Evaluation

Question 1

In what ways does your media project use, develop or challenge forms of conventions of real media products?
As I have previously mentioned on my blog the codes and conventions of a thriller are;-Crime at the core of the narrative (often Murder) 
-A complex narrative structure, with false paths/clues/resolutions
-A narrative pattern of establishing enigmas which the viewer expects to be resolved
-Protagonist who is systematically, dis empowered and drawn into a complex web of intrigue by an antagonist. 
-Extraordinary events happening in an ordinary situation.
-Themes of identity
-Themes of mirroring
-Themes of Voyeurism
-Protagonist with a 'flaw' which is exploited by the antagonist.
-Titles often reflect an aspect of the protagonist/antagonist psychological state.
-There is often a scene near the end of the film in which the protagonist is in peril.-Mise en scene which echoes the protaganist plight.
When creating our theiller, we tried to consider as many codes and convetions as possible.Aspects of our film can be compared to real thriller films.
This is a screen grab from a clip of our film and a well know film; "Harry Brown"



This is a scene in Harry Brown where Harry has tied up a member of the gang that killed his friend; this is to warn the others in the gang of what he is capable of doing. These characters are both the protaganists of the story.



after being kidnapped

Before being kidnapped

Here we show mirroring of shots. I think it effectively shows how her mood has changed after she has been taken.

music;

The music we used was quite successful at creating the tension. When looking for the music to go with our thriller, we looked for a piece that was calm at the beginning then, gets up-beat.

At the beginning of the film the footage is quite calm and normal, so for this we had slow chimes. this sounds like nice music, but too nice to know that everything is okay, and the audience should start to get the suspicion that something might happen. The as the action starts happening in the film (the burning of the photo) the music kicks in and gets more up-beat. Finally, towards the end the music slowly fades and leaves us with the sound of the creaky door opening. I think the music fits in with the codes and conventions of the thriller as it slowly builds the suspence for the main event. 

Question 2
How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our Thriller opening contains only teenage characters. This is because we were limited to actors that were willing to participate in our film. They play the role of typical individuals of this age group, such as walking through a park with their partner and goin to parties; this could be seen as a stereotype but it isn't negative as the action in the film aren't negative in any way.
We only had two main characters and they consisted of one male and one female, this balanced the gender within the film. However, the male role in our film is quite psychotic and obessive and  could be seen as being sexist as the female role is normal. 
 Both individuals are obviously straight as it shows them in a realtionship.
When choosing our actors we didn't really consider using individuals from diiferent ethnic backgrounds, therefore both our actors are white british.

Question 3
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

After some research into the filming industry, I found numerous companies that could potentially distribute our thriller. I then researched each of the companies further, to see whether they would be the best choice of distributor.

Universal Studios is a well-known and well respected company that regularly distributes films of a high quality. Universal Studios began to distrubute thriller/horror films in 1931, with 'Dracula' and 'Frankenstein'. Other recent films include 'Drag Me To Hell' and 'The Fourth Kind'. I think this company would be a great choice of distributor as they have a high reputation. Additionally, the company produce a wide variety of films with ranging budgets. Therefore, our thrilller would be suitable for their company. However, as the company is so well recognised, there would be a lot of comptetion for funding from the company.

Dinension is another film company that could distribute out thriller as it

has distributed other films that are of a similar genre, such as the 'Scream' series, and the 'Scary Movie' series.

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation would be an obvious choice as they are probably the most well-known film company in the world, however, they do not tend to distibute low budget films and is therefore quite out of our league as our film would have a low budget therefore the film company will not be interested in buying our film.

A more suitable company to distribute our film would be would be Metrodome. I think this company would be siutable as they distribute low budget films such as "Shifty"

 

Methods that we could use in the distribution of our film are avertising such as creating a trailer, or posters and banners that could be shown on bilboadrs, bus stops, buses, or on the internet.

Me and Hannah created a poster that could possibly be used for the distributioof our film.

 

Question 4
Who would be the audience of your media product?
link back to your audience research you undertook before making the thriller
who is the audience for your film?
how do you know?
why would they watch your film?
refer to evidence from:
-questionnaires -interviews -surveys -myspace -facebook
illustrate your answer using a wordle

Before making our thriller we researched into the audience that our thriller could be potentally aimed at. We created a survey of surveymokey.com and posted it to facebook so people would take it. 21 people in total took our survey, this was enough for us to get a rough idea of what our audience would expect from a thriller.

