Evaluation - Stephen Craddock

Question 1 

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

In my personal opinion i would say that our Thriller film contains many aspects of most mainstream thriller openings, giving suspense to the audience and really wants to make them watch more.

As you can see here, this is one of the screen shots from my thriller opening research. I believe that this partly represents our thriller opening as it follows the 'suspicious' rural area, such as the woods in which we recorded our film in.

Using a more rural area, in my opinion, makes the film more suspenseful as it creates much more of an enigma in the viewers mind, which of course is a largely important part of any mainstream thriller opening.

As in our film there is a murder case involved, the location of the filming would be imperative to the success of our thriller opening. After doing some research myself and group members decided that the best setting would be in a wooded area as it is peaceful, gloomy, muddy and little sunlight to add to the low-key lighting. 

 The screenshot on the left is a key example of how we have used low-key lighting for the film. As you can see there is little to no sunlight as we purposely fitted filming times around when the weather reports appeared to be 'overcast'. Because of the nature of our thriller opening the weather and setting was key. Fortunately due to researching and planing it was very successful. 

Yet another reason why we chose our setting as woods is because it really conveys the isolation of the protagonist and the antagonist, therefore making the whole situation far more intense.

This is from some one of the thriller openings that i have researched. As you can see it is an extreme closeup of a persons hand. This may seem pointless to some people but it is a key idea which we have put into practice in our thriller opening. One of the reasons it appealed to us is because it hides the antagonists face therefore causing an enigma in the audiences mind. Below there is an image showing where this has been used. 

As you can see we have put some of the research into practice and involved some of its aspects in our film. This will most certainly cause an enigma in the viewers mind with rhetorical questions like 'Who is it?' What is the purpose of this?' Only to find out that this is revealed at a later date in the film as such with the researched ' Taken 2' sample above.






This is another screen shot from some research i have done about taken 2. Before the opening scene changes the camera focuses on the main antagonist ( in this case the leader). We thought that this would be a good idea to put into our thriller opening as it would cause a good effect.

The picture to the right shows exactly what we have done in relation to the film research. The camera slowly pans towards the antagonists face and fades into the next shot to show the reflection of what has happened.

The Music.

The music that we have chosen for our thriller opening is a continuous piece of non-diegetic sound which is overlayed on top of the entire film as a music sound track. The reason that we have chosen to not include any lyrics in the film is because during the film no dialogue is used. This creates a far more 'mysterious' and 'spooky' effect. In ALL films, folleys are used to make sound effects more intense and just overall better quality. We have followed this by adding in folleys to out thriller opening. This is a non-diegetic sound also as the characters cannot hear it.

THE FULL SOUND TRACK USED.

Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Before making the thriller film we had to know what social class we were aiming at so that we can tailor-make the film to the standards of those people and what their stereotypical interests are. What i mean by this is 'what are they interested in?' We looked into this further and then decided we are going to choose the social classes B - C2 as the genre and quality of the film reflects that. Some reasons for selecting class B - C2:

• The clothing of the actors is just casual, normal clothing.

• The camera quality is good, however it is only at a 1280x720 resolution instead of the full HD 1920x1080 resolution which most films today commonly use.

• The film is quite low budget so very little costs were involved in the production of the film.

• The setting was in a wooded area, therefore it is rather mainstream in comparison to filming in a 5 star Hotel.

This is the male actor (Harry) that we chose to be in our film. The reason we thought harry would be a great actor for our film is because his height and build makes him come across as stereo typically strong and have a big presence which comes across overall as a very intimidating antagonist.We wanted a male as our main 'bad' character because the man as a stereotype is meant to be 'strong' and 'overpowering' which works great with the plot that we had planned.

This is the female character (Louise) who is the protagonist in the film. We chose Louise for a few very good reasons. Louise had to come across as very innocent and vulnerable in our film, this would give the audience the best idea of what is going on in relation to her being stalked by harry and eventually killed. Louise is small which makes her look very vulnerable compared to the larger antagonist harry.The blonde hair type is stereotyped worldwide as being 'Unintelligent' so this is a great add-on in relation to our film also.The fact that she is a girl means that she gets an instant stereotype as a weaker, lesser person compared to the big strong male character.The two actors both fall into the age group of the lower spectrum of age in the audience. This is good because it means that the audience can relate to the actors and perhaps find it overall more interesting for them.

This what Harry and Louise are wearing during the film. As you can see Louise is wearing casual clothing for walking the dog ( A coat, jeans and walking boots ). Harry on the other hand has been put in black clothing so that it appears that he is more mentally ill. He is also barefoot which clearly conveys he has some kind of mental instability.

As you can see here, this is part of the film. The antagonist is bare foot to convey mental instability. 







The social class that we are aiming at will be most likely to appeal from lower working class to middle class folk as it is inevitably a small production company with low viewing rates. 

When relating to the ethnicity of the two actors they are both White British. Some people may say that this makes the female character look even more weak and feeble.

Question 3

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

We are a low budget independent British film company who have made a Thriller film.

