ALONE

EVAULATION:

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

After being given our assignment brief of a thriller opening sequence, we conducted research of a number of thriller openings. It was relatively easy as members of our group like this genre and knew what to look for and knew of many examples of sequences to watch. We were particularly inspired by the opening of Kill Bill (2003) by Quentin Tarantino. We interpreted some of the conventions in which Quentin used. This included the use of flashbacks, black and white and a strong powerful soundtrack. The use of flashbacks allows the audience to be educated on parts of the characters past and the soundtrack is essential in adding suspense.

We also used typical conventions when casting the role of our victim, who is a young, white vulnerable female. We decided to do this because it would attract the male audience due to the age and appearance of the main character as well as the young female audience as the character’s age and lifestyle before her ordeal is relatable to them.

Other examples of typical conventions used in opening sequences in which we use are, introducing the narrative. We show this in our film sequence this by showing a relevant range of scenes spanning over a period of time so that audience is knowledgeable of the past events of the character and the present time. This shows them how the character got to the present time. Although we do not give too much of the storyline away to keep the audience intrigued by creating several narrative enigmas. We also introduce a number of themes involved within our storyline, this is also a common factor used for openings. This included our themes of mental illness, revenge, fear and violence, which are commonly used in the thriller genre. We use the effect of adding titles; this is used in the majority of opening film sequences. These titles include actor’s names, movie production, names of people involved and the film title. We chose to use a larger font for the movie production and film title as these are quite significant and important for the audience to know. We decided to use black backgrounds when font is involved as this is a common colour used in film thrillers as it associated with negativity. We use a smaller font the names as we add it in during the scenes and it is easy to identify whose name is whose.

Although we have used a number of conventions commonly used in thrillers we also have used an unusual approach. This is created by our choice to use diegetic sound straight away contrasting to the more traditional method of using a soundtrack, which we do not use until a little into the sequence. This opposes narrative enigmas as well as gains the audience’s attention and therefore they will wish to watch on. However we also challenge the convention of a typical dark, dirty atmosphere and an example of a film which uses this setting is ‘Dream House’ 2011 seen in the image below. We challenge this convention by using a white, fresh, clinical room. We did this to emphasise the importance of our main characters mental illness in the storyline. We challenge the convention of typical weapons you would expect to see in thrillers as we use the theme of the characters mental illness which is quite significant, without involving any use of weapons.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

A common representation we decided to use in our film is Mental illness. We have shown this by educating the audience of how the mental illness was caused by the kidnapping our character had experienced. An example of a psychological thriller is Alfred Hitchcock’s film Marnie (1964) which similarly uses the convention of mental illness. Hitchcock portrayed the character with the illness as just the same as all the other characters until the fact they have the illness is revealed, this makes the distinctive difference

When selecting our main character we decided to choose a young, white, vulnerable female. This is because it is a typical thriller convention, seen in many film thrillers such as; Orphan 2009. Also the fact that she is kidnapped whilst going out to a party and partying could be seen as a stereotypical thing for young girls to do in today’s society.

We decided to use a male for the character for the kidnapper. This is also a common representation as men are more likely to be the villain and seen more as predators towards young girls. This can also be shown through the media and today’s news. Men are shown in a negative light and most commonly the criminals; an example is the case of Ian Huntley.

We chose to use an older female for the character of the doctor, this is because it is more realistic, and could also be seen as more professional looking. Glasses can also make a person look professional and serious. We chose a female as we believe females are stereotypically seen as more caring and sympathetic, than males. Therefore with a young female being the patient it looks more natural and perhaps because she is a young female she will feel more comfortable with a female doctor rather than a male doctor.

Our group decided to use relatively stereotypical representations as we believe that the cases are more believable and relatable. Therefore they seem more realistic and can have more of a thriller element towards the audience, this element being that the audience know what the role of each character is and therefore can just focus on the storyline and action.

There is a contrast within the character of Sally. This is shown through the change in her character and story. She goes from being a confident, outgoing girl, to mentally damaged after her kidnapping ordeal. This is evident in our film by showing scenes of the past and present.

An example of another thriller that uses mental illness in a similar way to the way we chose to present it is The Devil Inside (2012) and Stalker (2010).

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

We have to be realistic and find a small distributor due to our film being a low budget production. It would not be shown in large chain cinemas, and is not blockbuster material therefore we have researched possible institutions to produce our thriller. A potential distributor is Guerilla Films, they are an independent distributor of British and Irish films, and they take on film within any genre. The website allows you to provide a synopsis which must state a brief outline of the storyline, director, certificate rating and the running time. It also allows people to write reviews and ratings on their desired film, the website also promotes the official website for the selected film. The website has a link with amazon; this is so you are able to buy the film from this website. This is how you make the profits for your film. However Guerilla Films do not produce films outside of the UK, this could be seen as a disadvantage as it’s unable to broaden our target audience. It won’t get as many views if we restrict it to one country.