The majority of people that took our survey were female and this show that they will be able to relate to our main female character who is the protagonist dring our thriller. The female in our film is portayed as being very weak and vunerable, therefore as our audience is mainly girls, they will be able to relate with this character.

Also from our survey, we can see that the majority of people that took it were between the ages of 17-25. The actors in our film are 16 & 17 and this is another reason why this film would interest them because it is about people their age.

Once we have figured out our target audience, we carried out a few interviews to find out what kind of things were popular within the thriller genre.

Question 5
How did you attract/address your audience?


Using the information we gathered from ous audience research,we tried to make sure that we included and took into consideration exactlywhat our audience wanted. This would hopefully make them what to watch on.
We also used young actors and this would also make the audience want to watch on as the actors are of a similar age to themselves and thy could realte to what is happening.
I think the film holds the audiences attention by the use of the continous clips shown of Harley tied up. Because the clips are very short the audience cant quite see exactly what is happening so it makes them want to watch on to find out what exactly is going on. 

At the end of our thriller, we see the main character Harley tied to a chair and look towards the door opening. This will hopefully make the audience wonder what is going to happen to Harley or who the person opening the door is or even wonder where she is tied up. 

Locations;
For our thriller, we had several different scenes for which we used different lactions/ settings.

For the scene of Harley and Kieran "in a relationship" we went to eastbrook end. We thought this was a nice loaction to use as it is usually quite empty and it looks like a typical place that would be used in films.

For the scene of Harley tied up, we used a drama room, This was because it has black walls and the room is very dull and empty; this was useful as it is the type of place you would expect someone to be taken to. The room was also useful to use as we were able to use the sepcial lighting technology in there that abled us to put a spotlight on Harley.

For the scence of Harley getting ready to go out, we just simply used her bedroom. This was releant as she was playing the character of a typical teenage girl, therefor we used her bedroom as she is obviously a teenage girl.

For the party scene, we used a little room in the school that is quite dark. We used this as we thought it was the closest we would get to it lookin like it was an actual party and we only had a few people, so if it was a bigger room, it would have looked odd. This was not our first choice of location, however, as wewere short of time, we had to comprimise.

For Harley's journey to the party we thought she should be walking through a forest as its a typical place that people associate with stalkers/ attackers.  

Question 6
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructin this product

Technology

View more presentations from Georgia Wigley

Question 7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the product?
 Preliminary Task;

Final Thriller;

Looking back at our preliminary exercise then at our Thriller you can see a great amount of improvement in the quality of the sequences overall.
In our preliminary task we used very simple shots and there was a lack of variation between the shots.
However in our thriller, we tried to use as many shots as possible



Preliminary Task Long Shot

 

Preliminary Task Point Of View Shot



Preliminary Task Over Shoulder Shot





 



These are the three main shots we used during our Preliminary Task.

Looking back at it, it seems quite boring and not creative atall.



However For our Thriller we use a range of several shots that we believed were quite successful.



Extreme Close Up



Low Angle









High Angle



Through Bushes









Long Shot



Mid-Shot





Point Of View



Over Shoulder



These are just a few examples of some of the shots we used when filming our thriller; we thought this would make the thriller more interesting to watch and would make it look more professional.
By looking at our thriller in comparison to our preliminary task, you can tell that we thought about the positioning of the actor within to frameto try and create some effective shots.

Another tool that we used for our thriller that we didnt for our preliminary task is shot transitions. We used the 'fade to black' tnsistion several times, we used this when we were changing scenes, such as from the burning picture to Harley getting ready to go out.
SoundDuring our preliminary exercise we had some dialogue.. However when editing the clips together we found it hard to fix the cips and the words being said together so they made sense. Therefore, when filming our thriller we decided to have as little speech as possible so we wouldn't have that problem occur again.   



Something that still needs improving;In both our preliminary task and final Thriller project we have continuity errrors. Both of these errors could have been avoided if the footage that was recored was exactly how we wanted it. In the preliminary exercise, Harley kept laughing when talkin to the crowd of people, therefore we had to get several different shots and put them together. In our thriller, The scene where Harley is gettin her clothes out of her wardrobe was too loog, therefore we had to cut out the middle section to still have the footage of her opening and closing her wardrobe, we tried several times to get it perfect but we couldnt get her head in the same position, therefore the error had to be left there.   

You're Mine.

