Evaluation- Ays

In what ways does your media product use, develope or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? In the opening of our thriller we chose not to use any dialogue so that it creates a question in the audiences minds and to leave curiosity as to what has happened or what is happening. Mise En Scene

We used urban settings like the woods with no housing around to create a restricted and enclosed atmosphere, but we then went onto using a more localised setting with a few houses to show sivilisation. This also represents the characters house which we can tell is hers when she is sitting in the shower.We used natural lighting for all of our opening accept when doing the sillhouette scenes. We did this because we wanted our thriller opening to be as realisic as possible so we didn't want to mess around with lighting too much, the only thing we did do was turn the footage into night vision because it was meant to be set at dusk, however if we were to actually film at dusk it left us little time to get it right in one go. The use of the sillhouette is associated with thrillers and some horror genres to create suspence and to draw the audience in as they get curious about a character or an object.

Camera work and editing

We used cross cutting to make it look snappy and quick. This is usually used to make a sequence look quick and fast paced making the audience get drawn in and feel tense about what is going on or what is about to happen. We used a few panning shots at the beginning to show the setting to the audience and it also gives a nice build up before any action begins. Point of view shots are used to give the audience a feel of what the character is experiencing, however we used the point of view shot as if someone was watching our main character.

Characters

The main and only character we have in our opening is a young teenage girl who is the protagonist. A protagonist is usually the hero of the film. The opposite to a protagonist is an antagonist which is always human in a thriller where as in a horror they are normally supernatural. For example a vampire or a warewolf. In our thriller opening we do have an antagonist, however you don't actually see him/her in the opening. The main character could aslso be seen as the victim in the opening as she is clearly running from someone who has hurt her in some way as her clothes are torn and she is bleeding and bruised.

Iconography

Dark, Creepy woods. A seringe. Ripped clothes. Make- up for bruises and home made fake blood.

Sound We used diagetic sound for things such as footsteps and the light turning on etc. Also we used it for when the flashbacks occured. This is because with the sounds that we got from filming were either not loud enough or didn't sound right. For example some of the walking scenes, the sound was not good as Chess was wearing shoes some of the time as the camera didn't catch her feet in the shot and the floor was hard and cold, so it didn't sound as if she was walking in bare feet. We also used Non diagetic sound for our background music in some parts of the opening.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

We wanted our character to be a normal 17 year old teenage girl who does everything a girl of that age does, college, friends and fun. She isn't poor and she isn't rich she is just a normal teenage girl.

Our story for our character is that she has just woken up in the woods, covered in blood and bruises with her clothes torn. She's confused and doesn't remeber what happened to her accept someone was chasing her. As we had no money to budget the opening we used old leggings and a plain shirt that we could tear up to look like she was attacked. These clothes represent her age as leggings are what a teenage girl would wear, and the plain top was simple as she would wear it and it was easy to get hold of.

As she had just found herself in the woods we didn't want to give her any props or over acessorise our character so apart from the clothes and the long hair and typical female features, they would be the only way to tell that it was indeed a female.

As we don't see our antagonist we don't know for a fact if it is a male or female or what age they are. So the only character we have in our opening is a 17 year old teenage girl.

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

We would probably look for a small indipendant film distribution company as our thiller is not going to be 'the next big thing' so a major company would be less likely to even concider our film. I think a smaller distribution company would be more likely to want to distribute our thriller because they would be more willing to try and advertise the film and sell it as opposed to a big distribution company who would not want to waste time and effort on a film that may not even sell. Once we would find a company to take our film they would then figure out the release date and how they would go about advertising it. our distributers wouyld then meet and show our film to exhibitors when they would then come to an agreement on having the film shown in cinemas and released on DVD's and such things.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

I think our film would be aimed at teenager from the age of 14 to possibly 19 year olds. I think this because it's not a grusome film but it does create a lot of questions and curiosity and I think 14 year olds are mature enough to follow and fugure things out along the way, however I think that over 19's may not be so interested and will want more of a horror or a more mature film that they could possibly relate to in some way. I also think that it is more aimed at teenage girls than it is boys just based on the fact that it is based on a teenage female character.

How did you attract/address your audience?

We made sure we made the opening as quick and snappy from the start to capture the audiences attention. Granted we did start with a couple of quiet slow shots to show the setting but after that we went straight into the story. This will kepp the audiences attention as they don't know what has/is going to happen. This makes then feel curious, keeping their attention as they want to find out whats going on. You see a teenage girl coverd in blood nad bruises running through the woods in bare feet and with torn up clothes looking scared and anxious, it leaves a question in the viewers mind. Also there is no dialogue just some creepy background music and sound effects to get the heart pumping.

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

For filming the preliminary we used a HD video camera which we got from college. We had to keep setting the white balance so that whenever we moved the camera the lighting would still look the same quality. We uploaded our footage onto the editing software 'final cut pro' which i found tricky to begin with but as we went along i learnt more and got the hang of how to do things, although i still need to learn more on it as i only know the basics. For example, how to split clips and overlap them. I think that with the editing i did a good job with putting the clips together at the right moments as to cut out anything that went wrong or didn't look good with another clip and still managing to make them look as if they fitted together. After editing the product we used garageband to add in our sound effects and background music. At the beginning we did origionally agree to write the music ourselves which Jon did do. However when it came to putting it over the film it didn't fit right as he had been doing it at home so it was difficult to produce music to the film when you can't see it.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product? Looking back I didn't actually know that much about filming and how to film or edit well as i dodn't do much of either in the preliminary due to a lack of confidence. Where as on this task i have had more goes at editing giving me more practice and time to learn how to use the programe. Also i managed to help come up with differnt shots that we didn't use in the preliminary and i was more willing to try more technical and effective shots which made me more confident to film them and try them out to see if they worked. I have learnt how to use the camera, tripod, final cut-pro and garageband. These were things i really was not good at using by myself and had to ask for quit a bit of assistance, however since doing the thriller task I have learnt a lot more and I am now able to do things easily and swiftly with minimal help.

Researching thrillers helped me a lot as I then knew what people expected and what things in a thriller are important such as the antagonist being a human. Also watching seven.