We then came across a site called ‘weebly.com’, this is where you can make your own website to promote your film. You are able to upload a trailer or in our case our opening sequence to youtube, dailymotion and vimeo, you can then add links to your website through this. Youtube is a great way to get our film across this is because the site has a lot of audience, the majority of people that use the site our young which our target audience is. Another effective website is ‘tunecore.com’ this site allows you to send your film to iTunes; this allows people to buy and download your film easily. It also has a wide audience, as anyone around the world can assess this. The downside to this site is that you have to pay for it. A site called ‘www.createspace.com’ allows you to make professional DVDs. This is a good site to use as you’re able to make good quality DVDs; however you have split the profits between you and the company. Another useful website is ‘zazzle.com’ this is because you are able to make merchandising such as shirts, posters, etc. This is useful as it’s a good idea to hand out flyers and leaflets to promote our film. Another idea is putting posters up in popular shops, for example village shops, fish and chip shops and HMV. We can also use these merchandising to hand out during festivals and other popular events. To promote our film further we could upload pictures from our shoots onto different social networking sites, for example Twitter, Facebook and Myspace etc.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The target audience for our thriller opening is based on a particular age, looking mainly from our research bracket somewhere over the age of 16 to 25, who were the main fans of thriller movies, which we carried out through questionnaires that had both quality and quantify. This research helped us consider what form our final film should take, as well as casting, scripting and setting choices, such as the language choice in some aspects, of which including not having swear words because some of them would be recommending the movie to younger children.

We also researched the official film certificate and found that our synopsis and use of violence made our film best fit the certificate 15 band. Therefore it is illegal for anyone under the age of 15 to watch it. For this reason our film will be targeted at anybody over the age of 15. We believe that young adults will be our main age group, most probably 16-25 years old.

We also think that our thriller will appeal to both men and women. This is because there are both genders involved within our thriller. Due to using a young female, this could attract the male audience. As well as females as they could possibly be sympathetic and have an understanding towards the character and the storyline, as well as using a male as the lead protagonist.

How did you attract/address your audience?

We attracted/addressed our audience with sound, camera angles and graphics. We selected a soundtrack for our opening that is eerie as it creates suspense and draws the audience in. When creating our opening we altered our initial idea, which was to film the back of two characters heads when walking down the corridor to their feet. We decided to film the feet walking instead as this adds mystery and suspense as you can’t see who they are or where they are going. Other narrative enigmas that also arise through the conventions we chose to involve in our opening is the use of a non-diegetic piece of sound of a police call. The police call is extremely brief but we did this purposely because it will attract the audience as they will be curious and intrigued to find out what it is about and what is going to happen.

Our choice of camera angles helps to address the audience about our characters. By using a high angle shot the audience can get the impression that the character is weak and hopeless. Using close up shots allows the audience to familiarise themselves with the character in the shot as well as being aware of the facial expression so they can understand the emotions and perhaps sympathise for the character.

We decided to use certain conventions of thrillers of which the audience know and therefore will enjoy, such as stings. This genre (thriller) is also popular with our target audience, so this would gain their attention. We also had the film based on real life experiences; this will attract audiences as it could happen to them.

Due to our genre being a thriller, we mainly tried to create suspense and spark narrative enigmas to interest the audience. Many people would ask ‘What happens to her?’ and ‘Does the kidnapper get caught?’, which would be prompted by seeing the character of Sally away from the kidnapping character. We also wanted to build up the audience’s anticipation when Sally flips out. This will attract the audience to keep watching and make them anxious as to what’s going to happen next. By choosing to keep the reason she was kidnapped and the reason for it as well as who her kidnapper is creates other narrative enigmas.

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

From making our thriller opening, we have all learnt a lot about the process and techniques required when making a film.

When we first began filming, we only knew the basics, for example following the storyboard in order to gain the correct shots that we had chosen. As well as how to position the camera in order to get these specific shots, making sure we used a range of different ones. We used a Canon SLR High Definition Camera to film on as we felt that we could get better quality and recorded the sound well which meant we had a backup if the Tascam was not successful. Apart from our preliminary task, nobody in the group had much experience with a Tascam and therefore we had to establish how to use it quickly and correctly. It was decided that one member of the group who found it easiest to use would be in charge of listening to make sure it was completely silent and record the sound. We all found that the Tascam picked up small noises very distinctly and therefore we made sure we were as quiet as possible and switched off all phones to make sure there were no interference sounds. Another thing that we used was a tripod, which helped keep our shots level and steady instead of fumbling around in our hands. A problem that we encountered with the tripod however is the space that we needed to get it properly expanded, which we had to get around by slightly adjusting our set to fit it in. We had no actual problems with lighting because we had a light that a photographer would use to keep the scene illuminated.

