Research

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The thriller genre has seen substantial development since its inception into televised media in the 1950’s (Ish.) The catalysts for this growth were the technological advancement of humanity, changes in audience preferences/ideologies and finally socio-cultural influences such as global affairs. Thrillers tend to focus on trying to elicit as much of an audience reaction as possible (the phrase “sitting on the edge of your seat” summing it up rather well), the genre has also broken off into many subgenres – with that actually being it’s primary form of growth as some genres would dominate over others for certain time periods based on the aforementioned factors suiting them best. 
 
In terms of technological advancement, as with most forms of media this greatly helped with building immersion or even realism, however thrillers benefit more than most other types of media from this immersion, as it makes the audience substantially more prone to being scared/surprised/worried etc. This can be seen through the development of VFX and CGI, as CGI was invented around the 1960’s, for example, the 1973 film “Westworld” was one of the first thrillers to use CGI, this exhibited two different effects of technological advancement, for one, CGI was used to show the world from the antagonists’ (an android) point of view, but technological advancement also inspired the theme of the franchise – that being A.I. robots taking over the world, this theme was entirely created due to worries about technology becoming too powerful and has only become an increasingly common theme for thrillers as time goes on and technology advances. Another example of the uses for technological advancement in thrillers comes from comparing the 1991 “Silence of the lambs” to the more recent 2010 “inception”, although both were received incredibly well (8.6/10 and 8.8/10 IMBD respectively), and both used lots of actual sets, the difference was that inception was able to use even more absurd sets by utilising CGI to hide wires and circuitry that the mind bending sets needed to function, making it appear more seamless and allowing inception to try even bolder methods than ‘silence of the lambs’ ever had an opportunity to do, this highlights that CGI did not entirely overhaul the thriller genre but allowed for subtle yet effective improvements to immersion. 
 
When it comes to change in audience preference, thrillers had very similar trends to most other genres. Firstly, representation became much more prevalent between the time of thriller’s inception and the start of the 21^st century, early thriller movies and tv series often starred white men, this does reflect broad cultural trends in the 1960’s as although societal racism had been mostly abolished by movements started by people such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr, with American legislation for women’s rights coincidentally being passed at around the same time in 1929, there was still much stigma and racism present in Western countries around people who were seen as foreign races, many had grown up on racist war propaganda from WW1 and later WW2, where white men were often painted as powerful figures standing up for their countries against the “evil” foreigners. This all unsurprisingly lead to a trend of white men being the heroes in thrillers, often having to save a “damsel in distress” who was more often than not a woman, this can even be seen in one of the early thriller series – aptly named – “Thriller” (1960-62), in which almost every single self-contained episode starred a white man, however the prejudice against women would begin to be turned around as time went on, for example the 1996 film “scream” which was a well-received horror-thriller, what made it different was that it actually subverted gender stereotypes by starring a woman who has to save their boyfriend instead of the other way around, it’s positive reception clearly highlights how audiences enjoyed this twist on gender norms, this idea is also supported by Steve Naeles Genre Theory, where the movie stayed true to the genre in most ways keeping the general audience by being comfortable, but posed a twist (in this case to gender roles) to stay new/fresh and most importantly, bring in a modern audience, allowing the genre of thrillers to stay relevant. Race stereotypes would also begin to be abolished, albeit slightly slower, this can be evidenced by the somewhat recent thriller movie “Get Out” which starred a black lead, the previously mentioned argument for Genre theory also applies to this aspect, overall the biggest impact that audience preferences had on the thriller genre was that of improving representation within the genre, whilst still maintaining foundational narrative elements, broadening the audience of the genre by keeping the older audience as well as appealing to a modern audience. 
 
The last facet of the development of the thriller genre is socio-cultural influences. One of the greatest influences on specifically the thriller genre was WW2 (and to a lesser extent WW1,) one of the first thrillers ever televised was called “Confession of a Nazi spy” (1939) which was only the beginning of a long standing trend in thrillers for the coming decades, WW2 was obviously known by all alive on earth at the time and thus it acted as a contemporary theme that the genre of thrillers was very well suited for, this sparked the subgenres of ‘spy’ thrillers as well as ‘war’ thrillers, commentary on wars would continue even in the 1970’s with “Apocalypse Now” portraying the horrors of the Vietnam war at the time, the war thriller subgenre allowed for a more visceral portrayal of war, eliciting anger and sorrow in audiences about the unfortunately accurate portrayal of the horrors of war. However as the world has grown more peaceful (comparatively and objectively) war thrillers have become far less common. Another factor within socio-cultural influences is that of globalisation and politics, in recent years, ideas/cultures have been spreading between different countries and regions rapidly, along with this spread of information, interest in the affairs of other countries has been growing, especially within often sheltered Western countries, this has led to many thrillers being set in countries aside from the USA and Britain, and instead looking at the affairs and issues of other countries, which has of course sparked the popularity of a different subgenre – that being political thrillers, for example, “Red Notice” and “Freezing order” which both explore the questionable Russian government and economy, yet have no reference to war for the most part. Thus socio-cultural influences have dictated the prevalence of specific subgenres within thrillers, leading to a transition from the narrow subgenre of spy/war to more broad subgenres such as political thrillers, and even allowing for the growth of other types of thrillers such as psychological thrillers. 

Overall, thrillers have seen extreme development over time, however with the exception of socio-cultural influences, this has not been unique to just the thriller genre. Thrillers have grown in diversity and technical complexity, whilst the themes within thrillers have often been dictated by what is happening across the globe, this allows thrillers to be a useful and ever-contemporary genre, enforcing its position as an audience loved, classic yet relevant genre. 
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Firstly,
In my own time I watched the official adobe premiere pro tutorial:
(https://www.youtube.com/watchv=oLMdXC_B1vQ&t=2210s)
Both during and after the video I also recorded and played around with the software using self recorded footage, most of the time I spent practicing in this initial video was simply spent learning the various key binds (surprisingly useful) and cuts the software is capable of, ultimately culminating in a rather basic but still worthwhile clip of me walking down the hallway using various camera angles.
This was also where I first learned to organise clips, sound and sequences into “bins”, a technique which I suspect will become very useful for the naturally more convoluted final film opening!
Short video is below – followed by the rest of the post.

Secondly,
During my third and final preliminary task (check page for details) we had to make a 1 minute short-short film using the prompt “He’s gone.” During this video I attempted to use every editing technique I had learnt up to this point, introducing major elements such as key-framing, the addition of sound editing, warping speed, lighting/colour grading and even transitions. I believe ALL of these will be used to some extent in my final film opening and can definitely contribute to the camera, sound, mise-en-scène and of course, editing aspects of my final film opening. This video is far more substantial than the last one, both in length and density of editing. Below is that video:

Thirdly, my school was able to get a teacher from the South Seas Film and television school to host an Adobe Premiere Pro editing workshop. This spanned the entire day and covered just about everything bar special effects in editing, we ended up compiling a short film using sample footage, (Footage is sourced from ‘Framelines’.)