• A pov shot
• A final master shot

We used a tripod on most of these to ensure a steady frame was produced and used panning and zoom on our final shot to make the scene emotional.

Preliminary Task - Editing

After finishing our filming, we began uploading and renaming our produced videos to our groups asigned computer. After doing so we created a new project on Adobe Premier and slowly inserted and cropped our files. Once the movie was clearly running smoothly we began editing the audio. Firstly, we muted any noise from the camera such as the tripod adjusting then we went onto www.freeSFX.co.uk and searched for apropriate sound effects for certain shots in our short film, for example we used a gun shot sound for the end of the piece and a soundtrack for our credits. This was apointed to me and ellie whilst the film was rendering. Matt then applied several transitions for certain scenes. After rendering out movie again it was complete. We saved the file to the correct format and image size and then later uploaded it to YouTube.