Media Evaluation - HARRISON BLAKE.

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

To start my answer off for this question I will first be using an extract from Wikipedia on Thrillers.

‘’Thriller (also Suspense) is a broad genre of literature, film, and television programming that uses suspense, tension and excitement as the main elements. Thrillers heavily stimulate the viewer's moods giving them a high level of anticipation, ultra-heightened expectation, uncertainty, surprise, anxiety and/or terror. Thriller films tend to be adrenaline-rushing, gritty, rousing and fast-paced. Literary devices such as red herrings, plot twists and cliff hangers are used extensively. A thriller is villain-driven plot, whereby he or she presents obstacles that the hero must overcome.’’

In this little extract it states the main conventions of a Thriller; suspense, tension and excitement. We have implemented all of these into our product in many different places. The suspense and tension tie in together pretty well because they’re both happening at the same time as the opening leads up to its’ climax of the chase scene – the chase scene is where the excitement is at.

As for the forms, I did not challenge the normality of thriller films (bad man on good girl) because I didn’t think this through enough when planning the opening. When I got the idea of challenging the normality I was too far into planning, blogging and had already got costumes/started a bit of filming so it was too late to do this, but if I was to do something like this again one of the things that I would implement.

Imitating other films

In the final product, one film was imitated and a scene from a game was. The film we imitated was called ‘Se7en’ which is a very well-known Thriller. In the opening of Se7en there are very fast paced shots of a man writing and cutting out articles into what looks like a scrap book. His identity was not revealed throughout the opening, this created enigma. We also attempted to imitate this by using low level lighting in a dark room and doing close up shots of a man cutting out articles, writing things and just planning something that the audience is yet to know, this is how we created our enigma.

The first screen grab shows the film Se7en in which the hidden identity is crossing out someone's face, the second picture you can see is from our film 'Missing' in which you can see the hidden identity crossing out someone's face, we used the darkness and close ups to hide the hidden person's face which created suspense, uncertainty and anxiety as the viewer will not know who the person is or what they're planning to do.

Using thriller techniques in our film.

 The first two shots are from the first scene in our opening, these are using the normal conventions of a thriller film which are having a mysterious character in a dark and gloomy room plotting something, the mysterious man of course being the antagonist and the victim is a helpless girl. This is the normality of a thriller film - a horrible man after a helpless boy/girl. We were debating going against this but we had planned too much to  be able to change what we were doing. We used low key lighting in the shed to create enigma and mystery, also we used an eerie soundtrack to add to the dark and worrying mood.

The third picture is the first time we see the antagonist outside of the shed and in daylight, we still try to keep his identity fairly hidden so that the enigma is still in place but as it is daylight it is somewhat hard to keep this up. As you can see the antagonist is wearing all black and a hood, this is conforming to the normality of thriller conventions and most antagonists wear dark clothes and have hoods/hats on.

The fourth and fifth shot are of the victim on her lead up to the big chase, as clearly shown she is dressed in bright colours and looks harmless, this is another thriller convention, we stuck to all of them which is a thing I would change given the chance to do this again. Both of these shots are taken from angles that portray someone watching her, the fourth one seems to be someone standing behind a tree and the fifth one is a birds eye view on her which shows vulnerability.  

The sixth and seventh shot back up the fact that the runner is vulnerable as you can see her looking scared and threatened and then in the seventh shot you see for the first time the antagonist realising that she is there and needs to be dealt with, this results in the chase scene that takes place in shot eight, we can see the runner trying to get away from the antagonist, being able to see him in the background adds to the idea of her being in trouble and in danger. The final shot is when the runner falls over, in Final Cut Pro I added a blur to add to the shot to make her vision more distorted which added to the tension and as the antagonist is being viewed from a low angle it gives him more power, this adds to the overall mood of the opening giving it a scary and worrying ending.

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

In our thriller, there were two main character's represented; the protagonist and antagonist. The  antagonist being the man in black and the protagonist being the woman in pink. These two people represent the typical 'bad guy' and the typical 'innocent girl'.

• As we didn't have any external actors for our group we used myself and Carla as the actors, we were both portraying middle aged people who, to the outside world, would seem to be normal people.

• The male actor was representing a killer - his clothes were dark and rugged which added to the overall effect of him not being a nice person. This is the normality of not just Thriller films, but anything trying to portray an evil person. We used a lot of camera angles to assert the dominance of the male over the female such as:

This shot shows that the male has authority, it is a low angle.

This is another low angle of the killer, again showing dominance over the female character.

