Evaluation Question 1

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

Our production, Case #058, is embedded in the final part of the evaluation.

For our AS Level media studies, we were tasked with making a two minute thriller film opening, which went from research, planning, filming, editing and post-development evaluation. A thriller is a film, a piece of literature or a TV programme, anything,  that has themes of crime, mystery and suspense. This gave us a wide spectrum of thriller sub-genres to work with, like action-thriller, crime-thriller, etc.

There are basic conventions that we want to follow in our production, like;

• Camera work – The thrillers we looked at used a wide variety of camera angles, like close-up shots and over-the-shoulder angles, in our thriller we wanted to mimic this, so there are a lot of close ups to bring attention to important parts of the opening, like in the "past" part of the opening, the knife and when the antagonist grabs the detectives wife. The whole "present" part of the film, when the detective is in the attic looking through the evidence files, is shot in over-the-shoulder angle.
• Mise-En-Scene – Because our thriller was set in the noir period, our use of mise-en-scene was to play a very important part in making our thriller seem authentic. This meant we had to spend a lot of time talking about what we would need and put a lot of effort into making it work well. We didn't spend much on props that we had to buy, like the files and documents. The rest of the props we used we already had, like the radio, the costumes, the handgun, and anything we could use we saw on the day, like the table, the lamp, and pretty much everything else in the house.
• Sound – We planned to have an opening sequence, similar to that in Seven after the first clip of footage, the detective climbing into the attic, of the names of the characters and then a shot of them from somewhere in the film, so we had small soundtrack over that which we made on the iMacs. We also made use of a wide array of sound effects, like a gun shot, for example.
• Narrative – Because we are only making the first two minutes, we didn’t want to give too much of the story away, leaving little to the imagination of the audience, while keeping them interested so they would want to keep watching.

Influence

We looked at a variety of thriller films before we started planning our own, and the one we liked the most was Seven. We agreed that we didn’t want to make the same action-thriller that everyone else would try for, so we opted for crime-thriller, using the conventions seen in Seven as a basis.

Lighting

We tried to use dark lighting as much as we could in the ‘future’ parts of the film, where as in the flashbacks, it is lighter. We also looked at the title sequence in Seven, and how our opening title sequence was idealised with the title sequence of Seven in mind.

This scene was very dark, whereas the "past" scenes are much lighter

Location

The house from the original Psycho film

Donleys house.

We filmed all of our production at Donleys house, we thought this was suitable because it seemed secluded and isolated against the trees around it, much like a scene from the original film Psycho, a reason we liked it, and inside there was too much that we would have to work around, because our thriller was set in the 50s, noir period, we had to ensure that there wasn’t anything that would give away that it was filmed recently. We spent a lot of time making sure there wasn’t anything that would give this away, like a modern radio or the digital clock on the oven. Props included an old looking radio, a leather suitcase, a variety of document folders and newspaper clippings, a toy gun and vintage cars which were parked outside.

Costumes

For costumes, Donley, as the detective, wore a shirt, suit trousers and smart shoes; and he had a suit jacket and an old leather suitcase as props during the scene where he walked from the car to the house, all similar to Morgan Freeman in Seven.

I played the role of the murderer/burglar antagonist. As the murderer, I had shirt and suit trousers, smart shoes and a jacket. We didn't want our antagonist to be completely stereotypical, like in No Country For Old Men, where the hitman, the antagonist, isn't wearing what you would expect him to wear, he just looks like an ordinary person, this is why we chose him to be wearing smart clothes, instead of the typical "hoodie" murderer that a lot of thrillers have.

Sound in our thriller was mostly sound effects; we included a small soundtrack we produced on GarageBand over the credits, although this was mostly to prevent the scene from sounding empty after we had muted the background noise from those scenes. We also used a gunshot sound we found on the Internet, and a car engine we recorded when we filmed.

Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In our Thriller opening, we looked at social class in terms of social groups.

Firstly, for our main character, the detective, we wanted to give the impression of a hard-working, serious-business detective. To fill this role, Donley wore a suit and had a briefcase to give the audience the impression he had just come home from work, found his wife dead and the murderer fleeing the scene. In the "future" parts of the opening, the detective was the only lit up object in the scene, the background, the rest of the attic, was in darkness, when he was at the desk it was only him and the desk that were lit up. We used the dress code, suits, from Out Of The Past and The Big Combo, two iconic 1950s noir films, mixed with Morgan Freemans detective image, only being more worn down, from the film Seven, which played a larger part in influencing our production. We used mostly midshots and over-the-shoulder shots on the detective to give the audience the impression that they could be there actually watching him. He appears mostly in the attic, a dark, secret hidden place, or the house, this gave him the image of being a domestic, family man.

