Thriller Evaluation - Natalie Sergeant

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In the thriller opening we wanted to stick with conventional methods that are used in traditional thriller movies of today. With research into other thrillers (as seen in this post) we where able to learn and develop forms that are used with real media products. We decided to use Todorov's theory of narrative and in the opening researched used a equilibrium such as Silent of the Lambs with a woods.

         

          

When looking at both our thriller and Silent Of the Lambs we wanted to have a environment that would be used often in their daily lives, Clarice having a job and our protagonist walking the dog. With the scene of a wood it gives the audience a uneasy feeling as woods are often connected to bad events occurring, even though we know with Todorov's theory in the introduction we are only introduced to the problem in the first step.

The forest implies more tension with the fog adding to the atmosphere making it harder to see and connects to the audiences confusion. We wanted to create a similar effect but knew it would be impossible to create a foggy atmosphere so we wanted to recreate the lighting used (as seen in this post). With the lighting and the setting we are using conventional thriller techniques in our own product.

To help achieve our final lighting effect to be more similar and have the atmosphere we deiced to add some post-production editing.

                               

The post-production editing we used was desturated color a similar effect has been used in Sin City. Though in Sin City this has been to esentuate the comic book style it also give a bleached out world with less colors, it makes the piece more serious.
                                       

                    

Another similarity between Sin City and our thriller is the use of restricted narration, that is a frequently used to create enigma to engage audiences within the thriller industry. Sin City used restricted narration as we don't know fully the relationship of the two characters giving hints but never the full story. This interests the audience to know what will happen next and always asking questions due to the characters kissing on moment and then the male shooting the woman next.

                                

We used this technique in our thriller as we never reveal to the audience what it is that the girl has found under the bridge and distraught her so much so creating enigma and forcing the audience to carry on watching to reveal the full story.In our thriller we wanted for our main character to be of a young age to hold the image of innocent. We felt that ever day clothing would be suitable for our actor that would be sensible for the setting they where being placed in. We looked into colors representation and see that white is more signified innocence so deiced that this would be a subtle color, such as Sin City with a red dress to show temptation.

            


             

 From the thriller opening we could see the representation of innocents by the thriller to be surrounded in bright colors of pink and white and having her hair down when compared to her mum with it up. We then experimented with different clothing and hair (as seen here).

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our main character that we selected for our thriller is a 11 year old girl that resides in the south of England in residential area. Her character is to represent innocents of that age as the color of her clothing, being white but also her body language and the use of high angle shots show a representation of young female characters being weak in thrillers. This innocents is used often to attract the sympathies of the audience but also to cause connection due to being of similar age. We researched into the representation of young females in thriller movies by looking at Lovely Bones and saw connections from our own thriller within it (as seen here).

Gender

Our character fits the stereotypical vales of femininity within thriller and seen in general values. This can be from her representation of vulnerability, such as at the end of our open we see the character crying, this is classed as a more emotional state as it is seen that men don't cry and is seen in a negative way but with women it is just assumed because of femininity.

In the beginning we decided to have these strong femininity values for our characters not just to represent the experience that the character has gone through or as they are seen a common characteristics make it easier for all audience to identify with the character due to assumptions but to the tackle these values later in the thriller. Due to seeing our character in such a weak and negative way in the begging it allows to combat these values later on within the thriller.

Age

Not only does our character being a girl help represent her as innocents but also age. We original planed to use an older actor but felt that this made it harder for the audience to feel sympathy and what to become protective. Also didn't want to young of a character so that the audience would be unable to relate to in some way.

Class and Ethnicity

A main factor of what class and ethnicity was due to the actor, we needed someone who could work well with in our own scheduled. With ethnicity a majority of people within the UK are of white British ethnicity so this might allow a better connection to the audience but over all the ethnicity was not a huge factor as any other ethnicity could of been used and not had a effect of the thrillers over story line.

This is the same as for class, our character is from a middle class homing as can be seen from the setting shoots and her clothing. Middle class is also the target audience that we are aiming our thriller at so by having a middle class character could make her more relatable and more sympathetic than other classes such as upper class.