• The female character was dressed in bright clothes which shows that she is just a normal person (or in this case in trouble) as she is not suspecting anything. The camera angles used on the runner were aimed at isolating her, making her look vulnerable and in danger.

A birds eye view of the runner, making her look alone and vulnerable.

An over the shoulder shot of the runner, showing that the antagonist has clocked her and she is in for a scare.

• Another aspect of our project that represents social groups is the first scene in the shed, all the girls photos on his wall look young which portrays them as being alone and defenceless and not a match for an evil antagonist.

Here you can see the young girls.

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

Our film is a low budget Thriller film, this eliminates the chances of having a big box office release on a Friday/Saturday night, however there are still other outlets that could be used to distribute the film.

Our main target market is the 15+ year old males, this is a similar age range for the Gaming market which gives me the indication that releasing it on something that can be viewed from the Xbox 360 or PS3 as a wise move. Around 10 million people have access to LOVEFILM and Netflix on an Xbox 360. LOVEFILM and Netflix are film distributors who host movies and TV shows online and they can be accessed through Xbox's and PS3's (as well as laptops, ipads/iphones/ipods and many other devices).

 

As I have previously mentioned, our film will not be well known and is not highly anticipated so the major Cinema retailers (such as Cineworld, Odeon etc..) would not be interested in showcasing our film. The most local film theatre that showcases local films is The Duke of York which is situated in Brighton. We would advertise the film as a Thriller, aiming at audiences of 15 year old males and above, but anyone would be welcome to view it. Advertising for this would involve printing posters and sticking them around the area, maybe even paying for an ad in the local Brighton & Hove paper. The Duke of York does a good job at promoting the films it shows which is a good thing.

SAY SOMETHING ABOUT FILM DISTRIBUTORS AND GET A PICTURE OF A INSTITUTION THAT DISTRIBUTES LOW BUDGET MEDIA FILMS.

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

I feel that the target audience for our film would be 15 - 25 year old males. After going over the guidelines for the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) I have come to the conclusion that our film would come under the '15' age category. This is because it contains strong language and scenes of a violent nature.


This is also the Thriller market's most populated age range, which will benefit our film as more people will be interested in viewing it.


These are some films similar to ours:

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

Our film will appeal to audiences and our key demographic alike, due to a variety of key features such as setting, sound and props. However the key reason is because it is to contain specific aspects of a thriller, such as the film having an aura of mystery and suspense, a threat and a protagonist and antagonist.

Setting:

The setting is one of the most important parts of attracting an audience, we set our opening in two places: a dark little shed - we did this so it would create a feel of horror and anxiety and would keep the antagonists identity hidden, the second place we used was a scary woods. We used the woods because a big open place suggests vulnerability and is also a rather scary place to set a film.

A shot of the woods.

Another shot of the woods.

The shed we used - we made it darker and rearranged the furniture. 

Character:
We have two characters in our opening, an antagonist and a protagonist, they both portray the conventions of a thriller film as they both wear clothes suited to their characters personality. The antagonist in all black, representing dark and evil, and the protagonist in bright colours representing a calm person who doesn't want any trouble. The way they acted also added to their personalities. This kept the audience attracted as they were always looking for something bad to happen when the two characters would conflict.

Camera Work:

In the product our group used a variety of different camera shot in order to keep the audience interested.  A few of my favourite shots are the birds eye view of the protagonist running up to the chase scene, and a shot in the chase scene where we used a dolly to hold the camera and get the shot. These sort of shots keep the viewer interested as they are exciting and enjoyable to watch, they also create suspense so the viewer wants to watch more to find out what happens next,

The birds eye view

The chase scene

Sound:

Another important aspect to our thriller was the sound that we added to our production. The first piece of music we used in the shed scene was a creepy piece, very eerie - this was because we wanted to make the character in the shed very scary and also very mysterious. Throughout the product we used a few sound tracks and some foley sound to add to the mood and make the film make sense - for example we used a foley ring tone that we added in post-production so it made sense when the antagonist notices the protagonist.

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

In this project I have used a variety equipment that I had never used before, and if I had used it before it had been of very little use.

First and most importantly the camera we used was a Sony Handycam which was of outstanding quality. The HD picture it produced was very high quality and I believe this made our film look much better than it would have were we to have used the SD camera which we used for our preliminary. The Handycam enabled us to do a variety of different shots which we would have been unable to do with the SD camera such as focus pulling.

This is not a focus pull, but we did use depth of field which the HD Sony Handcam enabled us to do.

The shovel handle out of focus.

The handle coming into focus using a focus pull.

