Evaluation Part 7

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

If i was too look back at previous tasks that I have complete before my thriller such as my preliminary task I would have to say I have come along way. The very techniques and construction has continuously increased when talking about skill. If I was to compare the 2 projects against one another I would easily and happily say that my thriller is superior in many ways. Although my preliminary demonstrates so many different camera angles and techniques my thriller uses more and in very affective ways creating a spooky atmosphere and a fine finish like it should have.

In all I have learned from my preliminary task that time is everything the more time you have to create your projects the more effort you can put into it, which is exactly what a great piece of work needs to be great. I have gained skills in filming an editing mostly which is the preferred skills I would like to have upon entering a career in the media industry. Below are both of the tasks, the 1st task is my preliminary and the second my thriller. You can clearly see the progress that i have made over the year. If the videos are not below refresh the page.

Final task

Preliminary

Final task

Preliminary task

Evaluation Part 6

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

Whilst constructing this product I have learnt allot about technology that i needed to use. For example it is very hard and complicated to use, you have to take time to understand it before you can actually begin to edit using the new software. Some of the technology i have used are Final cut express, Facebook, Livetype and survey monkey. Each one of these technologies played a significant part of producing this project.

Survey Monkey

Facebook

Final Cut Express

Live Type

The images above are images of me using the different technologies and websites to construct my project. The 1st of the 4 i used was survey monkey and I used this website to take a survey in order to find out what my audience would be. Once I created the survey I posted it all over facebook and asked friends to take the survey to get a much larger range of opinions on what people like. Once i found what was most popular i could them plan and shoot my film. After filming i used the 3rd technology (Final Cut Express) to edit the footage from what we had film. Once adding,cutting and adding affects in the correct order i added the audio to complete the film. My last task was to use the last piece of software which was Live Type to create the titles of the film and then import them into Final Cut Express. These are the software that we used in order to create our thriller now I am going to show you the hardware that we used.

Video Camera.

Blackberry Mobile Phone.

Apple Mac Desktop Pc.

One of the first hardware that we were introduced to during the creation of our thriller is the video camera. We was given as tape, a camera, knowledge of how to use it and sent off out to record our thrillers. The camera that we had to use was not HD hence the poor quality of our output. The second hardware was our very own mobile phones. These were used admittedly both in class and after school to arrange meet ups, when we can film and how we will film the thriller when we got there. Other uses were making notes, alarms to help us meet on time and of course the common camera on the phone to take images of where we was going to film or other possible locations. The main piece of hardware that was used was the Apple Mac, located in our schools Apple Mac room. This is what we did the majority of our editing and blogging on. It contains all of the software above that I have discussed previously. 

I have learnt from this how to organise myself in away that I can get such a huge work load accomplished. All my work was complete ahead of the dead line and I believe it was up to standard and if not it was above standard. The skills that I have obtained is how to use the camera in various ways to best portray different scenarios. I have learned how to upload and edit our footage from a digital camera and then upload that to Youtube which is another website they we used to show our product to everyone that wished to see it.

Evaluation Part 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

In this part of my evaluation I shall be discussing how I attract and address my audience. The audience would want to watch my film because it contains many famous thriller conventions such as allot of suspense, mystery, an enigma and a twist. All these different aspects will keep the audience on the edge of their seats and if they don't the nail biting action will. They would carry on watching my thriller after the 1st two minutes because there could be so many possibilities. There are many enigmas such as who is the guy, why is he trying to kill this girl, who is she and what's he connection to this guy. People may wish to watch on for that or may even just want to watch the rest of the action. 

Using Mise En Scene my group and I have made it easy for the audience to interoperate who is the antagonist. For instance the costume of my antagonist is black which shows that he has darkness within and that he may generally be dangerous and violent. The audience my sympathise with the actress because she comes across as innocent. This is simply because we made sure she was wearing white clothing. When the audience knows the characters better they may watch on to find out what is going to happen to them. 

The image at the top is the actress getting into the car as you can see she is wearing white which portrays innocence. And the image below is the antagonist who is covered in black clothing making him look  conspicuous and mysterious. 

Evaluation Part 4

Who would be the audience for your product?

In this part of my evaluation I will be talking about audiences and who is my film going to be directed it at. For example will it be directed at a specific gender or age group. The audience for my group will be based on anyone that likes the thriller genre. But if I was to pick an age group based on what I found during my survey monkey research I would have to chose between 14 and 50 because most people I asked to fill my survey were in that age region and the results were mostly positive. The results are shown below.

This images show my results from survey monkey and what I based my decisions on as to which age region I'm basing my thriller at. As for gender it is not for a specific gender as a thriller film can be for any gender. As my film is more of a horror thriller so it may not appeal to anyone that has heart problems or just doesn't like the horror genre. I think people will watch and enjoy my film because its not boring as it has action fro the start and a introduction like no one else. 

Evaluation Part 3

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

In this part of the evaluation I will be talking about the distribution and handling of my thriller film. To distribute my film i would like to say I will be using a real and well known production company instead of the distribution company that we had to make up our selves for our thriller. We could either use a local company and by local I mean a company from the UK. Some UK companies that we could use are:

Metrodome.

Film 4.

or we could use slightly bigger companies such as 20th century fox or universal in the USA. I have chosen to use a company from the USA because the media industry in the US is much larger that here in the UK. Hollywood is also in the US so I would like my film to go to Hollywood. My film will be released distributed all over the world (but mostly in the US and UK) to maxemise profit. The film itself will be able to be viewed in celluloid cinema, digital cinema and in both 2D & 3D.  A few weeks after it has been in cinema it will be released onto paper view and DVD. Then finally after that it will be released onto things like sky. The reason I have chose this type of distribution is because i believe it will maximise profits and exceed standards. This is the same way that many of the films in the industry are released.

Example of Universal Production Studios.

Example of 20th Century Fox.

Above are example of the productions companies that i would like my product to be produced by as the production company that i have created myself is not yet successful.

Evaluation Part 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In many thrillers created the director may use allot of stereotypes. For example using the 'dumb blonde' or the 'scary hoody of doom'. Within our film there are no such stereotypes, there are no 'hoodys of doom' and our main actress does not have blonde hair. As for representation there is always something to say. In many thrillers characters represent different groups like the 'working class' or a certain age group. Our film may represent a few of them groups but does not represent all of them as we only have 2 characters. Our main actor is put across as some kind of a murderer, so in terms of gender this could portray males as being more violent compared to females. To continue on gender our actress may be represent that women are innocent as she has done nothing wrong but yet is being followed and killed.

In the image above you can clearly see that our actress does not have blonde hair and our actor show behind her is not wearing a hood. Sexuality along with class and ethnic minorities are not being represented here as none of them are totally clear. We do not know the actors sexuality at this point, we could guess the male actor is straight as he is chasing a female actor but that can easily be misinterpreted.  Within the film we went for a youthful age of around early twenties but as we did not have any actors around those ages we used actors that were between 16 and 18. Using young individuals such as our selves we may be portraying our age group as violent and stupid. Age is not portrayed in a positive way for this part of the film but if we created the rest age would not be represented negatively. 

Evaluation Part 1

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

In what ways does my product use ,develop or challenge forms of conventions of real media products? After analysing so many different thrillers the result of our finished thriller or product was a smooth finish. Within thrillers there are many different types of thriller conventions. Some of these conventions are; enigma's, mystery. suspense and sometimes a convenient twist. Our thriller consists of a few conventions commonly used in many thriller films today.  One of the key conventions in the opening of our thriller is that we used a great deal of mystery. The main part where we use alot of mystery is the first minute where we were influenced greatly by the film "se7en".

Our version

Se7ens Version

Our version

Se7ens version

As you can see by looking at these images our film extract was very similar to parts of Se7en as our group was greatly influenced by that film. Another key thriller convention which our thriller uses is suspense. We use a great deal of suspense in the second half of our extract. This is the half where we change the audio and scene to an alleyway where a young innocent girl is being chased. The key to the suspense in this part is where the killer is slowly following his victim. The tension and suspense is build throughout the short chaise until he finally kills her and the actions slows again. My thriller has certain aspects of it that make it different to other thrillers. An example of these differences is the fact that no other film has done a opening like ours. We use 2 key conventions allot in the first two minutes which is allot more than allot of the other films. 

Final Thriller

After weeks of planning, filming and editing we have finally finished our thriller film.

Film Session

Yesterday, our group met each other at 5:30pm to start filming the rest of our opening. We chose to meet at that time because around then it starts to get dark which we needed it to be to film. We asked the female actress (Naima one of our group members) to come dressed in a white top, as the colour would portray her innocence and hopefully make the audience watching sympathise with her more. Similarly, we asked the male actor (Faustas another member of our group) to come dressed in black and other dark colours to portray how there is a dark side to him and hint to the audience how he was not to be trusted. If we were to film the rest of the film he would continue to wear dark clothes to hint his murderous ways to the audience.

As a group we thought this part of the filming will be harder than what the first part was as this bit will include acting. If the people in our group cannot act the part properly the effect of the opening will be ruined.People who have watched what we have produced have all said they think it is really good and other media students have said already how it is better than what theirs was. So by that feedback it has made us confident that we are doing a god job also that we may achieve a respectable grade. So by poor acting we didn't want that to ruin things.                                                                                                                                                                                    
To make the acting be as believable as possible during the running scene we came up with the idea of making the actress run up and down the alley; where we was filming, to get her out of breath a little to emphasise how she's been running for quite a while also to show how she was frightened and breathing heavily because of this.

We again; on the spot came up with the idea of roughing up the male actors hair to make him look even more threatening and scary looking.While filming we decided to stop and have a group discussion as we didn't know what we was actually filing which made the process confusing, but soon as we discussed what we was doing it from then on it went a lot more smoothly which helped us finish filming everything we needed.

As i wasn't in the film, I was set the task of being in charge of the lighting; making sure there was enough light in the frame. At first we used the light from one of our phones, here I had to shine the light on a certain spot in the frame to brighten it up. During the process of filming I had to run along with the actors holding the phone to give out enough light, bend down and by using my wrist pan across and follow the actors movements, also stand behind the male actor shining the light on his back to make the effect of a silhouette. I found being in charge of the lightening very fun and I was happy that I was in involved with the filming even though I wasn't an actress. However, our plan of using the phone as a light source didn't last as a problem occurred when the phone ran out of battery. Luckily one of the group members didn't live far so they quickly went and got a torch which we used from then on.

We used a prop of vapor ....... to help the actress cry which in the car scene worked very well. We asked permission to use the car as a prop from a group members Mother. While using the camera and the tripod we made sure we was using it correctly and while the camera was fixed on top it was secure. When we moved around from place to place we took the camera off the tripod and carefully placed it in it's protective bag so it could not get damaged in any way.In conclusion, I think yesterday's filming ran very smoothly and we all worked well as a team listening to each other' s ideas. We did not have any disagreements or arguments and i honestly can say i am happy to be in the group i am in. Today we on the IMacs will be editing the footage we took and hopefully finish our Thriller.

Editing

Our group is currently at the stage where we have started to edit all of the footage that we have filmed. Just like the other groups we are currently editing in final cut express. Using the trim tool, capture and some of the effects on various layers we have constructed the first half of our thriller. I think the future of our project looks promising as we have only received good praise and feedback about what we have done so far.

This is  a screen shot that i have taken of my group editing our project in final cut express. As you can see we have used multiple layer in order to incorporate the titles that i made in live type into our title sequence.