EVALUATION OF THE FINAL PRODUCT

By Michael NewellMedia Group 7

WBS 7 Productions

Forms and Conventions Our Product is a horror/thriller set during the twilight hours.

The opening sequence is set during the twilight hours when the sun is very low in the sky. A fairly typical convention of horror movies is the setting at night time during the hours of darkness. The reasons we chose to shoot during the twilight hours were because the low sun cast longer, and more eerie shadows whilst allowing us to use silhouettes of our antagonist to inspire fear and suspicion in our target audience.

Another typical convention of both horror and thriller movies was to make our antagonist and elusive character. We did this by the use of a simple home made mask which wore a blank and expressionless facial expression and a plain black suit which was unbranded. Masks are often used in horror and thriller movies because it raises questions such as, why is he wearing a mask? What does he have to hide?

Forms and Conventions A fairly typical convention of horror movies is to build

up tension before revealing the antagonist. Being a two minute opening sequence we were unable to wait before revealing our antagonist so we chose to use a mask as a way of hiding the true identity of our antagonist. We also wanted to have the audience question the actual existence of the antagonist, we achieved this with the use of the scene with the therapist and also shots such as the antagonist dividing into two and the small sequence when he pulls off Daniel’s jacket. The idea of this effect was to make the viewers wonder if the antagonist was only a figment of Daniel’s imagination.

Forms and Conventions Theme tunes are often fairly similar between horror

movies in that they have slow and dramatic changes in tempo and pitch. Although we decided not to use a specific theme tune, the sounds we did followed the conventions of typical horror movies such as high pitched noises and short musical scores with different tempos.

We used several point of view shots which are often used in horror movies during moments of tension and excitement. These effects were notably used in “Cloverfield” and “The Blair Witch Project.” We wanted to use a variety of different shots rather than just this though, as it is in both of the above and so we only used this type of shot twice.

Representation The protagonist in the opening sequence is a

character named Daniel. I feel that after the amount of time we spent developing Daniel as a character.

We always wanted Daniel to be a social drop out type of character. Through much consideration and design of the costume of the character, we were able to portray him as the type of person who wouldn’t be popular or in other words… “cool.” We achieved this by making him wear old dirty jeans with unbranded old trainers and a faded t-shirt with an unbranded hoodie. We wanted Daniel to be like this of course, because he is paranoid.

Representation Daniel represents a paranoid person in that he is

obsessed with his adversary the scarecrow. Daniel’s obsession with the scarecrow is the overruling priority in his life which is the reason we portrayed him as a social outcast.

Daniel’s obsession is the most important thing in his life and therefore things like having a social life, education and caring for his appearance take a back seat in his life. I believe that Daniel is an accurate representation of a paranoid person in that his obsession with the antagonist is all he seems to care about.

Media Institutions I believe that our product would be published by a

smaller company such as Pathé. I believe this because our film would be aimed at a

much more niche audience and so it would cost less money to reach the target audience.

Methods of reaching the niche audience would be largely internet based like the advertisement boxes on MSN and on websites such as Facebook and Bebo. Other methods of advertisements would be posters on bus stops and in train stations, late night advertisements past the watershed because of the nature of the film and the target audience.

Target Audience Our target audience is very niche and specific. The questionnaire we did told us that the popular target

audience ranged between 16-22 year old males. Although a significantly smaller amount of females took the test, we grew to understand that only few of them out of the majority were likely to watch our film.

Because of the nature of our film, we decided that the rating would be a 15 so all target audience would be able to view the film.

We concluded that because of the age range of our film, the types of people who would watch our film were students and young workers who simply wanted to go out for a good time after a long week of education and work.

Target Audience We also concluded that the types of people to

watch our film would also belong to the middle class and working class. (Yaks also)

Our product was open to people of all ethnic backgrounds because it doesn’t offend any cultures.

I believe that our product is aimed more at the explorer type people and also partially to mainstream and strugglers. I believe this because it is not a film that mainstream or strugglers could relate to whilst explorers would watch it simply to get scared or to have fun.

Reaching The Target Audience Our protagonist of the opening sequence, Daniel,

was one way of reaching our target audience. Daniel was supposed to be between the ages of 15-18, and the target audience being of a similar age would be able to relate to him.

We also took Daniel from a middle-class family and middle classes were who we were pitching our product at.

In some parts we used the same camera style as those from The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield as an intertextual reference to both films hoping that people who had enjoyed these films would want to view our own.

Technology.

From

To

During the production of our final piece, I had to come toTerms with the schools cameras. Although I didn’t do a lotOf the filming myself, I still found it useful to understandHow it worked.

This of course worked out to be a waste of time becauseThe school decided to purchase the new HD cameras soI got to learn how to do it all over again. The HD camera’sProduced a much better quality and did the same as the Cameras we had previously yet they were somehow muchHarder to use. Also, I didn’t dare press any weird buttonsIn case I broke it so I never really found out the fullPotential of these cameras.

TechnologyThis year our media studiesDepartment managed to Purchase Mac book pro appleLaptops which were very handy.

The laptops were very simple to use and they provided us with better resourcesThan our media department had ever had for use in our coursework. One of these Resources being garage band. Garage band allowed us to create our own Theme tunes for our product and although we initially struggled with the task,We were able to make our own and also find various sound effects which wouldEnhance the mood of the product.

I personally was no good at garage band althoughI understood the basic concept of the software and how toUse it I was not so good at producing anything of any use inOur product.

TechnologyFinal Cut express was a complex and very unique editing software to that of which I had accustomed myself to in the past. (largely Windows Movie Maker.) It took a lot of time before I was used to this software although once I had mastered the basics I found that the software became progressively easier to use.

I believe that Final Cut express

was a very useful piece of software as it

made the cropping and

cutting of clips much easier

than Windows Movie Maker.

There were also a lot more

effects and different things which we could

do to further enhance our

final piece which wouldn’t have been available

on Windows Movie Maker.

Progression From Preliminary Task

Our final product is much better than the preliminary sequence for a number of reasons.

Firstly. We approached the task in a much more organised fashion. In our first draft we filmed in the library and so we ensured a week before that we had permission to film there. Opposed to our preliminary sequence in which we didn’t check for permission and in fact just picked a room to film in that was empty. During the preparation for our final product we spent a lot of time location spotting and preparing in general for the shooting.

For the shooting of our final product we were also careful to follow the storyboards much more thoroughly because during the filming of our preliminary task we didn’t follow our storyboards and as a result the final quality of the Preliminary task was poor.

Progression From Preliminary Task

We used a tripod to support our camera because in our preliminary task, we didn’t use a tripod. It turned out that the quality was much better when the camera was still. We were also clumsy in the preliminary sequence in that we had a jump cut. We were very careful to avoid making jump cuts as well as avoiding cutting dialogue short as we had done accidentally in the preliminary task.