Jack's Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Alfred Hitchcock’s Macguffin has been used to make the film feel more like a thriller than a horror. We made the toy which was being held by lily to seem important so they would assume it had some effect on the main plot and also to make the viewers think that she would get lost at that point. At the beginning of the film we show a scene where a grave stone is shown. This is quite a significant object that grabs the viewers attention for the short amount of time that it is shown. It makes the viewers question it and wonder how it could be related to the rest of the film. Throughout the rest of the film there are clues to what the gravestone signifies.
The audience’s attention is grabbed by suspense and realism created by the setting and costume. The film ‘The strangers’ influenced us to give the kidnapper a mask. This hides there identity and gives the impression she is hiding from herself and that she’s going to commit a crime.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The social groups represented in our piece are a young child of the age of ten, two parents in there late 30’s and the kidnaper in her 40’s. Those who are just old enough to watch the film must be able to concentrate and give the film the attention it needs for you to fully understand the plot and physiological horror. There are no other ethnicities within our film so may be more appealing to white viewers.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
I think that this could be released as an online drama/thriller. I believe it would not be suitable for a Hollywood movie production due to how the story line is laid out and the type of thriller it is as it is not very original for that market however having it as an online thriller would be a fresh way for are media product to proliferate with the right advertising and marketing. Having it as a series means that each episode can have its own plot while the main story line continues. Each series can have a hook to keep the audience interested which would be harder to accomplish in a film. The mise on scene is one of a simple lifestyle which helps the audience put them selves into the actors positions.
Merchandising opportunities could include a DVD of the series. Two versions of each season could be released, one having more special features. A book could be made containing interviews of the cast and behind the set pictures and information. A replica mask could be manufactured for the comedy value and also for people who which to dress as the cast for Halloween or conventions.
Who would be the audience for your media product?People in their 30’s who are looking for a thrilling mystery to watch in there spare time. This age are quite computer literate and should be able to use the equipment needed to watch the film. It is aimed to attract both male and female audience members. We were originally going to give it a 12 certificate as we thought it would be suitable for any one over that age but after researching age certificates and checking current films certificates we thought it would be best to change the rating from a 12 to a 15. We decided that if girls under the age of 15 were to watch it they may put there selves into Lily’s position.

How did you attract/address your audience?
The section of our film where lily is kid napped creates anticipation for the viewers as they want to see what will happen next. This may terrify children of a young age which is one of the points we took into consideration when deciding upon what we should rate the film. Also the fact lily has been stolen could scare the viewers for her sake as they will want her free and sympathise for the parents. The safety of the girl has a large impact on the opening of the series as the female audience may relate themselves to Lily’s mother. It sets the story line for the series to follow wile enabling sub story’s to happen.

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

We used the best camera equipment we had available to us taking into account that it had to be compatible with an Apple Macintosh. The tripods were not of the best quality as we had

trouble being able to pan the camera smoothly from left to right but they were quite stable when we were using them on stable terrain. We also found out that you could set useful features like being able to manually focus the camera and also fade in and out of scenes without editing.

One problem we had while filming our media product was that half way through filming outdoors the battery ran out despite charging it before hand. We had to put our filming on hold to go indoors and charge the battery this had an effect on the amount of time we had left to finish the film but luckily didn’t effect the outcome.
The main piece of equipment we used was an Apple Macintosh. Being a windows user I was not accustomed to the Apple Mac’s operating system and user interface and found it a bit difficult to get used to especially how they have desig

ned there hardware to not feature a right click to access certain other options I am used

to with windows and Linux. To begin with I found it a bit infuriating to navigate as I kept using it as if it were a pc and going wrong but by the end I had become a lot better at it.
I also had to learn how to use final cut express and navigate the program. I found a few tutorials on youtube which helped me get to grips with it. I was already familiar with how certain aspects of the program worked for instance the timeline and the razor tool but I had to learn how to superimpose test into our film which we used for the title and credits.

I also had to learn how to add in effects which we used to emphasize certain scenes in the film and makes the masked woman’s power over the girl more apparent.
We also used the resources in the music technology suite to record the voice over which happens over the majority of the opening. We had already used the recording resources in our music tech suite before so we found it quick and easy to do without having to learn anything new.

Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the profession from it to the full product?
Once we had done our preliminary task we began to think about how we were going to make the opening to our media product and how we could plan it. We began thinking of ideas and making a brainstorm of them which we were to later add to our storyboard. We thought about the different types of camera shots and lighting we would need and how it may look. We experimented with the camera to see what it was capable of and different effects we could get with it alone.

