Evaluation

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

Our media product uses a very fast pace shots to build up the tension for the audience, as well as using stimulating audio so that the audience is using both their sight and hearing to gain anticipation and interest. I feel that our film would not be worth watching if the audience isn’t engaged with the content, so we used some ideas and camera movements such as panning, tracking and shaky camera shots which give the viewer a sense of action and movment; it also keeps the viewer interested in the film because their eye is drawn to the movement. these techniques we got from the blockbuster “The Bourne Ultimatum”, which is also another thriller movie like ours.
So in the chase scene which was the main focus of the film that we created we used clips that were no more than 2/3 seconds long which allows the audience to watch and physically get excited because of the choppy scene. This convention we took from the train station scene from “The Bourne Ultimatum” where fast moving cameras and crowd scene make the audience wonder whether the will be caught or escape.
The way that we have challenged the conventions however is to not introduce the second party or the hunter in the same frame at the same time e.g. you see the hooded man in the trees but he suddenly jumps from place to place which anchors one of the core ideologies of the film that this man is more of a phantom, connoting the horror element of the film. Whereas, in “The Bourne Ultimatum” is more of an action movie with explosions and spies.
For Mise-en-scene we looked at such films as "The Ring" which a hughly successfull thriller film produced by Dream Works. they use a lot of grimmy colourings and clothes to give the uncomfortable dirty look, we tryed to replicate this in our film by using dull clothing and dim light in the forest. if we wanted to take it one step further the we may have used make-up on Harry or myself to make us look more bedraggled, however, we had neither make-up nor a make-up artist to use as we are not experianced at using these products.

2) How does your media product represent particular social group?

In our film we created two types of characters/ social groups for the audience to recognise. The first character that you see is the man in a hood (Harry). His surroundings are dark and enclosed which connotate the image of the villain. Also the use of the hood to cover Harry’s face puts a dark shadow covering his features, which is a convention of a villain, and also creates the mysterious identity that we were trying to create. Mise-en-scene was used with the costume being dark brown to further anchor the image of a villain in our audience's mind.

The second character that is shown is the hero and all the aspects contrast with the villain so that it is easy for the audience to make the connection and to separate them as different social groups. The Hero (me) is positioned in an open road with bright natural light which give the man an almost glow with his blonde hair; also the costume is brighter which contrasts with the villain and connotes him as good.

We did not use dialoge at all during our two minuite film so we could not use it to anchor the type of person a character was so we relied heavily upon the images an connotation of Mise-en-scene to show character personalities and motives.


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

Institutions such as Lionsgate and Pathe have been mass producers of past horror films which give them massive experience in distributing and advertising, which smaller or independent film institutions can’t provide. Another reason for choosing these companies is because they can get the film in the cinema which allows the film to be well known and then get it on a DVD or TV slot. However, DVD distribution would be the only stage if the film was produced by a smaller company.

I choose these institutions due to the amount to thirllier films that they have produced such as The Decent (one and two) from Pathe and Lionsgate are such large distributers that they would promote the film very highly like the new films such as "Kick Ass" and "From Paris with Love".

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

The target audience of our movie was for 15 year olds and up which allowed us to play with some disturbing ideas as it is a horror/thriller film. However despite this we did not use blood or gore to gain viewers or to make the age rating go up, we used a more David Hockney style of approach which allowed the audience to use their imagination about what is happening to the victim. So due to there being no language violence or scenes of a sexual nature, I would deem our film to be a 12 possibly, or at least this short clip of the film.

We determined this by giving out a questionare which questions like what age do you think this film is suitable for? and what would you classify this film genre? these questions were answered after showing the clip to the indevidual. We were quiet unadventurious in our question makeing as we only used friends and family members which meant they might be influenced by our ideas of what the film could be, so if we had to change the audience feed back this whould be it.

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

The feeling that we got from the audience when we did our audience research was that people liked to be excited about what they were watching. Which we interpreted to be that the chase scene held the most excitement with the short choppy editing and fast pace music. These changed our plans for the film, because at first we wanted to do a really clever film where the hero is followed which the villain in the back of the shot. But to pull this off well, slow pace shorts are needed so that the audience can acknowledge them. Our pre-production questionare was very helpfull in giving us ideas of what type of filming techniques to use as well as what films to draw our inspiration. If we needed to change the way that we used the questionare it would have been use more sources (people), and to ask more about what made a good horror/thriller movie worth watching.