The detective’s wife was relatively easy for us to decide on, because she only played a few seconds during the opening, we only had to think about her costume, so we agreed on the typical dress for women in the fifties of a dress and cardigan. His wife is only in the opening for a matter of seconds, so we had to represent her as the character she is effectively. We had her standing directly in front of a window, this lighting gave her this impression of purity.

For the murderer, we agreed we didn’t want the cliché balaclava, black jacket and gloves. During the initial planning stages we thought about the murderer being a patient who escaped from a mental hospital, drawn in from watching Shutter Island, but because we never included any of the newspaper articles we made about an escaped mental patient, this concept was never given to the audience, so the murderer character remained as just the typical murderer.

Evaluation Question 3

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

For the production of our thriller product, I would use Spyglass Entertainment, an American Film Production company founded in 1998, based in Los Angeles. They are close to Hollywood, the world centre for films, this would make it easy for us to get good distribution and a large audience on the release date. They have worked on an assortment of different thriller and crime films, including The Sixth Sense, The Lookout and The Happening. This experience in thriller and crime films would be useful to us for producing our crime-thriller. The sixth sense had a very small budget compared to other films, only $40 million, but made over $670 million, our thriller would also only have a small budget, so hopefully they will be able to turn the small budget into a financial success.

I would look to New Line Cinema for the distribution of our thriller product; they worked as the Distribution Company for Seven in 1995, and Bullet the following year. New Line Cinemas distribution company, New Line Home Entertainment, don’t specialise in distributing any type of film genre, but in recent years have distributed a variety of thriller, horror and crime, including many Final Destination films, the remake of The Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13^th, and an assortment of crime and thriller-genre films including Fracture and The Number 23.

New Line Cinema is an American Film Studio founded in 1967, again situated in Los Angeles, therefore being next to Hollywood, we would have the resources they have to offer at hand. New Line Home Entertainment was founded in 1990, before this New Line Entertainment distributed its films using various other distribution companies. New Line Cinema worked on their own until 1993, releasing a wide variety of films of different genres, but their first commercial success was A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, and its sequel in 1985 which was also a financial success. In 1993 they merged with Turner Broadcasting System, which became a part of Time Warner in 1996. In 2008, New Line Cinema merged with Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. this was blamed on the financial failure of The Golden Compass.

Evaluation Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

We carried out a questionnaire before we started to plan our thriller opening, so we could get an idea of what kind of thing our audience would expect to see.

We asked the basic questions, such as their favourite genre, their favourite thriller-genre film, what kind of things they would expect to see in a thriller and what kind of age rating they would expect a thriller to be, and we got a variety of results back from our survey audience.




These two graphs show the demographics of our questionnaires audience.

This graph shows the favourite genres of our questionnaires audience. There is a clear preference for action and comedy. We couldn’t make a comedy-thriller, so we agreed with looking at making a crime/action-thriller.

These are the genres that people expect from a thriller film, and as shown, mystery and action rate very highly. From this we knew what sub-genres to include in our thriller, mainly mystery and action, but we also want to include crime from our own decision.

This is the age rating that people expect a thriller production to be. 15 was the most highly rated age grouping, so we knew we should stick to this, that way we could include things that would attract an older audience, without having the age rating too high that a younger audience can’t watch it. This means we can show themes like drug use, strong language and violence, but without restricting our opening to an older audience. I don't think this restricts us in any way either because we don't want to have an older age rating, 18, because it will restrict the audience too much as well as barely increasing the available theming for our opening, there are things we don't want it to be involved with as the producers.

Our audience would be people over the age of 15, people over this age tend to have more disposable income, and I would imagine a higher proportion of males to females based off of the genre.

Evaluation Question 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

We produced a questionnaire to find out what kind of things our target audience would expect to see in our opening, as well as what type of people our audience would be.
From the results of our questionnaire we knew what our audience wanted.

• The most favoured genres were action and comedy; obviously we couldn’t include comedy in our thriller, so we agreed on an action/crime-thriller, action being one of the most favoured genres as well as comedy.
• Most expected sub-genres of action and comedy in a thriller.
• Our survey audience msotly responded with 15 being the age rating for a thriller.

So from our question about what the audience would expect from a thriller, we learnt they would want action and mystery, both of which genres we tried to include in our opening. Audience feedback went well; we posted our video on YouTube and linked this to Facebook asking for reviews. All of our replies were positive, most agreed that the use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound could be improved upon in the titles sequence.

Evaluation Question 6

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

We used a wide variety of technologies in the production of our thriller opening, ranging from the video camera itself, to iMovie and Blogger.

I already had plenty of experience in the technologies that we used to make our thriller opening, so I used the opportunity to improve the skills I already had. I learnt more about how to position the camera for a wider variety of angles and shots, and how to use the tripod effectively to get a stable shot at the preferred angle.