We also thought about what sort of music that we would have in our film and how it would sound in different parts of our film. So we went about putting different sounds into different parts of the film to evaluate how it would sound. We eventually found two free royalty free sound tracks (Click here for the website that we used) and added them to the most suited places in the song which worked well.
After spending plenty of time on the Apple Mac I began to feel a lot more confident without how to operate it.
We also took inconsideration that we must look up our specific genre which was to be thriller. We looked up different thrillers and how they executed different scenes and what they did to keep it interesting and hold your attention.

This is a video of how we adjusted the lighting to make it seem darker and not so well lit and happy.

Media Task Evaluation

Miles Hider - 12Be

-EVALUATION-

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

We made sure our thriller contained as many of the basic requirements of a thriller as possible. We built up suspense. When Lily (the child) drops her teddy, this acts as a MacGuffin, it makes audience members assume that this has something to do with the story in some way but the audience later finds out that it does not.

We had a very realistic storyline and that there were no continuity errors in the thriller... For example we made sure that each actor was always wearing the same clothes when we filmed on different days, to keep it so no time appeared to have passed.

As the story in our thriller goes on, it is clear what is happening which makes it easier to understand and helps it to develop more easily, for example when Lily is taken, this is made obvious by having an entirely different scene, so as not to merge sections wholly into one larger section.

A link to the trailer for the film The Strangers, which we used for the idea about the masked antagonist. (Click here)

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our thriller introduction represents a few defined social groups; all the people acting in the thriller are 16-17 years old, playing characters of ages 10 to 40. There are two 40 year olds and one 10 year old (the child, Lily). This does not leave much space for other ethnicities as we only had 3 actors but does not affect our target audience as it was designed to appeal to any audience member over the minimum age requirement.

There is no representation or stereotyping of either female or male people yet there are more women than men. This has no correlation to the target audience, but could help attract the male audience a little more.

A link to the BBFC website which I took much of my age rating research from. (Click here)

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

Our thriller introduction is one that we hope could have been produced by a major media institution, for example a Hollywood film company etc. however we thought that if we had more time we would have been able to polish off the whole thing a little more. And if we had more money to spend on props and better equipment then we would have been able to produce a much neater thriller introduction.

We felt the thriller would be more suited to being an internet only release and would be better available to anyone over the age limit (15+). Hosting our thriller introduction on the internet would have made it cheaper and much more cost effective, though it would have been harder to keep safe from copyright and piracy. Our thriller introduction follows a closely modern representation and visual style of mise en scene.

Who is the audience for your media product?

Our thriller introduction is aimed at anyone over the age of 15 and was designed to attract both female and male audiences equally. We thought originally that it would be suitable for anyone over the age of 12 but upon thinking about what was in our thriller introduction we figured that a 15+ age rating would be more effective. We did a lot of research on age ratings and the BBFC and found out that it would be better to be safe and go for a 15+ than a 12A (12+).

How did we attract/address our audience?

The audience we were aiming for is described above, we attracted them using characters with similar lifestyles. I.E. Couples aged 30-40 with a child aged 10. When the audience can relate to the lifestyle of the characters it helps them stay interested and can attract attention to the thriller when it is noticed or heard about by a target audience. We also made sure to keep it as memorable as possible to keep people talking about it after they had seen it, this would help it sell better due to word of mouth. It would be very much like advertising.

We were sure to keep our thriller fast paced and jumpy so as to keep it interesting throughout, we would have liked to have used more camera techniques to show our scenes from many perspectives as this would also have helped to keep the audience interested but we did not have enough time for filming to do this.

We had to be certain that the title of our thriller was short and simple so it would be easy to remember and read when it was on the introduction. If it had been much longer and complicated it would have been far harder for a potential audience member to remember and could therefore give the thriller introduction far less audience members.

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

I have learnt that filming can be much more time consuming than originally planned and can also be considerably harder too. We found many problems with lighting, as it was hard to get power to our outdoor locations, we had to rely solely on natural light. Because of this we had to do much of our filming in a very rushed manner. Indoors lighting was not such a problem because there were always power sockets easily accessible.

Another problem we found was with the cameras, the batteries were never charged and we found that even when they were fully charged, they would only last a few minutes before needing either to switch batteries or be attached to the mains socket. This was a considerable set back when we were trying to film outside as it gave us a very small time frame to film in.

We thought we may have a problem with actors, as some that we used in our original filming were not available after this. So in the end we had to re-film all of the scenes we had previously done. This took quite a bit of time.

