Found Prod - Sam Fullerton, Jack C Smith

In Brothers Tobey Maguire plays Capt. Sam Cahill, an active soldier out on the front lines in the war in Afghanistan. Before leaving on his second tour in Afghanistan, Marine Captain Sam Cahill, a leader, an athlete, a good husband and father. Sam's helicopter is shot down and all are presumed dead. Sam survives the crash and is kept hostage, he is made to kill his own comrade on camera in a sick, twisted joke by the Taliban. This cause's immense psychological problems, Sam is left traumatised from the incident.

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The main character in our opening sequence (Jack) strongly relates to this character. Suffering deeply from post-traumatic stress disorder, Jack is haunted by seeing the death of his brother on tour in Iraq in 2010. 2 years later his at boiling point, about to fall apart. His tattered trousers, plain t-shirt and old shoes show since what happened he has given up on everyone and everything. His completely alone.

Sam and Jack both share very similar costumes; white top, casual trousers and boots. They're very simple in their style, this emphasizes the stereotypical plain personality of a soldier. Sam and Jack both being males, reinforces the stereotype of soldiers being males, who are related to violence, blood and war, which juxtaposes their symbolic white shirts. However, both characters have emotions bundling up inside, and their almost silent roles do not help to extract these strong feelings and emotions. Consequently, they're exerted in a time of madness. Sam wakes up in the middle of the night and threatens to shoot his brother, whereas Jack keeps having flash backs from what happens and swears to kill anyone that had anything to do with his brothers death.

This strain, though concealed in word, is clear on the surface.

The Title of the Film 

The title of the film 'Brotherhood' signifies our protagonists weakness during the film. It links to the usual thriller conventions by using black and white, which are symbolic colours to the thriller genre along with red. We chose not to stick to the normal colours associated with thriller films because we wanted our title to be simple, which challenges the conventions and juxtaposes the complex narrative. Although, we did use RGB colour shifting, which is an effect on Final Cut Pro to distort our title. This develops usual conventions; another thriller that does this is 'Cape Fear' (see analysis of Cape Fear post).

   

1. Screen -grab number 1 shows the setting and location in the opening of our thriller and this shot shows Jack walking up a hill in Bedfords. The shot is an extreme long shot to symbolise his isolation to the world in this desolate place. As Jack is walking up the hill, he fades to different points of the hill, which represents the essence of time; by using this we was able to gain the symbolic affect that he is on a journey that shows his life.

2. Jack's costume brings to the audiences attention the themes of war. His white t-shirt shows his innocence, which could relate to his brothers death and his combat trousers show an army pattern to back up the themes of war. Whereas, Samuel is wearing a black leather jacket to juxtapose Jack 's white top, which could show the themes of death, but we wanted to make a connection between both characters by using costumes. We both wear high top converse that represent military boots, Jack has a black pair and Samuel has white, thus showing a connection between them. 

3. We used a high angle shot for picture 3 because it showed his isolation and how lonely he is; the world is looking down on him. He walks like he is meant to be somewhere and our camerawork ensured that the audience knew this. The second picture 3 (top right) is showing Jack fade into Samuel to once again connect the two characters by using editing techniques.

4. The opening titles show the titles come up in pieces, which symbolise how his life has been broken down, but the font is etiquette and sophisticated. This is a good way to represent our production company, Bosslight Media, because it looks smart and appeals to other directors.

5. Screen shot 5 shows Jack running with a gun. This appeals to the audience because it follows the thriller conventions by having a gun as a prop to show his lifestyle and he runs as if he is a machine and no one can hurt him. There's not many implications in the opening of our thriller, which give the audience an insight to the rest of the storyline because we only aimed to show the themes and to produce an enigma to make to audience watch on.

6. The genre of our film is shown is the opening of our thriller by involving the gun Jack is handling in shot 6 and the glitch effects also create a psychological aspect to our film. The rapid editing gives the audience a feeling of tension because it leaves them wondering, what could be coming next. The rain added to the pathetic fallacy of the tension of the plot, to gain a more emotional affect for the audience.

7. Our main character Jack is introduced by having a gun hidden under his pillow at the beginning, showing him to be a paranoid and sensitive person. Screen-grab 7 shows the breakdown of Jack because he is pointing the gun at no one is the isolated field he's standing on, plus he's crying. The next screen-grab (bottom right) shows how he is breaking down through smoking and drug use. Samuel is shown to be a vivid memory of Jack and the fades give the effect that he is in the past, but Jack will not let him go.

It has been reported that our video appears to be jumpy on YouTube, we can confirm this is a issue with YouTube and not our video. We have burned the Thriller to a DVD, in which the problem does not occur. We have used a jump cut effect in our video, this is to highlight the instability in the characters life, however, the problem that has been reported to us is actually effecting the viewers experience.



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After completing our thriller we proceeded to show our teacher and he mentioned that it reminded him of the film 'Dead Mans Shoes'. So we looked into this and discovered that the plot is relatively the same and the opening to our thriller related to the opening of this film. We hadn't known about the existence of this film and in our eyes, if this film became successful, what's to stop ours from being successful?

"JCSmithMedia" is an associated partner of our movie.

 http://www.wix.com/jackcsmith/jackcsmith

These screenshots show a few ways in how we have organised ourselves with filming, editing, planning etc..

We edited and filmed our storyboard by using an iPad 2 with the app iMovie, this has enabled us to have an efficient work flow within school hours.

This is the native Calendar app; from using iStudiez Pro, we have been able to plot dates, times and places where we can film, edit or complete blog posts.

Once all this is completed we are able to edit and create blog posts on our iPhone 4S's.



After our first day of filming we went through all the shots and pictures taken; the picture below was our favourite because the colours create a fantastic silhouette of our main character.

We decided that we would film our thriller in three main areas. Firstly, we would begin inside a house as our main character wakes up, then he moves into a park, by a road and finally our main location Bedfords Park. As you can see, here is a few locational shots on site as we're filming:

Inside the house:

The house was a perfect start for our thriller because it establishes our main characters home and how it has changed since the death of his brother (our props show this).

Inside the park: