Media evaluation
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
My media product was to create the opening sequence to a thriller film, to do this I had to understand the genre by researching its origins, studying its films and understanding its target audience, the genre can be broken down into many sub genres including sci-fi thriller religious thrillers and action thrillers, the likes of Hitchcock are considered the father of the genre.
The thriller genre is one of the oldest genres in film history, it is easy to recognize with it’s distinct forms and conventions, it’s use of fast editing and cross cutting, close ups, a dramatic score and low key lighting such as in films like James bond 28 days later psycho London to Brighton and the saw films. Its use of femme fatal and criminals, all associated with the genre. Which is considered to be fathered by Alfred Hitchcock with use of femme fatales and pleonastic sound such as in Psycho. These clear conventions made it easy to create a film based on the thriller genre but instead of making a classic thriller we have challenged the conventions with the use of a female antagonist. We was encouraged by a number of thriller films and directors, notably Alfred Hitchcock, his use of editing and characters greatly helped to create my film, the Bond films also helped, it’s use of dramatic scores helped me to create tension as well as helping to create an enigma in the film. Compared to the typical big budget American thriller our film is clearly more British due to the clearly low budget and use of unknown actors. In our opening sequence a dramatic score starts from the very beginning, the heavy score creates tension from the start feeding into the use of low lighting, we see cross cutting in the opening scene typical of a thriller film, as well as this we see an enigma from the start as it is not clear how the antagonists father has died and who his murderer is. We chose the classic thriller genre because we were inspired by Alfred Hitchcock and we met his typical codes and conventions through the use of characters such as femme fatales, but we did challenge the conventions of the male antagonist by using a female one. The narrative follows the codes and conventions set up a lot of enigmas which means the audience has to watch the whole film to for the answers. We used a religious sub genre where the question of religion appears constantly creating questions such as in the Da Vinci code. Using a dramatic score for tension,
How does your media product represent different social groups?
Our media product challenges how social groups are presented especially that of females, my film shows that women can be as ruthless as men, not the usual stereotype of women, especially young women whose father was a priest. We chose to do this deliberately to challenge the stereotypes as we had the conventions of the genre. The antagonist starts off as an innocent girl a common stereotype for young females but as the film develops her ruthless side is revealed and the audience experience the conventions of the thriller being challenged as we watch her develop into a murderer, another way we challenged the social groups was age, the antagonist is very young which is not typical of killers, a part of the inspiration for this was the film Hannibal Rising which uses a young boy as the antagonist. The other female in our film is a young prostitute who we see drinking and smoking, what the audience is presented with is a common belief that many women solicit themselves to fund their habits and this remains the same here. The final social group we see is religion in particular Catholicism and how religion drives our antagonist to murder rather like the crusades, this goes against the typical beliefs people hold against the beliefs of religion.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Our film is an independent and not a normal big budget Hollywood movie with star casting and amazing special effects, in contrast an independent film is made on a low budget with poor quality equipment and unknown actors. It’s easy to see my film is independent as we only have to compare to the big Hollywood mainstream films such as Lord of the Rings and mission impossible, by casting a list celebrities it brought a large amount of attention to the film which doesn’t happen it an independent film, the locations are limited in independent films as we may not get permission to film compared Lord of the Rings where Peter Jackson had the use of the entire New Zealand countryside as well as very expensive made sets and CGI.
Independent films tend to have different points in their film compared to mainstream Hollywood blockbusters, usually dealing with challenging social issues such as narcotics, soliciting and homosexuality as in films like London to Brighton and Trainspotting.
The best way for my film to be noticed so it may be distributed is to start at a small independent film festival, this could lead to the funding I would need to have my film put in the cinema, a example of an independent film festival I could show my film at is Sundance film festival in the united state http://festival.sundance.org/2010/
this is because the product created is a low budget independent British film that most likely be first viewed at a short film festival before being picked up by a television company thinking it could fill a good hour slot other two nights at nine o’ clock. This is because compared to a mainstream film it is very low budget, there are no big name Hollywood stars, special effects etc, with good advertising it could attract a large audience other a number of nights and bring in a lot of money for the television company. If it is not picked up by a television company it will most likely be put on the internet, in particular YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiKj5pf3S-w&feature=player_embedded) or possibly an independent film site such as the independent film channel www.IFC.com. Some cinemas may show it such as the electric cinema or the everyman cinema.