Final Cut Express took a bit of getting used to but once we got the hang of it we were quickly editing and finalising our product, Final Cut Express was full of useful effects which we used to our advantage when making our thriller. Other groups used a program called Garage Band, we found that it was a waste of time to create our own songs when royalty free songs were so easily found on the internet, they fitted well with our thriller so we used those instead.

I didn’t feel very confident about using the equipment after the preliminary task, this made it very hard for me to focus on the group work of the main project. After a while I began getting used to the camera and how to use it all properly and now I feel much better about using it, and have helped others upload their coursework to Final Cut Express. Using the cameras and playing around with the equipment to get the hang of it also helped me to learn to use it properly and easily when the time came for our real coursework task.

This is the final result of our media group project:

We were all happy with our final result and are glad to finally have finished all our recording. It was very time consuming but was a good group work building experience and helped me personally to learn much more about Macintosh computers, the recording equipment, my group members, and Final Cut Express.

Evaluation

Fiona Ward, 12ma.

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

Our thriller has a realistic setting which is a generic convention of a thriller. Alfred Hitchcock's technique of a 'MacGuffin' item, this is where an item is seemingly important to the plotline however it is later apparent that it has little significance. Our MacGuffin is the very first shot of our film of a grave, it grabs the audiences attention and makes them curious to learn more about the plot. Alfred Hitchcock is a good influence for our thriller as he also worked with psychological

thrillers.

We also used realistic costume but using the mask for

the masked character creates an abnormal feel, the contrast with realistic life and the strange masked character creates a gre

ater dramatic impact. The use of narration though our voice over indicates a sub-genre of a psychological thriller. This is because it immediately takes the audience into the mind of the character and the audience becomes involved with the characters thoughts. Our use of conventions indicates influences for our work such as 'One Hour Photo,' because it also uses a voice over to tell the audience the characters thoughts. Other thrillers such as 'The Strangers' and 'Dead Man's Shoes' also use realistic setting but use masks as a prompt for something thrilling about to happen so the audience make a mental link between the mask and suspense towards a bad event. The mask also hides the identity of the character which makes the audience intrigued to see who she really is.

How does your media product represented particular social groups?

Our thriller is most likely to be appealing to white, female or males who enjoy a film that incorporates a lot of thought . Seeing as it is a modern take on a thriller it may be more appealing to a younger audience but still of an age suitable to view the film, as it has aspects of horror. The viewers also need to be mature minded enough to understand the psychological parts of the plot. Family is presented in a stereotypical way due to a mother, father and child figure who all seem happy together. However gender is not represented stereotypically as the woman character is dominant and in control of the other characters distress. The victim being a child, female is stereotypical as she is portrayed as weak and helpless. A female antagonist appeals to a modern audience as it in not a generic convention. Also a parental audience may find our thriller appealing as they can relate to the distress the parents would feel about the kidnap of a child.

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

Our product is unlikely to be something a hollywood company would be interested in as

there are a lot of other products like it, if more aspects of horror were added it may be more likely to be used for hollywood studios as it would appeal to a wider audience and more capable of holding the consumers attention for a long time span. I think our thriller is more suitable to be viewed as a short TV drama. Channels such as ITV would be the right kind of audience for a thriller as it shows a lot of similar dramas such as 'Torn' that has previously been shown on ITV, it would need to be shown after 9 o'clock because this is the watershed period and would ensure that it would be viewed by a teenage/adult audience. The mise en scene of the thriller links to the target audience of ITV as it has a typical street, house and family which the audience can relate too. This could open opportunities for merchandising such as the thriller being released on DVD, or the sale of masks the same as the one used in our thriller for costume purposes. Also if we were to finish our thriller with the parents not finding the child, this cliffhanger ending could lead to a sequel. The style of our thriller is appealing to ITV consumers as the mise en scene creates a realistic atmosphere, we used costumes that mainly reflect those of ordinary life. Camera ang

les such as point of view shots and over the shoulder shots cause the audience to feel involved and creates a sense of immediacy for reactions.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The consumer of our product should be over the age of 12 in order to not cause any distress on the audience, the consumer also needs to be mature minded enough to understand the situation. When choosing an appropriate gender for our product it is more likely to be viewed by females as the technique of inflicting emotion and sympathy on the audience is more likely to be felt by females, as generically the are more emotional and sympathetic. The voice over through the fist minute of the product is voiced a woman, this causes a female audience to relate to the voice and become engrossed with the thoughts of the woman. However the building of suspense is appealing to a male audience as they typically enjoy a product that is exciting. Films such as 'Taken' are similar to our product and this similarly appeals to both males and females as it has different aspects that appeal an

d our enjoyed by each gender.