Final Editing

Today we done the final touches on our film. This is a screen shot showing the sound bridge we made between two clips at the then end of the sequence.

Filming Weekend.

We signed a camera out so we could film over the whole weekend. First; on friday we filmed Harley walking to and through the forest. 
On Sunday we filmed Kieran Burning the picture of Harley. This took several attempts as we didn't know what would look most effective. However, we finally got some good footage of The photo burning. 

More Filming;

Today we film the next essential footage for our thriller. We went to Harley's house to film her getting ready to go to a "party". We tried to use lots of different shots and angles; such as placing the camera in the wardrobe and filming her from the inside, also we got Harley to put on her mascara looking directly into the camera as if it was a mirror.

Editing;

For todays lesson we edited our film. It took us a while to get used to editing the different clips together and our film isn't looking good at the moment.

Hopefully the more time we spend on Final Cut Express, the better we will get at editing and hopefully our film will start to shape up soon.

Second Filming Session.

Today, we filmed the next part of our thriller.
For this scene we had Harley (our main actress) and Kieran walking hand in hand at eastbrook end. This was scene is a flash back to when the two individuals were a couple. We also filmed Kieran taking a picture of Harley and looking at it on the camera. We will hopefully be able to do a graphic for when Kieran is holding the picture just before he burns it.

First Filming Session (:

Today we started filming for our thriller. One location for our thriller was a room in the school so we thought that we would film this section first. This was for the scenes of harley tied to a chair after she has been kidnapped.
To do this scene we had to tie her to a chair and make her makeup look like she had been crying. We also had to print off several pictures of harley and stick them all over the wall. Considering this was our first filming session the footage we filmed was quite successful. 

Moby gratis;

Today my partner Hannah and I browsed through the songs that are listed on mobygratis.com. we found two songs that we that we thought would be suitable for our thriller. One we will use for the majority of the film and the other we will use at the end of our thriller and for the credits. We have requested for the two songs and now we have to wait for a reply to confirm the licence. 

Our Ident;

This is the outcome of our ident with music. The music that accompanies our ident is from youtube as we were unable to use the music we had created on garage band as the computer we was using had an old version of itunes and therefore final cut express did not recognise the file. 

Sound Effects;

Me and my partner Hannah have been thinking about the sound effects the we will need in our thriller.
These are;
-footsteps
-door slamming
-cars passing
-rustling bushes
There are some sounds effects that we could use that are on Final Cut Express however we may need to search for some of these sound effects on the internet.

Garage band

To accompany our ident we thought that we could create a little music piece. We put together differnt sounds that we thought would go together and listened to our outcome and it sounded pretty good and fitted in perfectly with our ident.

LIVE TYPE!

So after scrapin our second idea, we finally decided to create an ident using Live Type. We found if quite confusing at first but once we knew what was what is was very simple creating our ident. We chose a background and then font style, typed in our production company name, and then put it all together.

Using Photoshop (:

Even though we did struggle to use photoshop we managed to draw a little robot (:

After a while we did get used to photoshop however we decided we wasnt goning to use this idea for our production company.

Production Company

Today me and Hannah started to make our production company label, we decided to call our label "G-Sharp Productions" and we had a second idea of a dancing robot; so then we had to put it together.
We started by using photo shop to draw the Robot. This was quite difficult as neither of us have used photo shop much before.
After several attempts of creating thin robot on photo shop we gave up. So instead we used painted to draw the robot. After we had drawn the robots we put the two images on final cut express and edited the together so it look like the robot was dancing. However we both decided that we don't really like this idea anymore.

First Production Company Idea;

When me and Hannah first thought about our production company label we thought that we could do something like "Metro Goldwyn Mayer" (MGM);

Obviously we wouldn't be able to use a lion so instead we would have used my cat. -->

However we both agreed that this idea was a bit too complicated for the small amount of time we had so decided that we would do something simple.

Location For Our Thriller;

We went to Hainault Forest and took some pictures of our actress there as this is where we will be doing some of our filming.

Graphic Match;

During our thriller we have decided to use several graphic matches.
Graphic match is a cut in film editing where the compostion of two different shots match to create a smoother cut between shots or to link the two shot together.

Lighting experiments;

In our thriller we do not want to reveal too much of the psyco kidnapers identity. To do this we thought that we could use low key under lighting so we experimented with a dark room and a torch (':

I think we achieved the scary effect we was goin for, however im not sure we are definately going to use his technique in our actual thriller film.

The Script;