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.