How did you attract/address your audience?

Our audience profile of women aged 12 and up would be attracted to our product through the emotional build up of our product. They will see similaraties in the characters of themselves and might find that the product brings them awareness of the dangers for the vulnerability of children. The part of our film where the child is in the kidnappers house would particularly terrify girls around the age of 12-15 as it would inflict emotion of how they

would feel if put in this situation. They would also feel this way in the part where it is apparent that the masked woman has been watching the family in the forest, this is shown through the point of view shot from the woman, and then the child is grabbed, this would cause the audience to feel involved. The audience is shown from the position of both the masked woman and the child, this creates sympathy for the child but also takes the audience inside the mind and reasoning of the masked woman helping them to understand the psychological parts of the thriller. This has a greater emotional impact on the audience as they know, but not necessarily agree with the masked womans reason for kidnap, the sympathy for her and the child causes the audience to feel confused and therefore reflects its psychological impact.

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

The camera equipment has proved difficult to use due to its short battery life when filming outside, however it is easy to transport. When filming we were faced with the problem of time, filming hours caused us to not have the right lighting for some parts of our film. We resolved this by using an effect called 'image mask' on final cut express which darkened the image and created the atmosphere of night. When using final cut express other effects such as 'wide time' created a blurred slow motion effect when the masked woman grabs the child, this caused the moment to be more dramatic as the wider time span creates more suspense, also as the image was blurry it creates importance of the moment to our thriller. The use of 'fade in' between shots helps create a sense of different place and time and makes the film flow.

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

The preliminary task helped us to gain practice in story boarding, it showed us the average time a shot should be in order to retain attention of the consumer. It also showed us how to develop characteristics that reflect a genre, for example a serious attitude must be shown through body language of a dominant character. It also gave us knowledge that the use of different camera shots and angles makes it more interesting and conveys different positions for the audience. I am now a lot more confident using the equipment after so much practice and i think we have conveyed enough camera skill to fulfill the original task. Our product could of been slightly improved with better organization.

Evaluation

Media Evaluation - Elliana Smith 12by

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? - To begin in developing our thriller film we focused on Alfred Hitchcock, and looked at his techniques such as 'building suspense' and the 'macguffin'. A macguffin is an item that seems important in a thriller, but really just carries on the plot. We liked this idea and incorporated it into our own piece using an image of a grave at the very start of our opening. By doing this, it appeals to the audience as a thriller but we do not see or hear about the grave again, the audience now want to carry on watching. We aimed for our product to be a psychological thriller and that was another reason why we used Alfred Hitchcock's techniques, as he specialized in that. This technique therefore indicates our choice of genre. We also wanted to build suspense, and had our antagonist wear a mask which hid her identity, not only are the audience intrigued to see who she really is, but they then associate the mask with a bad event about to occur.

Our idea for the mask was inspired by films such as 'Halloween' and 'the strangers'. Every time you see the character wearing the mask in the

film, you knew something bad would follow; the mask was also generally scary. Other films that inspired us for our piece was 'the silence of the lambs' and 'one hour photo', we took inspiration from 'the silence on the lambs' use of setting which was a woods and 'one hour photo' had a monologue at the beginning, we really liked this idea because it introduced the story without giving too much away, and also built suspense.

How does your media product represent particular social groups? - The social group of our film is white male and female of varied ages. Our piece could be seen as different from stereotypical thrillers as our dominant role (antagonist) is a women, and one of our passive characters is a man,

we balanced this factor out by having our victim as a girl. Although our antagonist is not stereotypical, our family is and gender is generic in terms of roles in the family. The dad is a typical business man, clothed in a suit and on the phone; the mum is presented as a housewife, not dressed well and in comfortable clothes. And the daughter is a girly girl with a bow in her hair and holding a teddy bear. By using a woman it is a more modern take on a thriller and this will be relevant to our target audience.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? - We never set our sights at having a product worth being produced by a Hollywood studio as the type of thriller is not appropriate for that market, not being very traditional. It may have come near to those standards however, if we had added more horror aspects into the product. It is a low budget film, most likely to be a TV drama similar to one called 'torn' a programme also about the kidnap of a young girl, but the intensity in our film more advanced. We would show it on ITV, this being a family channel but obviously shown at a later time due to its small aspects of horror, if we were to give an exact time probably 9.00pm where this could appeal to an older audience. There are possibilities for merchandising, if we were to add a cliffhanger to our film we could almost make the short film have sequels and therefore we could release it on DVD. There are also possibilities to merchandise the mask in the film, like they have done with the film 'scream', with the masks sold in the Halloween season. In terms of mise en scene, the mask is an unrealistic prop; however the visual style of our film would be realistic with an average street and house etc so the audience could relate to it, and be sucked in through the realism.

