Thriller Opening Evaluation1. In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms

and conventions of real media products?

When we first had the idea for our thriller opening the first part of our costumes to be thought about was the killer mask. The main influence on our production to have a mask was from the opening to "The Book of Eli". In the opening you see a person sitting down wearing a gas mask with a bow drawn, it is not apparent what this person’s

gender is. The gas mask might symbolise there is a war on as gas mask are worn in wars and are now associated respectably. From the idea that meaning could be added to a mask we researched masks and came up with various results. We decided to buy a plain white mask and paint cracks with a jigsaw piece. The colour white contradicts the fact that it is worn by a killer but represents that when the killer is awake (Dylan) he isn't a bad person. The jigsaw piece represents that there is might be a piece missing from the story and leaves the audience to ask questions as to why there is a jigsaw piece. The cracks also make up the same effect as there are some cracks in Dylan's memory (his dreams) that need to be filled in. It is not uncommon for thriller films and it many sub-genres to use a mask some examples are Halloween, Friday 13th and V for Vendetta.

When thinking about other parts of our costumes we looked at colour representation. For our killer we went for a black out fit as black as it could represent death, evilness and the hiding of something. We can bring in the black hat/ white hat effect that the black is saying that Dylan is an evil person but in reality he isn’t. For our victim we went with white, which contrasts the black costume of our killer. We choose white as it could represent innocence, vulnerability and tranquillity. The two costumes we had chosen are a lot like the costumes used in “Timber Falls”.

When deciding on a location for our thriller film we looked at thriller

conventions and found that “bars” is a very dominant one. Influences from the opening to “The Book of Eli” utilises a forest in place of bars, when looking for a place to film we found a woods with maize field joined to it, this would then represent symbolise bars and in turn represent the isolation of the victim. A forest is an ideal place to film a thriller as it takes the audience out of their comfort zone as most people probably don’t spend most of their time in woods due to the majority of people live in urban areas. When Dylan wakes up we filmed this in an ordinary bedroom to show that it was only a dream and that everything is back to normal as our audience can relate to the safety of being in your own bedroom.

For our soundtrack we wanted something that would create tension and build suspense. We found the perfect track for our opening at “http://www.freeplaymusic.com/”. The sound track we decided on features a full string orchestra, which can achieve very different feels, in our case it creates a very eerie feel with builds of tension which also dies down at particular point to create a sense of hope.

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

A big social group that is represented in our thriller opening is the victim. The victim is played by Catrin (female), this is significant when it comes to the victim as stereotypically women as victims are seen as physically weak, very vulnerable and at the peril of the villain. There are many thriller movies where a female character is held hostage by the villain leaving it up to the hero to rescue her. A prime example of this would be the James Bond series where seemingly in every film James opts to save the female victim who would be doomed in trying to escape without his help, he then proceeds to complete his mission without breaking a sweat.

Another main social group represented in our thriller opening is the villain. Our mask wearing, knife-wielding killer is very stereotypical of the thriller sub-genre horror. Having our villain wearing a mask, dressed in black clothes and wielding a knife instantly show the audience what this character is meant to be. The audience represent these things with a villain as in many other horror films such as Friday 13th and Halloween follow the same dress code.

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

As our thriller opening is low budget I think that our thriller opening would be distributed on You-tube as many people make projects which become very famous due to people stumbling across them and then posting it on such sites and Facebook and Myspace, resulting in their friends watching it which builds up audience knowledge of peoples work. As You-tube has an extremely large community and that everyone around the world can access it, providing they have an internet connection, if we posted our thriller opening to You-tube and it

gains enough positive feedback and audience desire for the rest of the film we could adapt our thriller to more suit the audiences needs. A prime example of this now happening, even though it’s not a thriller film, is a You-tube user called “Fred”. There are a lot of strong viewpoints of his work, being weather it is good or not. Non-the-less he has got enough publicity to make a film, which has been advertised on the TV recently. This goes to show that it is possible to get enough publicity through user made content websites such as You-tube that our thriller opening could follow the same path as “Fred” has made.

However it might not be us that distribute our media product. With today’s technology people will blog about up coming films, watch illegal versions on the internet and even watch user made versions on You-tube e.g. different parts of a film sequenced together with music.

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

When we conducted our audience research we mainly asked aged15-17 from around the college we did also ask people aged 18-20 and 25+. The results can back showing that comedy was the most preferred film genre with thriller coming a close second. From our results we can see that the age group 15-17 is our audience for our thriller film as the higher age group of 25+ answered other, The 18-20 did answer that they preferred thriller films. To get a more accurate result of whom our audience is we could have asked more people in the higher age bands. I think that with more research we would still find that the age group of 15-17 would still be our target audience. I am placing my judgement on the recent DiCaprio success films Inception and Shutter Island. Many people my age went to see these two films and seemed to really enjoy them, I honestly don’t think that you could ask someone in my college if they had seen either of these films and get a reply of no. People who went to see these films might not have gone as it was a thriller but maybe for the main actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) but then to find out that they actually like the thriller genre.

On top of the idea that people my age are now finding the thriller genre more preferable I think that our product is more appropriate for the age group of 15-17 as they can relate to several thing in our product i.e. the characters are college students and the victim has just come from a party. These two things are very common aspect in peoples lives aged 15-17.

5. How do you attract/address your audience?

Straight away the audience see a black screen with diegetic sound of somebody running straight away it makes the audience think about what could be happening. When the audience see who is running they can relate to this

character as they are of similar age making the audience more involved with events going on in the opening. At this point the audience is raising questions such as why is character is there? Who or what are they running from? How did this character get there? Throwing the view straight into the action keeps then alert and focused on what going on through them wondering what’s going on and trying to figure it out.