Something we encountered in terms of problems on the set was how we had to move a dining room around in order to make sure that nothing we didn’t want in the shot. This included tables, chairs, photos and shoes.

We were also only first introduced to the editing software ‘Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 12.0’ when we came to producing the film. This meant that it was essential for all of us to learn the basics and then it was relatively easy to pick up more techniques and methods when it came to exploring ways in order to edit our opening. We found that each member of our group was stronger in different elements and this worked out easy to allocate jobs with no problems. A particularly hard factor was synchronising the sound to match up with the footage, but eventually this was solved.

To improve the process and methods of making our film we definitely would have made sure we had better time management as we found that editing needed a lot more time and was a much longer process than each of us had first anticipated. We also found that once we had uploaded our first shots there were small errors that were impossible to edit into continuous shots. Therefore we had to refilm the majority of our film and this took up a substantial amount of our editing time that we later found that we needed.

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

The briefs for the preliminary and main task give a scope of what kind of progression what we were going to undertake. For the preliminary task, the simple objective of someone simply opening a door, crossing a room, sitting down and partaking in dialogue with another character and some matching shots as well as shot/reverse shot. This simplicity meant the sequence was kept uncomplicated, with the main focus on continuity editing.

The brief for the main task meant we had to show control in terms of complications. We had to think of an opening sequence that worked well, got the audience hooked into the movie that they might be watching. We all felt we had to worker harder and produce a better final film than our preliminary task.

Before we began for both tasks, we had an initial brainstorming session where we considered our initial ideas for the film, some location ideas and actors. After this, we produced a storyboard, a shooting script and dialogue. This process let us develop the seed for our ideas into a shared vision that helped each member of the team know what was going to come from these tasks. For the main task, we did location recces, which helped further the visualization of the end film, something which we learnt we actually needed from doing the preliminary task and not knowing where our location would be.

This planning helped us, but the Preliminary task did not require the same amount of detail as the main task, which caught us off guard in terms of Even though we knew it would have been a bit more difficult, we were willing to overcome the problems and complications by planning ahead, brainstorming problems we might encounter, performing checks on the locations to make sure there was nothing we could stop from going wrong actually going wrong and getting what we needed and making sure every resource we had to use was available to us, giving each other roles in order to take everything and put it into chunks for us to handle.

During the production of preliminary task, there was no time to do test shoot or reshoot if there was a mistake. This was because of a shortage of time, but we had some time for our final piece barring no big mistakes. An example of when we had to do a reshoot was for the interview scene, which we had to change our actor as well due to scheduling problems. The reason for the reshoot was that we had to consider continuity editing as well as getting some more shots.

We produced a shooting script which let us organise our time more efficiently, allocating roles to each member to cut down problems into bit sized chunks for everyone. These two factors really helped save time as well as a simple method of saying sound ready, camera ready and naming the take just so during the editing process when we got down to editing the film, we had an ease of access getting around our shots.

The progression from preliminary task to full product taught us that the Reece’s were quite important in helping us prepare for our filming; we had to do re-shoot so we could perfect our mental image of our final film onto the screen perfectly. We encountered various issues on our recces, such as sometimes getting a hard decent shot of an outside building because of traffic. Another location we looked at for our recce was our final location, the house. We had to rearrange some furniture to get some shots that we could use in our pre-production to properly plan for our production.

During editing, the preliminary task’s main focus for us was just simply constructing something that made sense, with no real story to portray through it. The editing process for the preliminary task helped introduce us into what was needed and the basic processes of editing. From this experience, we were prepared for the basics of the editing, but not trying to really construct a narrative, which is what we had to do for editing in the main task.

The final stage of both projects is feedback & evaluation, which had several developments for us. Seeing as the preliminary task didn’t require us to consider a lot, such as our target audience, the main thing we all learnt was the basics of filming, editing and others, which helped us in the theory and technical part, as well as it being almost a test for our final stuff, where we would discover some practical problems and consider them.

For our final piece, we had to find a location, so we took in some problems that we had with the preliminary task to find a good location that tackled sound issues. Sound issues we usually encountered was footsteps, chatter from surrounding classrooms as well as the occasional car going past when we did the preliminary task, so what we did was look for a location where it would just be us in the building and it wasn’t near a busy road so that we could get good sound recording. A problem we had encountered in the preliminary task was that our sound seemed to end up solely in mono, so we checked all the possible causes of this problem, attempted to compensate for it and learn from it.

However, there was the smallest piece of background noise that we didn’t pick up till very late in the editing process, so it was too late to remove it. We had to keep to a timetable, so that nothing would be done at the last minute. Target audience also plays a factor in the film, so research we found was necessary, and receiving feedback is very important, as is the teamwork.