Who would be the audience for your media product? - Our target audience is for mix genders but a specific age group between 15- 25 year olds. This is due to the style of our film, which is clearly a more modern take on a thriller. The fact our gender's are not stereotypical and aspects of horror have been added to the film such as the mask, makes it immediately become untypical from traditional thrillers and therefore this element would appeal to the younger age. At the start we aimed to give it a 12 certificate, but as our story changed slightly and we researched certifications of films we felt a 15 certificate was more appropriate.

How did you attract/address your audience? -

When researching other thrillers, we found a build in suspense kept us as an audience more interested in watching the film, where we found ourselves posing questions such as 'what will happen next?'. The audience become aware that our antagonist is following Lily, and they anticipate what will happen to Lily and if she'll be okay. We'd hope that children would not be watching this, so we aimed to terrify our older members particularly those who are parents, by using a child as the victim . A mother or father can relate to this pain and relate to the fear of losing a child. In terms of suspense it is good to use a child because the anticipation of her safety is heightened because her vulnerability as a victim is raised due to her age. To highlight this, we used a point of view camera angle when Lily is alone in the woods so it looks as if she's being watched, she became far more vulnerable visually.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? - We didn't want to affect the time we had to film by being unfamiliar with the camera equipment. Although we had become used to them when filming our preliminaries we had still only used the very basic techniques and therefore practised some more complex techniques in our lessons of preparation. One of these videos shown on the blog which experiments with the focus of the camera. It helped that they were simple to use and put together and none of us had a trouble with that, we also had a tripod which meant we could pan and keep the camera stable. The camera only became a problem when it came to the battery in the equipment, which didn't last long. Filming time was taken over to charge the battery, and when filming in an outside location we had to ensure to get the right shot fairly quick, as if the battery ran out this would waste a lot of time. Luckily we didn't face too many issues with that and prepared exactly what would happen in the shot so there would be no mistakes and we could finish filming in that location quickly. As well as the camera's it was interesting to use other equipment. For our monologue we went to music tech to use the microphones, we also had to use an apple macintosh this a little more complicated than working a microphone. I had the advantage of having this software at home, however I was unfamiliar with final cut express and it was a first for all of my group members to use. We used some lessons to get used to the programme by editing old preliminaries, this saved us time when it came to our editing day as we already knew the basics. The editing software became extremely useful to us, as it had the ability to transform some of our more tense scenes and make them look far more effective enhancing the antagonist's power.

Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? - When creating our preliminary tasks we made storyboards, they were not very detailed but a plan of a few shots with basic camera angles. When making our thriller openings, we found our storyboard needed to be far more detailed and cover every single shot, with an exact camera angle, details on lighting and the length of the shot. We also had to plan in far more detail, research the genre (thriller) and examples of thriller films. By having this back round knowledge we would know what techniques to use and how to create the effect we wanted, we could also determine the difference between a thriller and a horror film. From when we did our preliminaries our shot types have certainly improved and I hope this is clear product. We explored into point of view and panning which is a simple technique but one we hadn't used before. I feel our end product was different to how we expected, some being good differences and some not so good, especially as we had high expectations. But with the use of effects on final cut express I believe we have fulfilled the task, from finding a suitable setting such as the woods, to how the scenes are laid out and the use of camera work to determine the antagonist and the protagonist. If we had been more realistic from the start, we may have had a better outcome but with this being a first time in filming a thriller product it was only normal to learn in the process of making it.

set

Our opening shot is of a grave stone that me and ellie created, we lit candles and placed them around it to create a mournful atmosphere. This establishing shot shows the audience the main theme of our film, being grief. This will also help the audience to understand our plot.

music throughout the film

we have changed our plot slightly and we are no longer using our original idea of 'msuic box' music, the track earlier posted, 'dark walk,' will now be used at the beggining of the film, and during the voice over. we are now looking for a piece of music that will create suspense in the last few shots as the intensity of the plot increases.

Time limit

Upon editing we will need to try to keep our film within 2 minutes. This means we will have to think carefully about what we will need to cut from the current film without affecting the story line. The easiest way to do this in my opinion is to cut small amounts of of clips where there is no dialog.