Evaluation - Janith Perera

Evaluation Activity 1

In what ways do your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products (i.e. of film openings)

Here are 9 still frames for our thriller opening.

From top left to bottom left the frames are:

1) The production logo.

2) The distribution logo.

3) Shot of setting and idea of location.

4) Mid-Shot of protagonist.

5) Protagonist holding weapon with 'blood' stained on the weapon.

6) Names of the victims.

7) Producers credits.

8) Protagonist approaching the victim.

9) The title 'Closed Doors' fades in as protagonist is just about to hit victim.

Evaluation Activity 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our antagonist, who was played by myself, negatively represents teenage males in our thriller film opening as I am represented as a violent murderer. We conformed to the stereotype of male teenagers being violent, aggressive and cruel as at the end of the opening we get the feeling that I am about to kill another woman. 

Our protagonist was specifically chosen to be a male character. It adds a sense of dominance to the character, which is contrasted with the female victim.

A male character conforms to a villain, as a general stereotype to men is that they are more powerful and intimidating than a female. This as a result adds a mysterious atmosphere to the overall antagonist. The social group represented in our thriller opening is age. The age of our protagonist is representing the age range of 17-20. We found that using an actor around the age group of 17-20 that it would be easier to relate to younger adults/teens.

The dark lighting in the garage may also tell us a bit more about the personality of myself the antagonist. The fact that the lighting is dark may indicate to the audience that I am dangerous because in the dark it is hard to see what is happening and in this particular event in the opening there is a murder and this tells the audience that he is a violent and dangerous person.

Evaluation Activity 3

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

In my opinion distributors would be interested in our thriller film because it is a classic thriller film that everyone enjoys, it builds up a lot of suspense and would leave the audience on the edge of their, which is what a thriller is supposed to do. Also due to the fact that the protagonist's face is not shown it will make it a mystery for the viewers as they will want to know whom it is.

One distributor that we think could be interested in investing in our film is New Line Cinema as they have distributed a few thriller films similar to our one such as "Seven" which is also about a murder. The film "Seven was also very successful meaning that New Line Cinema should be interested in distributing our film as they will want the similar amount of success that "Seven" gave them.

Evaluation Activity 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

For our target audience of our thriller opening, as a group we collectively decided that the audience we would be targeting would be at the age of 15-25 year olds who would be mainly males however females too. Therefore we decided to have a film certificate of 15+. The age rating for our film is a 15 meaning that anyone aged 15 and over will be able to watch this film.

We decided that the age certificate should be 15 because from my audience research (questionnaire) that I conducted from my planning for our opening, I found that most peoples’ favourite sub-genre was action and crime and the majority of participants were aged 16-20. In addition to make our thriller more realistic and intriguing for the audience we for example used blood to convey many thriller conventions we knew that would not be appropriate for a younger audience to see.

Some key thriller conventions we knew we needed to make sure we included in our thriller opening to attract our audience were:

•   A good story (an intriguing plot to endure the audience in to watching the film)

•   An action-packed opening chapter (the introduction of a good thriller always sets the pace for the rest of the film)

•   Keep the audience questioning to what is happening and what is going to happen

•   Attractive, visuals are clear and look intriguing to audience

•   Intriguing sound effects (Non-diegetic sound to build up the suspense)

Evaluation Activity 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

We used a simple idea that all films use around the world, which is a poster.

We looked at a variety of thriller posters to help with our ideas; this poster was created with Microsoft word. Our target audience is the young demographic, specifically ones who are 15 and older. Our surveys helped decide this as most 16-26 year olds enjoyed thriller films.

I believe posters are extremely important in attracting an audience as this is the first thing they see and the first thing that stays in their mind about the movie, so it extremely important that we spend time on this.

Posters create anticipation for a movie, it catches their attention and makes them want to find out more about the movie. Word of mouth also helps with this.

