Location: Whitlingham Lake, Trowse, near Norwich.
Large expansions of water can be both intimidating and claustrophobic and are popular locations for thrillers, lakes especially heighten senses as you become more aware of your surroundings. They are also familiar to the audience thus making any unusual actions taking place even more chilling. For these reasons we wanted to set our thriller opening with the surroundings of a lake and greenery; our thriller is heavily influenced by Heavenly Creatures of which uses plenty of nature to contrast with its characters and their actions. We also wished the location to be peaceful and undisturbed in order to juxtapose the action.
The colours in the shot above are enhanced to give a (very) subtle dreamy gleam to the image. This is often used in order to disorientate the audience, encouraging them to believe all is not right.
The 1986 thriller, Blue Velvet uses this technique.
This may appear uncomfortably unrealistic and overly fake, a technique also used in the Truman Show (1998). This is similar to a children's television show; reverting the audience to the vulnerability of their childhood.
However, we prefer the grittiness of reality and wanted to portray this in our thriller thus decided against this technique.
We also considered filming our thriller in black and white as this made the location appear rather eerie.
Despite this we preferred the dulled colours of the naturally foggy landscape as these make our thriller appear more realistic, therefore more relatable and alarming for the audience.
Below are some natural shots of our location.
I agree with you about using colour footage rather than altering to black and white. The use of colour adds a kind of poetic quality to the mise-en-scene.
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