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.