Instead we used the chase scene which I feel worked out better than our original plans. This meant that the film would also attract the right type of audience because of the fast pace gloomy images which are a total contrast form a Disney film with bright colours and comedy which is aimed for children unlike ours.

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

During the making of the film I was impressed with the equipment, the image may not be as clear as expected but this was due to the dim light. In the editing of the film we used programs such as Final Cut Express, Live Type and Garage Band which as all found on the Apple Macs. Personally i found them very easy to work with once you know the basics and very fun to explore and experiment, no one in our team complained about the software or hardware that we used so as a group I believe I can say that we were satisfied with the equipment used in the creation of the film.

I liked working with Garage Band especially because it allowed us to creat the mood for our film by our selfs without braking copy write infringment. It was a difficult proccess due to the music having to be in sync with what is happening on the screen so I used the time counter on the program instead of the beats allowing us to get everything in time. Importing the soundtrack onto Final Cut Express was also very handy and easy once you knew how to do it. First re-mixing so that the file can be loaded onto Itunes and then droped into Final Cut Express allowing you to tweek the pitch of the soundtrack at pionts at which louder sounds would benifit the audiences emersion into the film.

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

Reflecting on the project and the skills that we have all gained as a group i feel that we have moved on quite a bit. With the preliminary task the planning was very rough and there was not many shots involved with the making and editing if the clip. Also we didn’t think about clothes or character statuses or what type of colour connotes a meaning which is picked up by the audience. But we learned how to code the message that we wanted to tell though the images to the audience, by planning ahead and making sure we had the right camera angle, light and costume before we even started filming.

Also we went out and scouted locations for possible filming taking pictures of shots and other angles to try at get a picture of what we are doing. However, this did not work as planned and the previous planned area was very busy with too much background noise, as it was a public place. So we changed our location at the last minute after much less in-depth scouting we found a new location, so as planning goes this was not the strongest point. However, the second location i feel worked better for us due to the correct lighting as the other area was to light for a convincing horror thriller. We also learned roughly how to create music that is synced to the film which was a slow a frustrating process but was none the less very effective in grasping the audience’s attention and increasing tension.

Over all the whole group has made massive improvements in their technical skills, but i have learned so much from focusing the camera to editing and even plan where everything is mean to be. We have well surpassed the standards of our preliminary task and are in a different league all down to working on this one short film. But things to change are in the pre-production planning like using props and costumes more effectivly with the surrounding. Also to be more realistic with locations as our first locaion was to public for filming.

Synopsis and Target Audience

John is taking a run through his local woods after work on a dark October day. However, his life will take a turn for the worst - he becomes, "bait".Straight from the start the audience is fully aware of both the sense of danger and malice that is shown in copious amounts, aswell as the dark twisting storyline of "Bait". John is lured from an everyday life and is thrust into a world of confusion, trickery and extreme violence.Whilst trying to survive from the grinding tools of a psychopath, John tries to tap into the mind of his captor and try and desperately find a way out. After an anonymous provocative message is sent to authorities the search for John begins after several days missing. The plot thickens as discoveries are made into the identity of the blood thirsty killer and where John is being held from escape.As the search for John becomes conclusive, John becomes aware of the twisted plan of his captor and realises he has become bait for a simple minded mass murder. - His rescuers are being tested.Fast action and slow tension building scenes capture the true evil contained in the darker rural areas of the UK.

(The poster was created by Olli Cannon and the group worked on the synopsis together.)

Open publication - Free publishing - More video

This synopsis got us thinking about who is our target audience?



We thought it was more or less about 18+ as our story is a convention of a horror gore film which would be rated as an 18. However we do not plan to use language, violence, drugs or scenes of a sexual nature which would bring our small clip down to a 12 or 15 at the highest. But this i feel was only due to our lack of resources, if we had the money for fake blood make up and false limbs then i suspect we whould have used it.

Scenery and Props

So as we had a rough plan of the storyline we needed to find a location to film it. I thought that this was very important as it could make or break the film, as we needed a certain type of atmosphere. Also it would need to be a safe area that isn't to public so as to reduce possibilities of brack ground noise; but accessable and close to where we lived so as not to take over a day filming.

