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

In the opening of Brick there is a scene where a girl is laying on the floor, presumably dead and the camera focuses on her arm which has bracelets on it. The scene then changes to the same arm reaching to put a note into a locker. This influenced our media thriller as to begin with we were going to do the same sort of thing but with a ring. This idea developed into our lead female finding a ring and then the scene changes to a flashback where the same ring is seen again

being given to our missing girl.

Other thrillers we studied were The Book of Eli (2009), Gothika (2003) which is technically a horror, Sin City (2005), No Country for Old Men (2007), The Lovely Bones (2009) and Body of Lies (2008).

All of these films helped to influence our decisions when making our film as they helped to make us more familiar with the thriller genre. The Lovely Bones and Brick influenced our choice of characters as both include young and innocent teenagers as main characters or victims and so our main characters and victims were also innocent and ordinary female teenagers. We also applied this when it came to costume as our victims would wear ordinary clothes and our villain wears dark clothes as this makes him seem more mysterious.

The other thriller films we watched and studied influenced our media film in different ways. Most of the things we paid attention to were the use of suspense and music to invoke a creepy and tense atmosphere. Gothika helped us to understand how a horror film is different to a simple thriller

film and so made it easier to create a typical thriller film instead of a sub-genre of thriller.

When looking at lighting we decided to use contrast between two types of scenes. The dark red lights from the darkroom contrast the dull light of the house and show the difference between the two characters. The dark light reflects the danger of the villain and the ordinary light reflects the ordinary victim. We also wanted to use a range of camera angles to make our film interesting but we didn't want to make it look silly and we didn't want it to seem like the camera was moving around lots and people could get confused. I believe we used a wide range of camera angles and managed to show what we have learned in our media course. We took into account what would look interesting when filming and tried to use match-on-action as effectively as possible such as the shot where the victim goes into the house and when the victim picks up the ring.

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

In our film we have represented two main social groups through our villain and our victims. We have two victims in our film and both are young and female, a typical victim used in thriller films as females usually appear as a damsel in distress. This was decided after watching The Lovely Bones and Brick as both were effective thriller films and both had teenage girls as the victims. Females are also usually stereotyped as the more

vulnerable sex and so are more convincing when it comes to being a victim. They are more convincing as a victim as stereotypically males play more dominant roles and come across as strong and powerful, there aren’t many thriller films where the victim is male. The victims are also both around the same age, same height, body build and hair colours which

create a stereotyped victim in our film; this is also enhanced by the images at the end of the film where all of the photos are of the same type of teenage girl. We wanted to give the impression of our villain having a 'type', this idea sprouted from watching The Lovely Bones where the villain only murdered young girls.

We have represented the villain in our thriller as a large frightening figure. We don’t show his face or any defining features as we wanted our villain to seem mysterious. This would make him seem scarier if you’re not entirely sure what they are or what they look like. An example of this in a thriller film could be Paranormal Activity (2010) where the villain (a demon) in the thriller is never shown and it is almost as if they are being taunted by nothing. In our thriller you can only see parts of the villain and his body is mostly hidden in shadows. The shadows and dark lights also reflect danger as does the red light. The person we chose to play our villain fits most stereotypes of a villain as he is tall and stocky which makes him big and scary, and the fact that he is stocky makes him seem more powerful, this contrasts the villain as they were quite thin and don't look very powerful.

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

The kind of media institution that might distribute our media product could be websites such as You-tube, social network sites and maybe even games consoles. You-tube is a good media institution to start with as millions of people go on You-tube every day and watch all different kinds of videos. We also uploaded our draft cuts of our film onto You-tube and got lots of different feedback which would be helpful to us trying to promote a new film. You-tube is also a good indicator of whether or not the film would be liked as from You-tube you can see how popular your video is. Social network sites such as Facebook would also be a good place to put our film as we could send it to our friends who are all around the age group we are targeting and get feedback on what they think of our film.

If we then got good feedback and a good reaction for the film then we would think about taking our film to a production company such as

Dreamworks who have done other thrillers like The Lovely Bones. If we had good feedback from people we were targeting then we would be able to know that there is a gap in the market for our film. We could also go to more of an independent film maker such as Vulcan Films or DNA Films as a less famous film company is more likely to make a film which comes from new people in the industry.

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

The audience for our Media product is predominantly from ages 15-19 but can target a slightly older audience also. This audience cannot be too much older as adults tend to enjoy more drama filled, serious films and are not as into thriller films as teenagers according to our research. Our audience would be both male and female as we would like to reach out to a large audience within our age range. We believe we target both a male and female audience as both males and females enjoy being frightened, males also enjoy more action films as we found from our screening feedback and teenage females would be able to relate to the victims in our film.

The audience we are targeting may enjoy films such as The Book of Eli, Kick Ass and Sin City as these are also targeted at a large age range, teenagers being one of them, especially with Kick Ass which appears to be a typical superhero film aimed at teenagers but also has some strong themes within it. Brick is also a film which is targeted at teenagers which helped choose our age range as Brick was a large influence on our film and one of our main ideas came from it.