When producing a film there are 3 steps which are involved:

1. Film production - Story-boarding, Filming and Editing
2. Film distribution - Securing the placement of the film on an exhibitors screen and for home viewing.
3. Film exhibition - The place the audience watch the film.

• Cinema

• TV

• Video / DVD 

To promote our video to a world wide audience, i have put the finished video on YouTube so that it is free to watch for the public. The benefits of this is that there is no upload costs and it is accessible by people 'Anytime Anywhere' on computers, mobiles, tablets etc. This is a great way of promoting as you can also receive income through advertisements. Due to us being a very 'Low Budget' film company, there are not many other ways in which we can make people watch our film without them paying a large amount of money or with us having to pay a great amount for putting it on different types of exhibitions such as the cinema or DVD as it would just simply be impractical.

The distribution method that i have chosen is to put the film on YouTube as its the most cost effective way of doing it, also it will potentially gain many views. In addition, it means that the audience can interact using the 'like - Dislike' bar and also commenting to give their views and opinions. 

Question 4 

Who will be the target audience for your media product?

Before we starting planning for our thriller opening, on of the first things that we had to take into account is 'who is going to be our Target Audience?' We had already established that it was going to be a stalker/murder theme to the film but we didn't know what was the best target audience to go for. 

So after doing a considerable amount of research we decided that we were going to set the Audience as the Teenage - Young adult range of 15 being the youngest age and 35 being at the bottom end of the spectrum. We chose this target  group because what we are producing (produced) is of quite a mature nature. 

Now all we had to do was select actors that would suit the characters that we had in mind. We chose 2 actors that are the protagonist and the antagonist. We chose the male with a mature look about him with a large presence. And the female with a more 'innocent' and 'helpless' appearance.Both actors are age 17 or over which means they should get a good response from the audience as they should be able to relate to them as the ages are similar. 

To help us choosing our target audience we did some research on site such as www.Pealanddean.com to try and gather information about what types of films attract different age groups. It turns out that after our research we established that our genre and setting of film appealed mainly to people between the ages of 18-30. I got this concept from the film'Cabin in the woods' which is also set in a wooded area for a majority of the film.

QUESTION 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

To attract our audience, we all did independent research to see what other people thought of our thriller opening. For example, Rosie has done a questionnaire to establish peoples opinions on particular aspects. For my idea what i have done is constructed 1 on 1 interviews with a select group of people of different ages to see what they think of the film. 

Below is one of the interviews which i had as an example of my research.

(Thank you to Jordan Gibson.)

I believe that this was a good form of attracting and addressing our audience as it enabled me to interact personally to one of the people who has already seen our thriller opening. I also interviewed 3 other people and they 3/4 had very positive feedback. I Taylor-made the questions to try and benefit our film.

There are many reasons why the audience should enjoy our film as its suspenseful, full of enigmas and exciting moments, the film has an interesting setting and the editing makes it even more intense.

To help attract our film to a target audience, i have constructed a poster so that people will want to look at it, i have also put the YouTube logo on the poster so that people can see where to watch it.

Here is the poster.

Here is the questionnaire that we used as a group.

1.  Do you think that this opening targets both genders in the age group of 15 - 30?
2. From watching the opening of this thriller, would you continue to watch it?
3. Which aspects of the opening do you like? and why?
4. Do you feel like the opening needs any improvements?
5. Which age certificate would you apply to this film?
6. Do you feel that using a girl works best for the victim? And why?
7. Were you able to empathise with any characters? How?
8. Do you think that the soundtrack and music chosen suits the opening?

QUESTION 6

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

What i have done is made multiple narrations talking about my experience with different aspects of technology that we used such as Sound, Music, Editing and Filming.

Editing

Sound - Music

Filming

Sound

In addition, i have decided to narrate over the finished product going through all the editing techniques which i had used when editing the film. 

Unfortunately the file size is too large for blogger so i have provided a private YouTube link.

PLEASE FOLLOW ATTACHED LINK AS BLOGGER WILL NOT ALLOW ME TO UPLOAD THIS VIDEO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_MIIvPchvE&feature=youtu.be

QUESTION 7

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

A couple of moths before we did our main task we did a preliminary task which was effectively a test to see how we would get on in the main task. The preliminary helped us as individuals and as a group to enhance our skills in filming and editing. It gave us a chance to practice properly with the camera equipment and then after he had done this, the editing software. 

 

In the preliminary task we used this shot and the following shot to create a match on action which is a type of continuity editing. As you can see in the picture below, we have followed and used the idea of the match on action shot onto the main task as well as the preliminary.

The pictures to the right show a clear demonstration of how we have used this match on action the in main task.

The above video shows a match on action shot which we have used in our main task.

In the preliminary it was very useful to look at the different tools and techniques in the Finalcut Pro editing program so that it would benefit us in the main task.
The main tools that we use are: 

• Cutting (B keyboard shortcut)

• Transitions ( Under video transitions - cross dissolve.

• Sound enhancements.

• Color correction

We have used all of these effects on both our preliminary and our main thriller opening task. However, i believe that during the editing process of the main task, the techniques used are far more advanced and more professional.

If you would like to have a look at our finished product then please follow the link below. 

Thank you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjiYqa0a0XA