Who would be the target audience for your media product?
According to target audience research and planning the target audience would be aged between 15-35, we made it a priority that the storyline was accessible to both teenagers and adults alike.
The audience for our media would be in the 15+
according to BBFC ratings, this is because there is a large amount of violence and the plot is complicated and it’s believed that anyone younger would struggle to understand the plot. Due to this the murders which take place it is a 15, it’s not an 18 because there is no sex or swearing. The BBFC stated that “may include reference to sex and violence as long as the film does not dwell on the infliction of pain” so our film fits into 15 age rating. http://www.bbfc.co.uk/
How did you attract/address your audience?
We constructed the film to make it relevant to our target audience (15-35) by studying a number of films including psycho, 28 days later and a number of Bond films. This helped us see what thrillers use in the conventions, such as use of scores and close ups, low key lightning. We included conventions which appealed to our target audience which included an enigma and murder, which appeals to the target audience. By using young actors the audience can relate to the characters, the sub genre is religion which at first glance would probably put the audience off in particular the youngest elements of our target range but it adds a great deal to the storyline, we didn’t challenge any of the conventions as we felt it would be far too much of a challenge to achieve in an opening sequence. our audience feedback was very good an extremely helpful,
overall it was very well received which meant the few complaints we received we was able to confront and deal with such as lengthening the score during the opening sequence, as well as this on YouTube I received a number of comments stating that the female scream during the opening sequence could be louder and that the opening credits could be made more clearer to read. As a result of this feedback we changed aspects of the film to improve its final edit. We specifically included the enigma so that we could make the audience guess who murdered her dad, how it happened and if there was a motive for it.
I have learnt a lot about technology in creating this film, the use of the internet through research in creating my film was one key aspect, we used it to research the conventions of the thriller genre watch several films that were beneficial to our product
We could download music for our film as well,
The use of editing programs were highly educational to me, the camera used to record is another example of technology I encountered. The technology influenced the film in several ways, thankfully due to the internet I was able to find copyright free music to use on the film otherwise I would have to of created my own pieces for the film, I was also able to find sound effects on the internet which helped further in creating a real film. Also the internet allowed for audience feedback which was highly useful in helping create the final piece. The use of non-linear software was extremely helpful in creating my product, being able to film scenes non chronologically would have meant our film would make no sense but due to the software of I Movie we was able to edit it so it flowed well and used the typical Hollywood style of continuality editing. Our final product is identical to our storyboard as our main aim in filming was to keep to the storyboard as much as possible. The use of Mini-Divi camcorders made our film look more real whereas celluloid gives a rather unreal shine to it that makes it seem very fake. The camera caused a number of limitation as well, due to it’s poor microphone located inside the camera it was not very good at picking up sound and as there was no external microphones to use it meant there was little room for dialogue, the lighting was hard to control as there was no lightning crew, so if we wanted a dark setting it required us to film at night which posed difficulties as the camera was poor at recording at night making it hard to see anything. This lead to a lot of improvising such as using high watt bulbs to create a brighter room or placing black paper over windows to make it darker.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
Looking back at my preliminary task I feel I have learnt a lot over the course of time, at the preliminary task we suffered a number of problems the first being it was the first time we had used a camera and so had to learn to use it, a key issue was we had not planned our film so finding the location of our set was hard, we also had to record dialogue which was where we first encountered sound problems. We learnt a number of important things from this task, planning was key to success and so when it come to our film we made sure the planning was as detailed as possible, recording sound was hard so we decided to include few bits of dialogue and the majority of dialogue we included in our film was recorded separately and added in. Our storyboard was done by a very good artist so that we could clearly see our plan. We learnt to improvise with lighting and mise en scene in general. The clothes and makeup chosen was used to emphasize the point being made in that scene. The script was written and then edited to be as well written as possible. We researched the locations for the scenes of our films and made sure we knew when they were free and when we could use them, how we could manipulate the set through lighting. I also found that I took a very focused role in the preliminary task as I spent a lot of time on the camera, but found that I worked much better behind the camera, filming, preparing the set, this I feel helped make my film better.
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