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

Who would be the audience for your media product?

We decided on our target audience for out thriller to be in social classes B, C1, C2 and D. This range of groups is to attract more people to use their pleasure pond as cinemas is not too expensive. This chose is also because of the actor being within these class causing a relation between both.

Our targeted age group is from 14 to 24, as not only will be appealing due to the actor being of similar age but also because this age group is more interested in going to movies and has more free time to enjoy pleasure/social activities. Due to the age that we have decided the thriller will be a 15.

We will have a 50/50 split on targeting at male and female viewers, this is as traditionally thrillers are seen to be viewed more by male viewers, we notice from our research of Magic Magic that by having a young female protagonist is attracts more of a female audience (as seen here). 

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

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


7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

I felt that from the preliminary task we learnt a lot about not only filming but also being prepared more for filming. With the preliminary task we learnt to maintain continuity by using the 180 degree rule, shot revers shot and match on action.

I think that a technique that has strongly influenced us is the match on action that we learnt while doing the preliminary task. We shot a scene where it goes the the characters hand when opening the door. We then decided to recreate this same scene in our thriller. By trying this out first in out preliminary task we where able to understand how to keep that continuity by filming more of the scene that you are expected to use. Also not only concentrating on match on action from a viewing point but also sound, with the use of sound-bridges we where able to do another scene where jeweler is place on the table and the sound carried of through the clip.

Due to doing experimenting with these techniques in our preliminary task we where able to preform the with ease in our thriller opening from being able to practice it before doing it properly and finding the best method in creating the scene we wanted.

A faulty that we made when we where filming our preliminary task was to leave objects in the frame, these objects were our story board notes what we had left on the table and where only in one shot so it lost continuity. When editing we noticed this mistake so deiced to re-film the piece (as seen here).  By re-filming we had some difficulty in making the scene almost identical to keep continuity. I made sure not to make this mistake again in our thriller as we would have difficulty re-filming shots due to time. So by making this mistake in our preliminary exercise it made us more careful in making sure that unneeded objects where out of the frame.

Another mistake that we made with our preliminary task is that due editing changes to keep continuity our footage didn't reach the needed time of 1 minute as being only 33 seconds (as seen here). From this mistake we deiced that when doing our story board we will make sure that we go over the 2 minute time limit as some of the shoots may be shorter than we think. Also on filming to create more extra footage just in case it was need to make the whole 2 minutes that was needed.

Another skill that I have learned from the preliminary task is in using editing software of Final Cut Pro, as I had no experience in it before hand. By doing the preliminary it aloud for me to make mistakes and learn how to use and experiment with the software without to much worry such as being to cut shoots to also learning how to export the video onto the blog.

Evaluation - Ettie Greenwood

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge form of conventions of real media?

In my thriller opening, we used Todorov's theory of narrative as we started our opening with an equilibrium. Here the equilibrium was where the girl walks down to the woods and nothing seems wrong. The music soundtrack here doesn't have any crescendos and stays at the same tone. However the non-diegetc soundtrack does sound slightly eery foreshadowing later events. Therefore this abides with usual thriller conventions as an equilibrium is present at first and later on in the film/opening shocking events occur.

One of the openings that I looked at - Zodiac (2007) - uses Todorov's equilibrium technique as at first a couple seem to be taking an everyday drive to get some food, but the plot quickly reveals a sudden change in tone where both people get brutally murdered.

Thrillers also use restricted narration frequently in their openings to create enigma and engage the audience. When studying my thriller openings, I found this technique in the opening of the film: The Disappearance Of Alice Creed, where two men are seen to be creating a plan, but the audience do not know what this plan is, but can only guess through hints from the props that the characters use.

 Therefore after looking at this thriller opening, we decided to include the same techniques. By showing the girl looking at an object but never revealing to the audience what it is, this created enigma and was a form of restricted narration, forcing the audience to continue watching in order to reveal what the object was and the significance of it.

