Toms Evaluation

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

At the beginning of our research process we were asked to research thrillers to find out what sort of idea's we could include in our piece, so once my group started our research we came across some idea's we could use. from the film Phsyco we used the blood going down the drain shot because we all agreed it was a good shot for our film when she is in the shower.

this is the blood down the drain scene from the film Phsyco, this is a very powerful image, someones blood flowing down a drain so we used a similar shot for our film. this second shot is from our media piece. our film uses typical scenes from a thriller, for example our beginning scenes are a vulnerable girl running through a forest, clearly distressed, which shows qualities of a thriller. other thriller films have used shots like these to create questions in the audiences heads, for example the film shrooms.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L-pJyGZhRM/watch?v=1L-pJyGZhRM

this hyperlink shows that in the first one and a half minutes the film shrooms uses a girl running through some dark woods. also in the first 40 seconds of our film we use many cuts to build up the drama of her running through the forest, the drama builds up in the audiences mind because they don't know what she is running from or why she is running in the first place, many films have used this technique to build up drama and create a rush of action. in our film we also use a heartbeat when she is running which shows that she is rushed and in distress, other thrillers have used this to create suspense.

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

our film in particular focuses mainly on gender and age. we show gender as a weak, vulnerable girl running through the woods, running away from something. we showed her in this way because its a representation of a stereotypical woman, afraid, in distress and weak. this shot is of her running through the forest and as you can see her arms are flailing around, not structured and a lot more random movements this shows that she is in distress and is weak. also in this shot you can see that her cloths have been ripped which shows someone or something has ripped them, maybe whilst she was running which shows that she is desperate to run away from whatever is behind her.

we also choose age as a social group because our actors age is what we wanted our characters age to be, about 17, because young girls especially are very vulnerable to all sorts of things like attacks and rape so she was perfect to represent the character. this shot is her in the shower, having flashbacks of what happened to her. we used a high angle shot to show that she is in a weak situation and is in distress, which is how we represent her throughout the film.








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

our media product wouldn't be distributed to any major companies because they wont want to take a risk with their company by distributing our media film, so a minor company might. after that then they would work out what sort of advertising they would do, then if the film did well then try to get it produced on a wider scale.

4. who would be the audience for your media product?

i think our audience would be young adults to adults, ages from 16 to 30, i think this because the actress in our piece is young, so people can compare themselves to her also our film is similar to the introduction of shrooms because of the girl running through the forest in the first scene, we don't know why she is or what she is running from and this film includes drugs like our film, although our drugs are discreet. this is similar to our film and has the same sort of target audience as ours, their target being young adults to adults. this picture is from a scene in the film shrooms which, if you compare it to our film is similar.















the comparisons of the film we made and the film shrooms are

• the ages of the characters look about the same


• both their cloths look ragid
  
• the background behind them isn't clear


• their in a forest


• in both scenes before they have both been running

young male adults would also be a target for our film because its a dark thriller which has mystery and gore in it, the blood. these are the sorts of themes that males like, for example the film phsyco was a huge success, we used the same type of blood down a drain scene

this shot is the drain shot from the much loved film phsyco

And finally another type of person that would like this film is anyone who likes mystery because this film leaves a lot of cliffhangers and questions that, if we made a full film, would have been answered towards the end of the piece.

5.How did you attract/address your audience

people would enjoy our film because its a quick paced thriller with plenty of cliff hangers and epic moments. also people feel empathy for our character because shes just a young girl and she has been attacked and hurt, also trapped from the outside world until she escaped. from the beginning we threw the audience straight into the action, apart from some minor shots, this would instantly catch the audiences attention. this picture is one of the flashbacks of her trapped. the flashbacks leave the audience questions like, how did she get there? who kept her in there, what does these flashbacks mean? and these are the things which will keep our audience engrossed in our film.

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

whilst filming our film we used a HD camera, which cost £4000. i had to learn how to use it, set the white balance on it and set it up and put it away, the hardest thing about the camera was getting the settings right because if you started filming and the white balance was off you would have to re shoot what you just did.

also once we finished filming we edited what we had done on a Mac, using the program final cut pro. using this was quite difficult for me because i had never even used a mac before this. once i started using this program it got a lot easier because i was more used to it, also using it we put in flash backs by editing the colour when she had her flashback, using this software i learnt that you should film a lot, even if you don't use it because at points we found that we didn't have enough footage in our preliminary so this time we had a lot of clips that we could use.

The hardest thing for me was doing the sound because every time you put sounds into the program you had to manage about eight or nine different sounds which in the end i overcame.

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

looking back from our preliminary i have learned so much about how good quality work doesn't have to be hugely edited, because our 1 minute piece was edited a lot to look good, also we didn't keep the 180 degree rule. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBPw9C57TuU this link shows what rule we should have followed. also our script and directions were very minimal, but for our final piece its improved alot, and some of our shots in our final film are better then our preliminary because they are better quality, because of the camera, and because we know what went wrong in our 1 minute piece we learnt from that and didn't make that mistake again.

when we edited our preliminary i didn't even attempt to have a go because Jon was amazing it at and i thought i would just slow down our group however I'm happy that i learned how to edit efficiently and creatively for our final film.