Evaluation- Question 7

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

Reflecting on the Preliminary task, that roles can be ditributed evenley and working in a smaller group can prove more effective, as it is easier to make sure everyone has a role and is working at their own best and not letting the other person down. I felt that during both perices i took on a suitable amount of responsability and workin with a friend can make the communication barrier a lot easier as working with each other out of school becomes less of a chore and something fun and creative, I feel that i have learnt how to use Adobe premier pro more in this peice then in my prelim task where a fellow member did most of this work, i have learnt o add effects and have grown in my confidence with the programme itself. also having touse and learn about a camera has been good, i learn how simple a move of the camera can allow for a smooth proffessional shot, but at the same time how it can look ameater and rushed.

Due to the fact that myself and Emily worked together well and really researched and planned this peice out the level of confusion and mistakes dropped signiffically, which made it less stressful us both and meant we could really enjoy and look at what we were doing rather then arguing on what new scene we had to do or where we would shoot it. There was no changes to location or idea unlike in my prelim task, not that i didnt like the challenge in my prelim task as this allowed me to think fast and change direction with an idea which i bought to Emily and I's piece very early on, into the planning stage.

As the two peices were set in different styles (premilnary- rom com and coursework thriller) it is hard to compare the two the main differences is lighting and use of shots, in the prelim we used mainly mid shots and lots of natural lighting in the thriller we used close ups and dark lighting. i also feel that due to my new found knowledge of the editing software our thriller holds a more porffessional feel about it compared to the ameatur prelim video.

I also learnt how to adapt to different sitauations for example we lost our main actress so instead i had to step in and during editing our software sometime played up, these are things i didnt encounter during the Prlim task and am glad i have know ready for future media products taht will film and produce.

Overall i believe that Emily and I are very pleased with our end piece and have learnt how to overcome certain issues and are pleased at the proffeswsional look  of our piece.

Evaluation- Question 6

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

Although during the making of this product the technology has proved to cause us some difficulty whilst editing although when the software caught up with us we managed to easily and effectively produce a well-polished product. Whilst producing this product I learnt how to apply many effects such as dark, slow motion, and sound effects.

            We used a Acer camcorder, which was easy to use and gave us great, clear and steady filming whilst using a tripod as well, the settings worked well and were very simple both Emily and I used it with ease and the tripod caused, the editing of our piece gave us the freedom to add many different effects and use many tools to make us feel as if we had given the best to our opening scene as we could. Such things as cutting and moving scenes around was very easy and allowed us to view our piece in several different orders to our original storyboard also such aspect of placing the music over the piece and listening to it to adjust either the music or the film to fit was well examined by us so that we could both do this either as a group or on our own .

We used Adobe Premier Pro to edit our peice 

We used the tripod to achieve many different effects such as angles, distances, zooms and tracking shots, we did not use all the shots filmed but as the actual filming didnt take long this was not a issue for us and we did not feel that it wasted our time or effort. We felt that we produced good quality shots and we also had fun using and exploring the software and equipment that we were provided with.

One problem that we encounted was to do with lighting as we filmed 2 shots next to each other on different days we were encounted with 2 different colours of shot, we overcame this by changing the saturation colour on the lighter shot and making it slightly darker so that the colour difference was hardly noticeable to the audience.

As seen below.

Evaluation question 5

How did you attract/address the audience?

We immediately placed our audience in a sense of false security with the sun shining and the clouds slowly moving, it seems calm and quiet and doesn’t appear to be any danger involved in this, also the complimenting music is slow and calm and light tricking the audience into thinking that this is not a thriller type piece. We decided that the music should drop and we should incorporate strings to allow the audience to hear as well as see the change in the feel of the start of ‘the chase’.

One of the main attractive element was the music it was composed by Ian Clarke and fit to our piece beautifully, the music dipped and slowed in the perfect time to add tension and also pull and detract the audience attention.

Another aspect that we considered heavily was relatable characters, mise-en-scene, costume and location. We made sure the young girl was put in a location that could be near anyone so that they felt that this was a believable and understandable location, also with our male character we didn’t make him really muscly or really skinny or really tall or small we made him again a common believable size so that it allowed many girls in the audience to relate to the fear that the young girl would feel.

 A recent realse that also works on the fear of a female lead character is that of  'The roommate' (2011) an america based film Directord by Christian E. Christiansen and Written By Sonny Mallhi, based on a room mate becoming obsessed on going on a killing spree, this is imilar to ours as it hold the female lead a physcotic other lead and the theme of viloence and killing.

Evaluation- Question 4

• Who would be the audience for your media product?

I think that the audience for our media piece would be middle class older teen to mature adults. The way in which we filmed our piece we hope would appeal to a wide range of people as we added content that both teenagers and adults could enjoy and understand. Also our piece covers a few sub genres, it is an action and Physiological thriller meaning that the action can attract the younger teenagers and the Physiological part can attract the older adults and intrigue them into figure out before the end. As a group we felt that this film would be unsuitable for anyone under the age of 15 as the content may be too graphic and deemed too scary for a younger audience .

            To be able to understand our target audience we created a questionnaire and handed it out to our class mates and further pupils throughout sixth form, we  had already considered this age group as our target audience because of our own personal experience with Thriller films, though we wanted to ensure this was correct and thought that a questionnaire would be the most suitable and quick way to achieve quick answers, our questionnaire involved  questions asking what our audience wanted from our own thriller opening scene, allowing us to get an idea into what's popular at the minute and how to achieve a good opening scene.