We had to make sure we had followed the 180 degree rule, in our preliminary, there were scenes i worried did break this rule. Because of thriller had many scenes where lighting took an important effect, we had to make sure the lighting was correct, or we would come to find shots were too dark, this included having a lamp out of the shot in the evidence table scenes to add extra light to the shot, so we would be certain that we wouldn’t have any problems with lighting during the editing stages.

We then came to uploading our footage on the iMacs, to do this we had to take the SD card out of the camera and put it in the slot on the Mac, whereas last year we burnt the footage straight from the camera to the Mac using a FireWire. In our preliminary task, we had to use a converter to change the file type of some of the footage to MP4, so I learnt these two skills better. During the editing stages, we used iMovie to make out thriller opening, and we used various tools on iMovie to make our opening the way we wanted, including cropping and trimming footage, adding transitions, effects and filters, for some pieces of footage we changed the playing speed of the clip, and for some we had to reduce or remove the sound.

A scene from our editing stages.

We made numerous copies of our production, and edited these in different ways to find the best ways for our thriller opening to work, after we had found how we liked things to be, we changed our main copy that we had used as a template for the edits to be how we wanted it, using what we had discovered from our number of edits.

We used GarageBand to make a soundtrack for the opening sequence of our film, this consisted of pre-recorded loops that we put together how we wanted them, it also let us make one to be as long as we needed it, and we took various sound effects from GarageBand to include in our opening.

To write our thriller opening production onto a disk we used iDVD. On this we changed the footage that would be played in the “slots” on the title menu, we removed the soundtrack that came pre-installed on the theme we chose, and we changed the font on text that would appear on the title menu.

My blog.

We used Blogger to keep a record of our progress during the course, which I’ve used before, but I made more use of embedding videos which I uploaded to YouTube, and the gadgets feature this time, so I learnt more about how to do this and what you can do with this features.

Evaluation Question 7

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

I think that, comparing our preliminary task to our finished thriller opening product, my media skills have greatly improved.

In our preliminary task, we had a basic idea of what we wanted to film and where we were filming, and how we wanted to finished preliminary task to look. We came across many problems in filming though, for example we planned on having a scene where a metal shutter opened for one of the characters to come into the scene, when we went to film we found that we couldn’t use the shutter, so we had to improvise, and this wasn’t as easy as we hoped it to be. When we came to editing, we found the three cameras we had used had filmed in a different file format to that which the Macs would accept, so we had to use a converter to change the format of the footage, and in doing this, some of the footage was lost. We then found that the continuity of the footage wasn’t as good as we needed it to be to make it realistic.

 

For our main task we used this experience to make our thriller opening to the best of our abilities.

We planned our thriller on location, this let us practise test shots so that we would know what we got when filming, this way we wouldn’t come to filming at the set and find things weren’t how we needed them to be, this way we wouldn’t have to improvise as much as we had to on our preliminary task.

During filming, we made sure to film everything numerous times, so we would have a good selection of footage to choose from during editing. We also got a variety of shots of the same scene, this way we could mix different angles together for the same scene to make it more interesting and to also get a variety of shot types in the finished product. We also filmed a few shots that we never planned and found that these were better than the shots that we did plan.

We never planned this shot. Turned out to be one of our favourite.

When editing, we made a few different versions of our thriller so that we could experiment and find the best techniques. This was useful because if we liked something we could change it on our main version, but if we didn’t, we hadn’t made the change to our main edit so we wouldn’t have problems with undoing it.

We did come across a few problems while we were filming;

• Authenticity: Because our thriller was set in the 50s, we had to make sure there weren’t any modern objects lying around, like digital clocks, phones and so on. In the kitchen scenes, we had to cover up the digital display on the oven with a tea towel so that the audience wouldn’t be able to see it when it was watched.
• Acting: We found that some of our planned shots couldn’t be carried out because of, to be honest, difficulties acting. It wasn’t a problem, none of use are professionals, but we had to find a way to compensate for shots we couldn’t fit in because of this.



Donley can't act, so we compromised and had a shot from this angle instead.

• The camera: We filmed for about 7 hours, and didn’t want to turn the camera off too much so we would have plenty of footage to show how we had filmed, this did mean we had to take breaks every few hours to charge the camera back up.
• Missed shots: We didn't film a few of our planned shots, such as the thief stealing something from the house after murdering the detectives wife. Although we missed these off, we never felt that it hindered the realism of the story.

We didn't have any real problems when filming, and our thorough planning meant we were able to work efficiently and get all of the footage we needed. On the day, we only missed one of the shots we planned on having, and this didn't have any consequence on our finished product. As a group, we worked really well together, I don't feel as if any of us didn't work as much as we should have, and we all got the work we had to do done.