 

 What deciding on our lighting ideas, we looked at difference thriller films and chose one lighting situation which we liked and felt would be the most similar to our plans. Here is our blog post where we researched into different lighting set ups in thriller films: http://foundationportfolio1422.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/thriller-idea-all-of-us.html

 

Here is the lighting that we wanted to achieve in our thriller: 

 And here our lighting in our final product. I think that both lighting setups are fairly similar with the use of desaturated colour (post-production editing) therefore making the setups fit into the thriller genre well.





When deciding on the costume choices for our actor, we looked into typical clothing - an area of mise en scene-  that represented innocence. We wanted the event to seem unanticipated therefore we felt that dressing our actor in 'every day' clothes would be suitable, and of course they would have to be practical (wearing a coat and wellies). We then looked into colour representations and found out that white signified innocence, so we then decided our actor to wear a white jumper to subtly connote this. Here is our blog post where we discussed our costume ideas: http://foundationportfolio1422.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/costume-ettie-greenwood.html

These costume ideas can relate from the thriller opening that I analised: The Lovely Bones (2009) where the young girl wears typical child-ish clothes; red dungarees and a white top.

This clothing choice enforces the idea of innocence, along with the characters age - young- , but also contributes towards the equilibrium. This is where the thriller does not really seem of its genre at first but then the tone of the film quickly changes to a dark and shocking atmosphere.


 Overall, when planning our thriller opening, we carefully looked at the codes and converntions of thriller films, then applyed this knowledge when creating our own opening. This ensured that our opening fitted the thriller genre as closely as possible and would appeal/please to an audience who liked thriller films. 

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The main character in our thriller opening was an 11 year old girl, who comes from the south of England. She is believed to be innocent through her costume choices, her body language, and at the end of the opening she cries. This therefore is a true representation of young characters as she is presented as vulnerable and weak in the thriller opening. This may make the audience sympathise with the character therefore engaging them more in the events of the film. A high angle shot at the end has also been used to highlight her weakness and vulnerability after discovering the unknown object.

Gender 
In our opening we used a female character who fits the stereotypical values of femininity:

• She wears clothes which are typical of a 'girl' (jumper, leggings and a coat)
• She has long blonde hair.
• She looks like a 'typical girl'
• She is represented as vulnerable and innocent

By using these common characteristics of femininity, the audience can easily identify the characters gender and then use their existing knowledge to denote the assumptions of the gender.

The assumptions of femininity are sometimes negative though with labels attracted to the gender such as passiveness and vulnerability. Even though my thriller opening does use these traits, I believe that they are not represented in a negative way as the character is young, therefore justifying these assumptions.

The ending of the opening may follow some assumptions of femininity though as she cries and this is seemed as a normal thing for females to do. As if the actor had been male and been see crying, the audience could assume that he is a 'wimp' or 'feminine' as it is expected of males to be strong and to resist crying.

Age
As said before, the girl is represented as innocent through her youth. This therefore makes the audience feel sympathy with the character when she gets upset as 'she is only young'. When researching about age and gender representation in existing thriller movies, we looked at how the young girl was represented in The Lovely Bones (2009) as this representation of character was similar to our own thriller opening. Here is my blog post about it: http://foundationportfolio1422.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/gender-and-age-representation-in-lovely.html

Class and Ethnicity
The class and ethnicity of the character were decided due to pragmatics (who was available at the time). However the class of the character is similar to our target audience - social groups B to D - which is mostly middle class. This allows the audience to relate and engage with the character more as her actions will be familiar to them.

This is also the case with ethnicity where even though there is a wide variety of ethnicity groups in the UK, the majority of people are of the same ethnicity of the girl - white British -. However this does not make much of a difference as the girl is not represented in a positive or negative way, so if a different ethnicity was used, eg. black British, the same effect in the thriller would have been conveyed.

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

We have produced our film in the role of an independent British film company, therefore implying that our film has a low budget. Therefore we would only be able to find an indie distributor to work with us and our film. 

When looking at individual distributors, we discovered the vast range of small distributors and their specific genres that they cover. But in the end we settled for BBC to distribute our film. We chose the BBC because even though is is a big company, it also focus' on smaller films and aims to get a bigger fan base for them. An successful example of the BBC's work is 'Mrs Browns Boys' where the BBC started only showing it on non-peak times, but as the fan base started to grow, the show started to move more towards the peak times. It is now a very well known show. 

