Deanna's evaluation

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

Our thriller includes generic conventions to show the genre of the thriller in specific scenes. This is shown in the ending of the film where you see the lad laying on the floor with injuries in the woods, we have used slow panning so that the viewer can see the boy and begin to imagine how he became injured. The film also shows many cuts, we had to include fades from one shot to the other this is because of the change of the lighting from when we were filming and also when a different person is speaking. We used point of view and over the shoulder shots this was when people where talking this is so that the audience can feel like there are there and are watching what everyone is doing.
Our thriller develops these conventions because it shows that because we decided to film the thriller in the evening we wanted to make it more scary, however this also makes the film seem more like a horror because of the time of the day. We filmed over two days in which on the first filming it was darker so the film generally came out really dark and on the second day of filming we decided that we would start to film the film earlier and then use different transactions to make the film more consistent.
To get the idea of our thriller we watched many different thrillers to get ideas after watching the thrillers we then had to analyse them.
Each member of the group had to create a story board we organically decided we wanted to use the carver barracks as our location but it became very difficult to get permission so we ended up ringing the council and asking if it was possible to use the location in Newport this meant that the chosen story line which was my idea had to be changed but only the location and a small part of the story line. We had to think about getting to the location and if it was possible for the actors to get to the location as carver barracks was hard to get to for everyone besides Nadine because she lived on site. It was then easier to use Newport as all the actors lived in Newport and we filmed after school so we would all be in Newport anyway. I came up with the idea from watching other thrillers and it gave me the idea of having someone being watched and then killed. The idea of camping also came from other thrillers.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The social groups of our thriller is white males and females and the age range is 16+. This is because the actors in the film are all 16 or above.

The gender in our film is stereotypical way as there are more men to women and in the thriller the men are more dominant to women as there appear to be the stronger sex. As the female appears to be more vulnerable to the males In the thriller.

In the beginning we made a questionnaire to ask our target audience what type of thrillers they liked and how we could use the feedback from the audience in deciding what type of thriller to do.

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

I would like to think that our film can be produced by a major Hollywood studio because its not similar to existing products as when I decided on the story line I got my ideas from many different thrillers so the film wouldn’t be the same. I would like to think that the film would be a tv movie this is because I feel that the film is would be watched more than it being on the internet.

Who would be the audience for your media product ?

Our film is aimed at people aged 16+ I think that the film is aimed at both males and females. There are not any other films that are similar to our thriller this is because the story line is very different as the ideas are taken from many different films so this would mean that our film would never be the same as any others.

How did you attract/ address your audience?
Our audience profile is aged 16+ this is because our characters are of the same age and that they are both male and female.

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

When it came to the filming we had a camera but after testing it when we got home we found out that the camera didn’t work so we had to come back into school and see if we could get another camera and the only camera that was available was the HD camera, this became a problem because the camera didn’t catch the fast movement of the filming and became blurry and it wasn’t as good as standards as what we were expecting.

The problems that we had when filming is that our group didn’t get on as well as we wanted to, we had many disagreements and no matter what we done someone wasn’t happy with it. Another problem we had was with our actors, the actors that said they would be happy to help we busy on the days in which we wanted to film, we also had some problems on when we were going to do the filming and when everyone was free, it took some time and we finally got it done but we had some difficulties in the timing of the filming as we had to film on separate days and the timing of the filming on the days.

I have only briefly used the final cut because I didn’t know how to use the software so I thought that it would be easier to get someone else in the group who knew what they where doing to do the work and then I would just give my input. I have looked at the tutorials about final cut express and I have now become more knowledgeable and I will now be able to help more when editing. I now know how to create a decent quality film by using transactions and how to cut the film using different clips.

We also used garage band to create parts of the song that we wanted because we didn’t want to use the whole song. We hadn’t had any experience of the software so we found it hard to use but soon got the hang of it.

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

From our preliminary task we have learnt a lot from the planning we realised we needed to do more in order to get a good result. The story board for the preliminary task was good and detailed so we knew we had to keep the standard the same in order to get on target and complete what we needed to do.

I fell more confident with the camera as I have used it the most but I fell that I could do more and learn more on the final cut express.

I think that the final product is good but we could have planned better and got a much better result. I also fell that our group could have worked better together and we might have got a better product at the end.