Final Thriller Opening

Finished Opening

Evaluation

Evaluation

1. Who would be the audience for your media product?

When we began thinking about our product the first thing we discussed was what type of audience were we going to be catering for? After some brief discussions among the group we decided that it would be much more suited to our knowledge if we targeted our product at people our age. This would make thinking up an interesting storyline for this audience much easier as we know what would be interesting for our own age group. After thinking of a plot for the film and storyboarding we realised that not only did our product taylor to the needs of a teenage audience but that it could quite easily also be aimed at an adult audience aswell.

2. How did you attract/address your audience?

Whilst discussing our target audience the subject of how we would appeal to them obviousley came up. we decided that the best way to get through to our audince would be to write a gripping story, about things that people our age would be interested in. As you can see from our brief synopsis earlier shown on the blog our film would include the subject matter of romance, a popular genre to a typical teenage girl audience. Alongside this we had a theme of violence which in turn would appeal to a typical teenag boy audience. Both of thses statements we found were also true of a typical male and female adult audience.

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

There are only two characters in our story and to create enigma we did not reveal much about either of them. But in what we did reveal you can see how we have tried to represent particular social groups in our film, we have chosen to do things this way because certain stereotypes of social groups are quite popular among our audience and may help to appeal to them. Firstly we have a character in the opening who you only ever see walking, whilst walking this character has his hands in his pockets and takes up a slouched position, his closed body language here and the fact that all the way through you can't see this characters face, suggests this character is quite concealed, quiet or mysterious. Also in our opening we have a character that you see in similar costume to the last, tracksuit bottoms and a large coat, this places him in a social group maybe seen as "thugs" or "hooligans" in addition to this we have a shot of him opening and drinking from a hip flask. Suggesting that this social group would be drinkers. Finally in a shot we showed a character washing blood from his hands, which might suggest that this particular social group is dangerous and violent. 

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

Our product would be seen in cinemas. After this the product would then go to DVD. It would get onto these two mediums through a production company or studio paying for it to be screened and then featured on DVD. Because of the technological age we are in our product would most likely end up on the internet aswell. Trailers for our product would be distrubuted by major television networks so we could appeal to a much larger range of audience and trailers would also be featured on popular websites like youtube.com and imdb.com

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

When we started out on this project as a group we only knew a little about the technologies we would be using, for example. We were all very uncomfortable with the editing programmes because we had only previousley used an older version of iMovie, but now we had to use either the new iMovie or FinalCut Express. In the end we used FinalCut and so we now know how to use that prgramme and also whilst we were producing our continuity project we tried to use the new iMovie and became accustomed to that aswell. Previousley to this project we had all only ever used a stationary tripod and a Canon MD101 camera. But since starting the project we got to grips with using a tripod on a dolly. We learnt how to set up and use a jib properly, and we also learnt how to use better and larger Canon XM1 cameras.

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

As our media product is in the thriller genre we were given the challenge of trying to take on certain ideas and conventions of a thriller movie. To do this we watched several other openings for thriller movies all from different times and directors, and made notes on the conventions found in each of them. This helped us greatly when we came to make our opening because we were then able to take ideas from these films and either use them or mold them to fit our story. For example, we knew from watching other openings that films used the convention of enigma. This could be created by having an opening character that you see but never find out about them, no clues are given as to who they are. Or and object could be used to create an enigma, this could be done by cutting to an object in a tense scene, the object would need to be quite abstract so to cause curiosity amongst the audience. In our product we decided to create enigma amongst both of our characters but would do it in different ways, firstly one of our characters was never to have his face or much of the front of his body on screen, the audience would only see him from behind and briefly from the side. This character would have very little revealed about him if anything. As for our other character we decided again to have little of him seen on screen but his face can be seen in a couple of shots. This however would not have created much enigma so we decided that in each shot, this character would have an object or be doing something that would create enigma, for example in one shot we say our character washing blood from his hands, the audience here would immediately question why? Thus creating enigma. Also we managed to incorporate the idea that a linear structure to set could create a trapped or closed in atmosphere. In a lot of shots a character was walking on a pavement by a road, the lines that are created here are that of the curb on the side and the fronts of houses on the right, this makes it look like our character is being drawn in and is being trapped, this creates a very tense atmosphere which is also quite typical to thrillers. 