The BBC also distributes a lot of thriller films which connotes its' experience in the genre, while it also has experience with people of our target audience (15-24) as it has its' own channel BBC Three which has a similar target audience. Therefore if the BBC were going to distribute our film, we would also look into them displaying it on the BBC Three channel.

We will also exhibit our film on tablets and smartphones as a lot of people in our target audience age range use tablets on a daily basis. There has also been a huge increase in tablet and smartphone sales in the last few years as statistics show:

• In 2012 the sales of tablets rose by 98%
• The average number of TV's per household dropped from 2.03 in 2003 to 1.83 in 2013 (due to increased smartphone/ tablet sales)
• 63% tablet users watch live TV on their device 
• 5 million apple TV's were sold in 2012

These statistics support the view that tablet/smartphone's are used more often nowadays to watch film making it a good way to distribute our film. Therefore we would place our film on the apple, android and windows store to allow the film to be successful to all people in our target audience (due to different devices). We could even opt to put our film in for the iTunes 'movie of the week for 99p' which aims to promote up and coming movies, which is ideal for the situation we are in.

However, we would also like to show are movie in a cinema, where an Art House cinema - for example: Uckfield Picture House - would be most appropriate due to smaller funding. The film would also be digital as analogue film is not cost-effective and is heavy to transport. 

To advertise our film, (which is one of the most important processes to a films' success!) we would display our adverts on social media websites eg. Facebook and Twitter. This is because social media websites are used everyday by people in our target audience using the websites the most. Facebook also has the ability to center adverts around the target audience, meaning that our advert would only be shown to people in our target audience, or/and if someone had liked a film page where the film shown was another thriller with a similar target audience. This means that our advertising campaign would be cost-effective. 

We could also create a Facebook/twitter page where people could share our posts to make the audience seeing our posts larger and attract more people to watch the film. This is also the case in viral marketing where if the film got good feedback people would talk about it to their friends, making them go and watch it too. This form of advertising is also free! 

Finally, our film would be released on a Friday. This is because it is the start of the weekend, when after a hard week at school/work a person would look for a sense of escapism (uses of gratification theory) when watching a movie. However it is also a popular realise day for indie films where in the case that there was negative feedback for the film, people would not be able to tell their colleagues/peers about it until the following Monday by which then they would have forgotten. This allows indie films to hide negative feedback if occurring. But this does not include social media which is now a problem for this 'Friday theory'.

Overall I think that our distributing plans would be successful and would earn our film company lots of money through the correct ways of advertising and exhibition. This means that the greatest amount of profit earned would be available through ticket sales and movie downloads. 

4)Who would be the audience for your media product?

Before creating our thriller opening we defined a target audience for our opening to be aimed at. Here is a screenshot of a previous blog post where we defined our target audience: 

Click to view Target Audience Post

We also looked at an existing thriller film which had a similar target audience as the thriller we were going to create. This allowed us to look at what had been used in the thriller and we could use similar conventions in ours. The film that closely fitted our target audience was 'Magic Magic' (2014).

 

 By creating our target audience, we were then able to come up with thriller ideas which would suit and attract our desired audience.

5) How did you attract/ address your audience?

To work out whether I had done this or not, I created a survey asking people in my desired audience questions about the thriller film. I sent the survey to people via Facebook and asking them individually on Facebook messenger. 

These are the questions that I asked my target audience:

1. From watching the thriller opening, do you think that it targets male and females aged 15-24 suitably?

2. After watching the thriller opening, would you continue watching the rest of the film?

3. The synopsis (plot line of the film) is:
Our thriller story idea is about an innocent girl who gets caught up in something quite the opposite.
She leaves her house about mid-afternoon to walk her dog. She takes her usual route down her quiet road, through the twittens and forest paths, through the field into the woods. Although she takes this route more or less everyday, the woods seem more quiet than ever. The dog runs off and finds something in the stream, as she approaches she realises what it is.