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

We used different ways to attract and address our audience in our thriller. One of the main ways was by making the main victim relate-able to by

teenagers and mainly teenage females. We wanted to make the females watching think 'that could be me' and relate to the main character. Male teenagers can also relate to one of the characters who are in our film at the beginning for a short time but if we were to make the whole film this character would be in it a lot more than the first few shots.

I believe that our non-diegetic sound is the most effective in attracting and keeping our audience. In our rough cut survey we got feedback saying every person who filled out our survey thought our sound was either good or great. I believe that our sound is very effective in keeping our audience hooked as we have used it to build tension as at the beginning the music is very somber and almost saddening but when the film gets to where the victim realizes she is in a murderers house the music begins to get more sinister and tense and so helps the film to show what is going on. The scream and heartbeat sound at the end of our opening also create tension and the scream also at times made the viewer jump which fits conventions of a thriller film.

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

When producing our thriller opening we had to use lots of different technology. The main things we had to use were digital cameras, tripods, dolly's, an iMac, iMovie, Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. Through using all of these different things I have learnt a lot about technology and

how to use different film making programs. We also developed our filming skills and worked on different camera shots and how each shot would enhance our film. I learnt about filming while moving using a dolly to hold our camera and move it slowly. We did this in one of the scenes at the end of our film where

the camera shot moved slowly to the left showing all of the images hanging on the string in the darkroom. Using a dolly worked a lot better than walking with the camera as it meant that there was no camera shake and the movement was smooth.

When editing our first draft of our thriller opening we used iMovie, a simple editing program which is easier to use than Final Cut Pro. Using iMovie was a lot simpler than Final Cut Pro and so helped us create a draft quickly with simple effects which showed the way we were going to edit it on our final draft. As we used iMovie in our preliminary task our group was used to using it but we also developed some of the effects we used on iMovie and used things we hadn't before.

We used Final Cut Pro for our final edit which was a lot more complicated than iMovie. I had never used Final Cut Pro before and as we didn't get a tutorial in it we were thrown in at the deep end and had to make our way around Final Cut Pro by ourselves. To begin with we struggled with the program as we didn't really know where to start but after a while we got used to it and managed to begin our final edit of our thriller opening Missing. Final Cut Pro has a lot more editing effects than iMovie and so we could experiment with things and decide which would suit our thriller the best. In the flashback in our thriller we even created our own effect courtesy of Jonny Gale, this meant that it was unique and no one else would be using it which would make our thriller stand out that little bit more. Through using Final Cut Pro I have learnt how to edit more precisely and create a better thriller which looks more professional and complex.

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

When creating our preliminary task we didn’t really know what we were doing as it was our first time filming anything. We had only a camera and a tripod to work with and had to come up with our own little stories to show different kinds of camera shots. Looking back at my preliminary task I realise how much we have improved in our camera techniques and editing. Our match-on-action was just plain awful and we managed to make it look as if one of the people in our film jumps from one place to another in a matter of half a second.

Through making our preliminary task I learned what to do and what not to do when it comes to making a short film. I learnt how to make camera shots work and make people look flattering rather than a camera just shoved in someone’s face much like one shot we used in our preliminary task.

We also used iMovie in our preliminary task which is a simple editor compared to the one we used in our final edit, Final Cut Pro. Through the process of our media tasks I feel I have learnt a lot, especially about editing. I was unaware of how long it took just to edit something that was only around 2 minutes long and I was unaware of how complex the editing process was. I learned how to make things flow together so people aren’t jumping around the scene all the time, I have learned that making scenes exactly the same for each shot in the same place is difficult especially if you are filming on different days as things can be moved then only be noticed once the scene is filmed.

Working with a group was easier than I expected. I thought we would argue and there would be difficulty finding a storyline we all liked but we all came up with different parts and it all fit in well together. As our time went on the group became easier to work with and we all had things to do to help decide how the thriller opening was going to be made. I think we worked well as a group and this reflects the mark we got for our thriller opening.

When it came to audience research we all decided on questions we were going to ask and then for each questionnaire a different person analyzed the answers and posted them to the blog for the rest of the group to see. All the audience feedback we got was very positive in my opinion and I found all of it very helpful as it was constructive but not offensive.

I think the strength of our media opening is the storyline and the way the darkroom and house contrast each other, the way the music is merged together and I also think that our camera shots were pretty good as we managed to get the match-on-action done pretty well. I think a weakness of our opening is that some of the scenes are a little jumpy and that if we had more time we could have improved the flashback scene more and made it easier to understand as out of all our audience feedback that is the one thing that came up more than once.

The most important thing I’ve learned about film making that I didn’t know is how difficult film editing is, even on something as simple as IMovie. I now understand why films take such a long time to edit as it took us a long time just to edit 2-3 minutes of film.