By Jasmine Pearson

Evaluation
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of media products?Generic conventions are the things that you think of when thinking of a certain genre, and can help to define that genre. In our film we use many of these. For example, in the scene where Lee Richardson discovers the bag, blood drops onto his cheek. The blood is a generic convention of a thriller/horror genre. Also our setting can be classed as a generic convention, because the woods is an isolated place, perfect for a killer to take their victims, and is also associated with thriller/horror films. In this sense or film is not challenging the typical generic conventions that are closely tied with the thriller/horror genre, but developing them. Our use of conventions does not really indicate what sub-genre our film is, so this is something that I would improve on if we were to do this again. Our use of conventions shows that similar thriller films have been an influence, mainly ones such as ‘The Shining’, ‘Blair Witch’ and ‘When A Stranger Calls’. The opening to ‘When A Stranger Calls’ is very similar to the opening of our film. Dead bodies are found at both starts of the films, so this is a similarity. Our film is also similar to this film because of its title sequence. The titles are on plain black screens with film in between them, and the titles in our film are set out like this. Also during the opening sequence of the film, a phone conversation is audible to the audience, and in our film a radio broadcast is played throughout our opening sequence, which are similar.










How does your media product represent particular social group?
Our film uses a syerotype to represent the teenage boys at the beggining of our film. They go into the woods and start drinking, which is something a lot of others view teenagers as doing, so in this aspect we are representing a male teenager in a sterotypical way. For the killer we go against the sterotype of a typical male killer, and in our film 'The Hanger' is a woman killer. Usually in films the killer is not a woman, so this is challenging the steroetype and I still think it works because it is unexpectd and thats what makes up a thriller film. One way we conform to a sterotype is by having the victims as teenagers. Usually the victims in thriller/horror films are teenagers, and you don't normally see an old lady being killed off in a film. We did this in our film because the teenagers add vunerabilty to the killings, making the audeince more shocked. Also our target audience is of a simular age to that of the teenage boys, so this would appeal more to our audience.

What kind of media Institute might distribute your media product and why?
Our film would be something that could be produced by a major Hollywood Studio. I had already researched into major film distributors, including Warner Bros, 20^th Century Fox and Universal. As a group we decided that Universal would be the idea distributor choice for our film because, it could promote our film to a widespread area globally, so that we have a better chance at success rate in more countries. Also it would be a good distributor choice because they also distribute a lot of thriller/horror films, including The Strangers, Wanted and The Unborn. It would be released on dvd and blue-ray, and available to purchase on iTunes. By widening our release range, we would create bigger profits, and enable our audience to enjoy the film in a variety of ways. With our film being a thriller film, there is not many opportunities for merchandising, as say there would be with an action or anime film.

Who would be the audience for your media product?
The audience for our film would be 15 – 30 year olds, of both genders. I think this age range is suitable because it is not a too big gap to target, but not too small that we would be cutting out possible audience. Also our film rating is a 15, so that is why our target audience must start at that age. Our full film contains a lot of thrilling/suspense senses and graphical horror images, such as the dead body that is hanging in the first scene. This is why we have picked the target audience we have. Any body younger or older would be disturbed by on un interested in this type of film. My group and I also decided on our target audience by looking at other similar films and seeing who their target audiences were. From the questionnaire we did on our film genre, the people who took our questionnaire had to state their age. We found that the majority of the people who said they liked all of the common features that were used in a thriller film were aged between 16-24, which also helped us decide on our target audience. Looking on the website http://www.bbfc.co.uk/general/ gave descriptions on what features are included in the age rating of films, and this helped us decide that our film was going to be rated 15.

How did you attract/address your audience?Our target audience was people of both genders, aged 15 – 30. This age group of people would be expecting something quite thrilling in a thriller film or else they would get bored of it. To try and make this true to attract them and keep their interest, we included a lot of point of view shots. This meant that the audience saw what Lee Richardson was seeing, and gave them a feel of being closer to the film, as if they were actually seeing this. If we were to film the rest of the film and not just the first 2 minutes, we would have included a lot of close up shots. This creates suspense and increases the thriller effect because the audience can not see what is around the victims, and cannot see until the very last moment is someone was to attack them. Also throughout our film you never see our killer’s face. This unknown element increases the thrill of the film, because people are scared by not knowing who are people is. We included these techniques to create a good thriller that would be interesting and thrilling enough for our audience.

What have you learnt about technology from the process of constructing the product?
As we were filming our second scene in a woods, the ground was very uneven and it was very useful that the tripod included a spirit meter that enabled you to adjust the tripod legs so that the shot was straight and not at a canted angle. Final Cut was the editing software we used to edit our film. During this process I learnt how to import film onto the Mac and into Final Cut, then drag into the film bar and trim it and rearrange the order. I also learnt how to separate the sound of the film so that it could be dragged out and cross faded to smooth out the sound. One problem we had during the editing was that we had made a mistake when filming and shot our first scene in widescreen and our second scene we didn’t. We resolved this problem by enlarging the first scene shots so that it then played over all parts of the screen. This cropped off the sides off the film slightly but did not crop off anything important and looked a lot better compared to our second scene of filming afterwards. In the editing process is where we added our radio broadcast to the beginning of our film as well. We recorder the broadcast ourselves and then uploaded it onto Final Cut and dragged it over where we wanted it to be placed. We found that there was a useful effect where we could change the texture of our voice over broadcast to make it sound more like something off the radio.


Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the procession from it to the full product?
I learnt that the planning stage of making our film was very important. When presented with the task, the first thing we decided to do was to discuss and mind map our different ideas. This was useful in deciding upon an initial idea, because we could separate each idea into a genre, beginning middle and end, among other things, so it made it very clear and easy to decide. After we had decided we were doing a thriller film we researched into that genre. We watched clips from other thriller films and analysed them. This helped us identify what common features were used in thrillers. We then tried to include these features in our film to get the same feel. We created detailed storyboards and shot lists, which helped us know exactly what shots we needed to capture and then the order to edit them in. This process was very smooth and we had few difficulties because of this detailed planning. Nancy and I took turns in filming the scene in the woods while Joseph and Daniel were acting. While using the camera I found that because I had rarely used this type of camera, I took some time getting use to how to operate it. By the end of the almost 3 hours we filmed, I was a lot more confident operating the camera, and knew exactly how to change the tripod to enable us to pan, tilt, and adjust to the right height to get low and high angle shots. I think I also improved with my knowledge of specific shot types, particularly point of view shots which we included a lot in our woodland scene. A lot of the shots were from the point of view of Lee Richardson so we had to make sure these matched the shots previous so that everything looked right. I feel that one thing I could improve my understanding of is the 180 degrees rule. I understand the basic concept of it, but do not feel I would be confident enough applying it without advise from others. So this is what I will put more focus on learning in the next project like this I have. Overall I think our end project fulfils our preliminary task and is quite successful. There a few things that I think could be improved if we were to do this project again, but I am happy with our outcome. I think our group had good initial research and smooth editing, combined with good non-diajetic sound. To get another point of view on the success of our film, we did an audience feedback, where we asked a number of people from our target audience questions and they commented on our film.

http://www.youtube.com/user/NJJDProductions#p/u/0/wACEI2abRJ0

In the video linked above, most of our audiences comments were positive. They commented mostly on the setting of our film, and the music, saying that the music fit the genre of our film, horror\thriller well. They also commented saying that we included good camera shots, and we had good continuity editing. See the full comments in the link above.