The death of her parents is brought back to life as she rediscovers the events of what happened all those years ago by finding the only object that was left to her after her mother and father died (in the stream), that she was first lead to believe was due to a fire; the rediscovery of the object sparks a chain of events that enlighten her of the real reason behind her parents death.

After the rediscovery of this object, the young girl is lead into a dangerous rat race to find out her parents were murdered. And now the murderer is after her.

Do you feel this story line would interest you?

4. What do you like about the opening?
 
5. What areas of the opening do you feel need improvement?

6. What age rating would you give the thriller film?

7. Do you feel that you could relate/empathise with the characters' feelings in the opening, and how did you feel this was done?

8. Do you feel the young girl in the piece is seen as innocent, and how do you feel this is done?

9. If we had changed the main character to be older or male, do you think the same effect would have been achieved (innocence of the character). Please state your view and why?

10. Do you feel that the soundtrack (music) fits well with the thriller opening style and genre?

I then looked at the results and found out that:

• Most people thought that the thriller opening suited their target audience (15-24)
• Most people thought that the music was synchronous to the opening.
• There was some confusion of what the age rating would be (I think this is due to the equilibrium start, but later in the synopsis the film would become more suited to an older age group, hence the bbfc 15 age rating).
• The character choice (female and young) was effective - respondants thought that the sympathy/innocence would not be achieved if the character was male or older.
• All respondants would continue watching the film- This shows that our use of enigma and suspense engaged the audience successfully.
• The opening suited both males and females- as I asked a mixture of both sex's and 100% of people said that they would continue watching the film.

 

6) What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

For this question I have made a 'Prezi' presentation where the link to it can be found by clicking on the photo below:

7) Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

Before starting the preliminary task, or even the AS Media course, I had only a small knowledge on filming effectively and editing successfully. Therefore, the preliminary task acted as a learning step to help me achieve better results in my final thriller opening.

The task for the preliminary exercise was to maintain continuity by using techniques such as: the 180 degree rule and match on action. And we had to achieve this by filming a character walking through a door, entering a new room and exchanging a few lines of dialogue with another character. For this exercise my group decided to film one character walking through a door, and entering an interview room, whereby they would start to ask the interviewee questions and show them evidence.

For this, we had to learn how to create match on action effectively as we decided to cut to a closer shot of the characters hand while she was opening the door. To do this we had to carefully make sure the actor was opening the door in the same way each time and the shot was at a similar angle to the previous shot. We then also had to intricately edit the footage to achieve continuity. We also did this technique when the character was placing bags of jewellery onto the table. In both examples of match on action, we used sound-bridges to enable continuity to be most effective and learned how to do this on Final Cut Pro.

As we felt that this technique looked successful in our preliminary task, we decided to use the same technique in our thriller opening. We used the zoomed in match on action technique  when our character was opening the door to exit. By already knowing how to do this technique, I believe it made filming the technique in the final product easier and were able to make it even more accurate as we had already had a lot of practice.

 When doing our preliminary task, we had a slight problem where we didn't film enough footage to cover the 1 minute of footage that was needed (we only had 33 seconds worth). Therefore we ensured that when we planned our thriller opening, that we had storyboarded our timings more accurately and when we filmed, to film some extra footage if we didn't cover the whole 2 minutes that would be needed. We therefore learned from our first fault and this enabled us not to make the same mistake again in our final product.

Another fault that we made when doing filming our preliminary exercise was leaving unnecessary objects in the frame: In our prelim we left our story board notes on the table and accidentally filmed 1 shot with them in, not allowing continuity to be achieved. Luckily we spotted this and re-filmed so in the final piece, this mistake was not present. Here is the blog post we did about spotting and correcting the error:  http://foundationportfolio1422.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/clip-alteration-ettie.html

One of the main thing that I have learnt from the progression from the preliminary task to the final product is the use of my editing software - Final Cut Pro. Before the preliminary task, I had never used this editing software before so new vary little about how to edit. Therefore the prelim task acted a leaning curve and enabled me to learn about the software before creating my final product where I could then expand my editing skills further.

Overall I think that the preliminary task was a good way to develop my skills in filming a short piece, and enabled me to realise my first mistakes and make sure that they would not occur in the final product.