In these two screenshots we used a focus pull on the handle of the shovel and the character in the background, to start off the shovel was out of focus and the focus was on the character and then as he took hold of the handle the focus switched to the shovel. This is what the HD Sony Handycam allowed us to do. Before using it I did not know how to do the focus pulling but we had a lesson on how to do it and I then understood. The HD camera also had an automatic white balance which is a fantastic feature as the first camera we used (which was SD) didn’t have this feature, so in our preliminary we had a few shots where we forgot to do the white balance and had to sort them out in the editing suite with Final Cut Pro, but in the final thriller piece we had no offset colours.

The second piece of new equipment for me was the lighting. Lighting is used to create moods in films and we used a very low level light in our first scene of the final piece as we were in a very dark shed. We had to cover the windows of the shed so that we could only use the created light from the LED light that we borrowed from the college. The light was very useful as it had a wheel on the side which you could slide up and down to create a lot of light or very little light. What we did try simulate with this was a lightning effect, which I personally think looked very realistic, but as we only did it in one scene we chose not to use it. Click here for a link to the video of the simulated lightning. We used the lightning to create a very gloomy, scary effect which I think we pulled off very well, we also used low light to hide the antagonists identity.

Lightning was very new to all of us as none of us had any previous experience with it and we did not use it in our preliminary task.

For our preliminary task we used a camera which enabled us to do a slow motion shot.

A picture of us experimenting for our preliminary with slow motion.

This was a good experience for us as we used a new camera which had a lot of different capabilities and we learned how to produce a slow motion effect with it which we used in our preliminary task, sadly we did not use any slow motion in our Thriller opening because it did not fit with the mood we were trying to portray.

The music we used for our piece was from a website called http://www.jamendo.com which hosts loyalty free music. (loyalty free means that anyone can use it in a video without having to ask permission of the creator of the piece first, this was very handy as we didn’t have to try and get in contact to use the music we could just use it straight from the website, this saved us a lot of time and the music standard was very high.

The HD Camera we used also came with an attachable microphone which, when attached, would replace the sound input of the built in microphone on the camera. The external microphone was a great help to us as it eliminated background noise and gave a very high sound quality which was what we were looking for.

The final piece of new technology I used was the Macs and Final Cut Pro, I have used macs before but I am a PC user so not everything about the mac was familiar to me, I had to check Google and ask the helpers to find out how to do a few things but nothing was too challenging for me that I ended up not doing it at all. I have used Sony Vegas on PC before and am fairly confident with using it and I believe that this gave me the confidence of taking on the task of learning how to use Final Cut Pro. I did the majority of editing for our final piece and although it took a long time, I thoroughly enjoyed it as I learned a lot of new featured of Final Cut. Final Cut Pro enabled our final piece to look as best as it could with the ease of cutting the clips down to perfection which created a seamless transition from clip to clip. I also applied a colour correction to the whole piece as I think the colour did not fit the mood, I made it a bit darker which in my opinion made the whole product look more professional.

This is the film without colour correction.

This is the film with colour correction.

I didn’t know how to do this prior to the project but now I know how with help from the internet and my friend who showed me it.

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

• I feel that we have learnt a number of things in progression from our preliminary task, a few being:
• How to use camera's better. In our preliminary task we were only using the standard definition cameras which weren't much fun as we couldn't do any focus pulling and the overall quality wasn't too great, but with the better cameras  we were able to out-do ourselves and produce some high quality images - such as the focus pulling and the overall framing and high quality outcome.
• Another thing  I have learnt is how important costume is to add to the overall feel of a character - in our preliminary task we only used normal clothing and didn't take any notice of it, if we did that in our final piece it would have been awful as the antagonist would have been dressed in jeans and a bright coloured t shirt and the protagonist could have worn a big coat making her look more dangerous than the man that we were trying to make look bad in the first place.
• One more thing I have learnt is how important mise en scene is - this is just making sure that everything in the surrounding area of where you are recording is supposed to be there, and if it's not in place it should be removed. In our preliminary we had a few tables and chairs in the background which downgraded the overall mood we were trying to create, so we made sure that in our final piece everything in the background would be how we wanted to be, and there would be nothing that would look out of place.
• Another thing we have learnt to do correctly is the 180 degree rule, although we didn't actually have to stick to it in our final piece because we had no conversations, in our preliminary task we broke it and when we realised this we went back and recorded another video of us correcting it - this helped us greatly in our knowledge of using a camera and how to make a successful film. There is also a blog post on this further down.
• How sound can make all the difference - whether it's no sound at all or a dramatic piece of music. We had to add in a few foley sounds in post production and sound effects and some soundtracks. These all contributed to the overall mood of the final product and helped it make more sense and even added to the tension.