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression of it to the full project?

When we began to plan our preliminary task we thought very little about a story to the entire film and focused mainly on the story of the short clip we would make. This impaired us greatly as without looking at the bigger picture a lot of things can be missed. Such as if your storyline requires a certain character to act a certain way then they must from the beginning and throughout, in our preliminary task our character didn't act and used a normal speaking voice whereas to make it much more realistic he could have been more serious. So when planning we not only learnt to plan the product in full rather than just the extract we would film but also to concentrate on characterisation where necessary. When we filmed our full project because of mistakes we made in the preliminary task we knew how to do certain things better in order to get a better final piece. For example we had a lot of continuity errors in the preliminary task that we hadn't noticed whilst filming then when it came to editing it we were too late to film again. So this taught us that when filming our full project we needed to think through each shot before filming it. That way we could work out any errors there might have been. Also to avoid some of the poor quality shots we had in the preliminary task, like shaky camera where not needed, we would practice each shot once or twice and then film it two or three time so we had several shots to choose from when it came to editing. Finally when we were editing, in the preliminary task we used iMovie and had trouble adding music to it. So we tried out FinalCut when editing our final product and found it much easier. Overall we feel that progressing to the final piece we have all learnt a lot about the technology we were using and feel confident in our abilities to use them.

Feedback

We showed our finnished version of the opening to some students in our class and asked them to give us some feedback, and some constructive criticism where neccessary. The students we showed made these points about our opening:

• The narrative is unclear.

We agreed with this, and knew that this would be a problem after editing. We took all of the shots thinking that when they were put together they would make much more sense than they actually did, this matter was also not helped by the fact that there were certain shots in the animatic that for unforseen reasons we could not film in the time we had. But if we had shot them, they may have helped distinguish certain aspects of our story.

• There is a continuity error when the photograph is lit on fire inside, and then thrown on a fire outside.

Again this problem arose whilst we were filming, in that we couldnt get the lighter to work outside so had to make the decision that we would light it inside and then re light it outside on the main fire then film it being thrown in. We tried our best to make it as unobvious it was two different locations as possible but certain things are noticabley different.

To avoid these problems next time we would have taken much more time to film the entire thing, possibly over the course of a few days rather than leaving the filming as late as we did and only having one day to film. This way there would be more chance of us having the weather neccessary for certain parts, and we would also have had much more chance of filming shots we didnt have time for that would have helped our narrative.

I would also like to apologise on the lateness of uploading our finnished opening. But as we have had trouble with the soundtrack and with uploading in general it has taken much longer than expected, it should be up by the end of friday though.

Soundtrack issues

Our original soundtrack was composed by phillip glass which we later found out that it wasn't copyright free, so Dr Clifflands gave us a CD full of copyright free music which we are currently editing to make it fit our thriller opening. This has greatly delayed our work on our evaluation and we will hopefully be back on track after one more lesson. While half our team are editing the soundtrack the other half will be trying to carry on with the evaluation.

Editing

After filming our thriller we have now come to editing. whilst we were filming each time we took a shot we needed we filmed it three times so to give us variety in shots and also helped when we found that some shots were either not what we wanted or were filmed with continuity errors. putting together our final piece was very little hassle apart from at one point the mac we were using sent all of our work to the recycle bin. Luckily we found it and were able to rescue it and continue editing. Our final problem occurred when we went to put a production company logo we made onto our piece in final cut, the lettering was unreadable. But we overcame this buy editing the words we needed over the top of the image on final cut the same way we put the credits on.

Corrected risk assessments

The previous risk assessments we uploaded were unfortunately incorrect. They were written out when one of our members, who had the completed storyboard, was away from college. So without knowing, the risk assessments were filled in and some large risks were missed out as we were not to know that they would be included in the story. Now we have reviewed the finished storyboard we were able to re-do our risk assessments this time including all of the major risks missed out previously. 

Here are the finished and correct risk assessments.

Completed Animatic

Animatic