Evaluation Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Here is a list of equipment we used to film our opening-

·      Canon DSLR 65D

·      Tripod

·      Rode Microphone

·      Types of lighting

Canon DSLR 65D-

·      The camera is small and portable, perfect for small projects such as ours, it was very easy for the cameraman to handle this and easily move it around.

·      Once you get into the menu it is quite easy to work out what you need to do to get started and film.

·      We could change the focus from automatic to manual, which suited our project as we could add many blur effects perfect for a thriller.

·      Although the camera was easy to use, there were many advanced features that we could not use as there wasn’t enough time to learn all of it therefore we could only use the basic knowledge we knew.

·      Also, the camera battery life was quite short even when fully charged, which meant we had to be good with our timing when filming.

Rode Microphone-

·      This microphone could be easily attached to the top of our camera.

·      The sound was of a very high quality, which made the opening sound more professional.

·      Although the quality was good, the microphone picked up small sounds in the distance too, which meant it had to be cut out when we edited it.

Types of lighting-

·      We used a variety of lighting, which worked well with our thriller, as our aim was to produce a lot of shadows.

·       Our lighting helped just show parts of the face and it ended up being very effective, as we did not want to give too much about our antagonist away.

·      Even though our aim was to produce many shadows, we were worried that the lighting would produce too much and not be effective which meant we had to be careful in how we angled our lighting as well as making sure to not bring the lighting too close.

For our editing we used a number of different programs such as-

·      iMac

iMac-

·      The iMac has a variety of different programs, which meant we had a number of programs available to edit with.

·      We could access our blogs using the iMac.

·      There is an auto-save option available, which meant the work we forgot to save, was saved for us and we did not lose any important work.

·      The iMac doesn’t have a very good memory space so we met quite a few problems, due to the bad memory, the programs often ended up crashing.

·      The iMacs allowed us to access Final Cut Pro to edit our thriller openings. It is an advanced software with a number of features available.

Evaluation Question 7

Looking back at your preliminary task. What do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Pre-Production-

Firstly we worked on our preliminary task, we were not given that much time to plan it so we had to come up with a suitable idea that was quick but interesting. On the other hand we had around 2 weeks to plan our thriller opening, which gave us enough time to plan properly and produce something that reflects our knowledge.

For our thriller opening we were only allowed to film on the school premises, which didn’t give us a variety of places to film. Whereas for our thriller opening we were allowed to film anywhere, which helped a lot as we could produce the thriller effect we wanted.

With our preliminary task we could only use props that we had in school, which was not a lot.  For our thriller opening we had a variety of props we could use from, but a simple hammer, hoody and fake blood was enough for us.

Also with out thriller opening we had different types of lighting such as LED hand held lights and LED lights for the camera. This helped us to produce shadows and create a scary effect, but on our preliminary task we had no professional lighting.

Production-

For our preliminary evaluation we only had around 50 minutes to film, which meant that we had to be quick and avoid mistakes to not waste time. Whereas for our thriller opening we had around 2 weeks to get it filmed however we filmed for about 5 hours. Having the longer time to film meant that if we made any mistakes then we had time to correct them. We had time to take further shots if any shots didn’t turn out how we wanted it to.

Before we started filming for our thriller opening we had to do a number of things. Firstly we had to make sure that the antagonist looked like a murderer we did this by making him wear a black hoody, we also had to write all the names on the walls and we had to get the woman in position. Whereas for the preliminary task we had hardly any time meaning that we wouldn't have been able to get all these things ready.

For our thriller opening we had around a week to film meaning that we could wait for the weather to be perfect. In our case we had to wait for it to be a rainy day as this adds to the thriller effect.

Post Production-

For our preliminary task we were able to use Final cut Pro but it was extremely difficult as we did not have that much experience and knowledge on the program, also we only had one lesson to finish editing and upload it. This helped our final product though, as the basic knowledge from the preliminary task helped us understand and know what to do.