Once again we throw more questions to be raised through showing the audience a masked figure, wielding a knife and hidden in a tree. This also keeps the audience engaged as they continue to question what is really going on. Shortly before seeing the masked figure non-diegetic tension building music starts to increase the audiences emotions towards the situation. The audience should soon work out that the victim is running from a masked killer but this raises further questions as to why this masked figure is trying to kill this innocent girl? Will this girl escape? Who is this masked person? When the killer brings his knife down onto our victim’s neck we blow all of their questions away with an anti-climax of the killer waking from what seemed to be a nightmare.

It is quite apparent of how we attracted our audience of which we gave them minimal information leaving them to question and try and piece together what is going on. This seemed to work very well as all of the participants in our screening and feedback session replied yes to “Did it make you want to watch the rest of the film?”

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

As I had done GCSE Media in terms of cameras, camera angles, movement and shot types I was already quite familiar with how these work. I found the cameras very easy to use again after the period of not using one. I understand the importance of angles and their effect on the audience e.g. a low angle shot of a character makes the character more powerful leaving the audience feeling vulnerable. A golden rule I will never forget from GCSE Media is if the camera doesn’t need to move always use a tripod. Tripods keep the camera very steady allowing for smooth panning, no jolts or movement when filming and makes your production look more professional. Shot types were key in our production and having some previous knowledge of different shot types was quite handy. We needed to show how terrified our victims was and wanted the audience to feel as if they were the victim as well, utilising close up shots to show facial expressions gave us the required effect quite nicely.

Editing didn’t prove much of a problem in the way of getting used to the programme (final cut express) as it was of a very similar lay out to Adobe Premiere Pro which I used for GCSE Media however some things were in different places which can be expected. I looked at what effects could be done in Final Cut and came across an extremely useful effect of which you can turn day shots into night looking shot this is done through making the clip slightly blue and changing the hue and saturation. This effect proved rather useful in our

production as it was set at night but the cameras had trouble filming in the dark, this effect potentially saved our opening from not giving the desired effect.

When looking at sound I have learned how much sound really does affect the feeling of the clip. If you watched our thriller opening it would have nowhere near as much effect on how the audience feel. We wanted our music to be dramatic, built tension and make the audience feel as if they are actually there but we also wanted the music to die down in places giving the idea that the victim has a glimmer of hope in escaping. We choose a string orchestra piece for our sound track as string instruments can be quite powerful and loud but can quite as easily be quite gentle and calm, these two feature together provided us a perfect sound track for our thriller opening.

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

It has to be said that our preliminary task was quite a bit different from our final production in the way that for our preliminary task we could choose any story line we wanted so finding locations and props wasn’t really a problem, we had to include as many (but not to many) camera angles as possible but make them flow so there was no continuity errors, we didn’t have to think to much about what effect different camera angles made on the audience compared to our final production and the sound track wasn’t taken as seriously as our final productions but it was reached through a group decision.

When planning our thriller opening each member of the group came up with their own idea when we came together we discussed our ideas and initially decided on one persons idea that “There’s a person who kills people in their dreams but it actually happens” we then developed this idea taking into account thriller conventions. It can be said that from our prelim task we have learned to listen and take into consideration other peoples ideas. When we had finalised our idea we gave each member in our group specific roles of which it is quite apparent on our blogs of which jobs where allocated to each member. After each member had performed one of their jobs allocated to them they would then come back to the group and we would discuss what was put forward before it was posted to their blog. The majority of the time other group members would find the work could with no real floors it was only when deciding on a sound track we had difficulties as it was hard enough to find an appropriate track but also one everyone thought was good, in the end we struck lucky with the perfect track fitting our footage superbly.

We had planed right down to the final t for our shoot but there was one factor that we didn’t expect, the cameras wouldn’t film very well in the dark, we could see fine but the camera couldn’t pick up much. As a group we decided it

would be fine if we filmed it in daylight although it would jeopardise the effect of hiding our killer. I later found a video on You-Tube explain how to get a night time effect on a day time shot resulting in our second attempt of a shoot to go very smoothly.

When editing we we’re advised to make a rough edit on iMovie, that we had used for our prelim task, before we imported it into Final Cut to make a “final cut”. Our group decided to import our clips for editing straight into Final Cut as we felt we would be confident enough with learning how to use it as we would have had to eventually. Nelson primarily did the editing with myself and Jamie contributing on how specific clips looked and to what effect they would give, which transitions looked similar to others on already existing products and how things could be improved e.g. moving clips around, shortening/lengthening clips.

When we screened the rough cut of our thriller opening the feedback we got was very positive which we didn’t expect and as a result where very pleased about. I am unsure if the audience where able to read fully what was going on in our opening, some things were blindingly obvious i.e. a girl being killed and it turning out to be a dream but we didn’t give away that the dream is actually a true representation of events. From this screening we found that the audience thought that the sound track was very appropriate and gave the desired effect and that all of the participants would want to watch the rest of the film if it was made. The only weakness was that very few people found the lighting was too dark at some points, we took this into account and adjusted it accordingly.

The most important thing I have learned about film making is to always look at sound tracks first and then base your filming on it, unless you’ve got fully access to instruments and facilities to record your own sound track. This is the most important thing to me due to how much trouble it was in finding a good sound track but we were extremely lucky, after hours of searching, to find the perfect sound track for our thriller opening.