We knew we wanted a rural setting in the woods so we picked ashridge forest. which was ideal as it was as it was close to both Harry and Olli's houses. We scoped out the area taking pictures of the areas that we would use to shoot, it seemed relativly quiet but still public. However, on the day started to film there were tons of screaming children and too many members of the public wandering into shot.

The solution was Harrys idea, he had been working for a woman who had a private pine wood forest, so we went to her house and asked permition. With is grantted we started to film. This wood was infact more ideal, with dense trees and a thick canopey giving us just the right lighting; and in fact it worked better than our previous idea.

The main prop was a rusty saw which we used as the weapon of choice for this phsycopath.

I shall include picture in my next post once i get them off Olli.

Reseach

When we started to research for our film opening we started by looking at films such as “Creep”, “psycho” and the “Bourne ultimatum” trilogy because of the chase scenes hoping to pick up a few techniques.






I could not get the chase scenes i wanted on youtube but this is the trailer.


Throughout the all the films i noticed that the music and diogetic sounds had big impacts on the intensity of the film. For example the chase scenes where always fast with quickly paced music to fit the rush of being chased or chasing and also that silence was a good tension builder when something is going to happen.

Here are some other classic horrors that we looked at and concidered as a style, but the main problem was that these were heavily gore based and we did not have the special effects departmet for such props. So the films were "No Country of Old Men" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre".

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: in the Beginning





No Country For Old Men








As well as looking at films for our style of filming we also turned to our potential audience and took a short servey which helped us determine what people expected in a thriller film.
We asked 30 people all between the ages of 16-18 years of age. The reason for our age range being so small was due to the fact we used our school for these questionares, but this was fine because it was the age range that we wanted to focus on and appeal to. The questions that we decided on asking were simple one such as:
What do you think is the most important bit of a movie?
a) the chase
b) the action
c) not knowing what is going to happen, ie suspense.
From these questions we determined that to best hold our audiences intrest was to do a chase scene with quick tempo music and to have it very fast moving.

At this stage i think we ruled out and dialoge in the film as that is a whole different level of planning with scripts and boom mics, for quality sound and convincing actor voices.
over all these questionares helped us a lot with planning how and what we wanted to do and to see if we needed to change anything.

rough planning

so we as a group decided to go with a thriller/horror type of two minute film opening so we brain stormed; and came up with a few good ideas such as we wanted it to be like a chase type of scene which would allow for some fast pace music and quick cutting shots. We came up with the final story board of a man saving a woman or child from a locked room but he gets locked up. All these are just rough ideas that to me sound really good and if we can recreate some of the scenes that i am playing in my head then we should have a very scary and exciting film. However I recognise that we have to budget and in a production team of men we would need to hire a women, so there are still some problems to overcome.



The short synopsis of the film clip is that we see a man drive up to a wooded area and get out. Time would pass and we see a jogger run past the car, when he hears screams. We want to flash images of the woman looking gray like the girls or flash backs from the shining. So as the jogger runs to help the tension builds as the audience sees the man from the car following the jogger. When he gets to the source of the screaming, an old shed, and when he goes in he sees the girl in the corner as he walk towards to help the doors close behind him.


that is the basic plan.

preliminary task.

Here is the finished product of our preliminary task. i think we attcheved the desired fluency of the cuts; but problems such as background noice made the cut more obvious and clunky. the video doesn't have a story its just a attempt at getting the basic camera angle and editing.

The Begining!

First Who are we?

This is me (Martin Aberson)

this is Harry Phillips

this is Olli Cannon

Back in september I started media studies for the first time and this year’s practical course work we were asked to make a two minuet opening for a film. The choices of genre were horror, comedy and documentary, we chose horror/ thriller. The reason we chose this type of film was because it is very hard to create a script for a comedy that will be funny to everyone and not just to the writers, also a documentary was not an interesting idea.



All of these ideas dont mean much though if you dont know how to film so our first task was to make a preliminary. This was our first time with the camera; and the preliminary test allowed us to know how to create a story board and a work with camera angles to see what works and doesn’t work. But the bit that i liked doing the most was the editing; making the transitions smoothly was one of my personal goals in making this short film. At the end I would have like to get a reverse shot in so that we could see the girls face but we didn’t have enough time to film it.