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.