Question one - "what is your favourite sub-genre?" the majority of people chose, followed by 'mystery'. This meant these were the two sub-genres that we heavily concentrated on and targeted for our audience as this is what they wanted to see so we decided to base our piece on mystery and action. We created mystery by using very close up shots so the audience do not get the full picture of what is going on and have to come to their own conclusions. We then created action by having tense running scenes allowing the audience to feel excited and tense and adding to the thriller notion.

Question two - "what do you like to see in a thriller opening?" many people chose 'quick snappy shots' for this answer, we have definitely considered and achieved this in my opinions as we have used lots of shots of different lengths lights and context, these range from some at only a couple of seconds long to others ranging at 10 seconds. When people have watched this they have told us that this was affected and gave them a good feeling and interest in the scene.

Question three - "where do you prefer the opening scenes to be shot?" the most popular result was 'woods' , we  both felt shooting the entire opening in the woods wouldn't be as effective or gain the audience attention. Our final three shots (of the chase and the female character running away) were shot in a wooded surrounding, giving it a isolated and mysterious feel to the piece.

Question four - "how often do you watch thriller films?"  this question was not really needed in order create and/or edit our piece. But we thought it may be a good question to ask to see if people would want to watch a thriller genered film. We found the most common answer was 'monthly' which  suggested to us that thriller  films are quite a popular genre of film, so this would be a good genre of film for us to be interested in.

Question five - "what is your favourite thriller?" this question had no particular answer, although we found 'Psycho', a classic thriller had a lot of mentions.

Overall the wide range of our target market large, as they we haven’t specifically aimed at a certain target audience, we have only considered over a certain age. This means the audience for our piece can be either male or female, of any background and over the age of 15.

Evaluation Question 3

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

EM Media is an independent organisation who doesn’t work for profit. They raise funds for small film and digital industries across the East Midlands, They have invested in over 700 films included 42 feature length films , a lot which include Shane Meadows production for example ‘This is England’

Some of the films backed by EM media have won many awards including 8 BAFTAs, 10 BIFAs, 3 Michael Powell awards and over 30 international film festival awards.

However after learning and researching EM Media I have found that they would not be able to distribute my film as they only help finance film and digital products, although they would be a great help for this as we would only be a small production company and funds may be difficult for us to produce a fully professional film that could be distributed to cinemas nationwide, we also would want to keep this a British film, so by using EM Media it allows us to do this with ease.

 These 2 of the films funded by EM Media.

However Working Title is a British distribution company that are based in London, but also has offices in Ireland and Los Angeles. They were founded in 1983 and have distributed such films as Hot Fuzz, Paul and Shaun of the dead since then. As this is a British company with links to america we thought this would give us to have the best chance of reaching a wider audience including some chance to branch into america. They may be interested in our film as it would bring something different  to their company with new stars  and a new genre as they tend to specialise in comedy films with specific well kown comedic stars. If they were to branch into a Thriller genred film they would be reaching a wider range of audience and people may think of them of a more established and well rounded film distribution company attracting more film production companys to use them.

Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

We would like to think that our piece could reach a wide range of social groups but due to the classic content within our media piece, it may reach specifically a younger teenage audience.

This may be due to the fact that we have shown a younger female character as weak and vulnerable, this is often the view of many people and we played on this theme to make it more believable and easier to accept by the younger targeted audience group. We looked at many different thriller films and most of them seemed to have a vulnerable female lead, as this is what is expected so we made sure that this was apparent through such details as her bare feet and a long black dress to cover her showing she is vulnerable, as this is not where she expected to be on this day/night. we wanted her to look vulnerable to the male character but to her situation and in turn life. Our female characetr is very similar to that of Clarice Starling in Hannibal Lector the difference being she is a strong character being taken over by the strong male character, but the scenario of the female lead being taken and captured by a strong and slightly menatlly ill character, as she is an older female lead she is portrayed as sexy and vulnerable compared to our characters just naive and vulnerable.

 

We also used an older man to be our villain, this is because being older it looks like he has more power and in control over the innocent and small girl in in comparison, again this is an expected occurrence between the younger social groups, because we knew this from research and basic knowledge we made sure that we did this for them so it would be more appealing for them to watch.

 We also made sure he was wearing black to show a also intellectually strong man who knows what he is doing by covering himself from head to toe to cover up what his crime, however we have shown that he has a guilty conscience about him, making him at time seem as weak and vulnerable as the young female character.

 We created his quality appearance by creating the ‘shifty eye moment’.

 This adds an extra dimension for the audience to watch as they do not know his circumstances and to weather to trust this character or not.

By doing this it has allowed us to use different close ups and shots and really allow people to get a quick look at this character. We used a lot of hand and foot shots by doing the close up of typically strong features this creates the enigma of a typically strong and dominant man it also allows people to not be able to recognise the male character making him a stranger and slightly more domineering to explore the male character. The close up shots are a similar recognition to our biggest inspiration ‘Se7en’ as it lets the audience get close to see the ‘brains behind the operations’ with skilled tasks and quite psychotic behaviour, overall showing a unhinged character.

We also used the music which Emily's Dad Ian Clarke composed for us using such examples of Seven and other dark films in order to get what we wanted, Ian used drums and strings to give a modern twist to a classic thriller film.

Tortured- Final Edit

This is our Final Edit of our AS Media Opening scene, Tortured.