Evaluation

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

We both used and challenged conventions of thriller films in our opening. One way was the use of a female antagonist, protagonist AND victim. Thrillers conventionally have a female victim because females are seen as weaker and less powerful than males, but seeing females playing the role of the antagonist and protagonist is less common, for the same reason. However, this isn’t actually seen in the opening of our film – the only character that we get to clearly see is the female victim, so the opening itself doesn’t challenge this convention. This isn’t, in our opinion, a disadvantage, as it’s important that the opening establishes a genre for the audience. If the opening had too few conventions of a thriller genre, it would be impossible for the audience to tell that that was the genre!

As well as this convention, we used low-key lighting, which is found in almost all thriller films, due to the fact that it creates suspense because you can’t see as clearly, and makes it seem eerier because of connotations with darkness that audiences subconsciously make. The only limitation we had with this was being unable to film during darker periods of the day, which meant we had to rely on editing software to create false low-key lighting, which wasn’t as natural or as dark as we originally aimed for.

Fortunately, we had more choice over our location, and as such we chose an area which gradually changed from being open to more closed in, creating a more claustrophobic feeling and the idea of being trapped throughout the opening. This was also helped by our use of camera shots and angle – we used unconventional shots (which are actually conventional for thriller films), and a lot of handheld camera shots to create the idea of being stalked.

We also used a lot of non-diegetic sound in the form of a typical thriller music soundtrack. The music is suspenseful throughout, but changes towards the end to create a more tense atmosphere. We did keep partly to our original aim to use diegetic sound by completely cutting off non-diegetic music at the end and using the only heavy breathing, panicky, and high-pitched scream, all of which create a lot of tension by themselves.

The other important convention we kept to for our film opening was the use of graphics. As mentioned previously, we took inspiration for our graphics from the film Se7en, where the words are in a creepy font and jump around the screen. This helps to put our audience on edge and therefore confirm the genre of thriller.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

As our film opening only clearly shows one character, there is limited representation of any social groups. However, as mentioned previously, it shows that females are generally viewed as being more helpless and less dominant than males, particularly as this specific female is murdered.

On the contrary, our film as a whole represents females as being as powerful and capable of just as much as males, by the use of females as the protagonist and antagonist. This is atypical of both thriller films and society in general, where females are more likely to be the victims rather than the heroes.

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

We expect that our film would be an independent UK production rather than a Hollywood blockbuster. This thought was backed up by the views of our test screening audience. We felt this would be an appropriate institution for our product, due to its low budget, small scale location, unknown cast and lack of special effects. The budget itself is the reason as to the other elements that make this an independent production – we can’t afford to travel far or hire out studios or well-known locations, little known actors and actresses don’t demand such outrageous paycheques and special effects are highly expensive. However, well-known independent films such as Slumdog Millionaire prove that they can still be just as successful!

Who would be the audience for your media product? How did you attract/address your audience?

Our primary audience for our media product is 15-24 year old females, with a secondary audience of 15-24 year old males. Because we use females as our antagonist, protagonist and victim, other females feel like they can relate more to these characters, and males feel attracted to these females, as well as being attracted by the thriller genre. We felt that this age range would be appropriate as the film would probably be rated a 15, our actresses would be around this age, further allowing them to identify with the characters, and we intended to use mobile phones, which is a type of technology popular with young people. We identified this early on in the planning, which would allow us to direct our advertising at this audience, by creating pages and apps on social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, using tv advertising during programs that are popular with young people (e.g. Skins, The X Factor, The Only Way Is Essex), and designing a poster that’s trendy and modern but still portrays the thriller genre.

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

During the filming of our film, we learnt to become more competent when using a video camera, but personally, I felt my editing skills improved the most. We needed to change the lighting of our shots using the editing software, and we discovered how to do this by trying out new areas of our software that we’d never used before. I also found out how to not just make a shot darker, but change the colour tint of the light, which was useful in softening the differences in natural light between shots that were taken on different days. I would also say that my continuity editing definitely improved, as I’ve become more accurate with cutting the shots to the exact point I need them. Unwanted diegetic sound was also no longer a problem, as, along with my group, we figured out how to remove it, and put in the non-diegetic sound we wanted instead. In addition, we discovered how to actually take snippets of diegetic sound (in our case, the text tone), and move it to all the desired places.

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

As mentioned in the previous question, I’ve learnt a lot about editing skills in this progression, much of this being due to trial-and-error, and the need to either improve on current skills (e.g. continuity editing) or develop new ones (e.g. change the light of a shot). However, my prelim task helped me to start developing my basic editing skills, which have allowed me to become a better film editor for our main task.

Outside of editing, I realised from my prelim task about the importance of having a good quality storyboard and sticking to it as much as possible. I will admit, my storyboard for my prelim was awful, as I didn’t really think it would be important, and whilst at first we stuck to it, we went off track and just started shooting whatever we thought would work. However, this resulted in poor continuity editing and a lack of shot variety. This time, I spent more time on my storyboard (although my drawing skills are fairly basic, you can at least see the most important details), and we actually stuck to it. Consequently, we ended up with a large range of good quality shots, plenty enough to ensure that our continuity editing wouldn’t suffer for it.

We also learnt of the importance of a shooting schedule – not all shots need to be filmed one after the other! It’s much easier to film all shots that are in one particular area at the same time.

What would you improve and why?

There are only a few aspects of our opening that I feel need improving and that if we were to do a task like this again in the future, we would make sure we did.

Firstly, some of our shots were quite unsteady. Whilst some were intended to be like this, in order to give the impression of being watched, other only ended up like this because we didn’t rely on the tripod as much as we should’ve done. This is something we were all guilty of, but I know we’ll all take more care over this in the future.

Whilst we were able to edit in the darker lighting, it wasn’t as dark as we originally wished, because that made the details less clear, and even though I edited the differences out as much as possible, the fact that some shots were filmed on two different days is still visible. If we were to shoot again, we would actually film in darker light in order to rely less on editing, and try our best to film everything on the same day, or if this wasn’t possible, choose two days with as similar a level of sunlight as possible. This would further improve the continuity of our film opening.