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.