Luke's Evaluation

Evaluation

In my AS media course I have produced a media product with the theme of a thriller. I did this with Elsa, Hannah and Dean. We had to make this all from scratch, we had to do market research and then put all our Ideas to make a final product. I had to plan film and then edit it by ourselves.
When planning our media product we all knew what we wanted what we really wanted to so, also as we are of the age 16-17 we knew what the market would want. We decided to make a thriller where It would be shot In the dark setting, In 3 different places and It would have a slightly creepy feeling to it.

In our thriller a girl brakes down In a remote area, surrounded by woods, she hears something In the woods so goes to Investigate. This first scene was shot in location 1 and mainly used medium shots, with a few POV from the stalker and over the shoulder shot in the car when it breaks down.
Then there is location 2, this is when she walks around in the woods to see if can find the source of the noise. In this scene there are a lot of POV’s from where and the stalker, so of him watching her and from her trying to look for him. In this scene we have also put in worms eye view, which is a very low angle shot. We went for a very much handheld feel, to get across to our audience that It Is very much just them 2 in the area. The scene ends when the stalker is running towards her and she screams.
Location 3 Is In a shed, where our victim has woken up tied up In a shed, again In this scene we have a few POV’s to show people what the room looks like from her own point of view, earlier on we had taken lots of photo’s of the protagonist doing her daily things, this Is to show that the stalker has been stalking her for a while and to add that extra creep factor. We had chosen that location as it was the creepiest place we knew that we close, it was a rundown shed, which you would not want to be.

When planning and filming we were very couscous about what we thought and knew our target market wanted, and what they wanted and liked what the conventions of a thriller followed. So we added In a lot of POV’s like In the forest scene, we also made sure that It was a women protagonist as when we did our market research that was what people liked, we also tried to shoot it in the evening as that was when It was dark without us It being too dark that we couldn’t film anything. Due to our market research and it showing people wanted to see conventions we didn’t think are necessary to challenge any conventions as we thought that the best effect would be that it was done like people wanted. As we wanted to add a creepy feeling to the thriller t feel into the sub-genre of a thriller horror, you can see this mostly as we have done it in the dark and from the last scene it being of the protagonist being tied up in shed. We as a group have all seen a lot of thrillers we when we were given this task lots ran through our head about what we should do in our thriller, so in a way many films Influenced us, but one that stuck out the most was hostel, the opening story line is very much like our own, but the locations are very different.

In the film women are very much stereotyped as being the damsel In distress so and the man (the stalker) very much In charge and very dominate, this was due to the thriller conventions and us wanting to keep to those, and also due to the cast that we asked to be In our media product a women fitted the role very well, as they are physically (In most case) smaller and then there are perceived to not to be able to handle themselves. This Is good as the audience will feel a lot more for the women as most people think that women aren’t able to handle themselves, this will mean people will get more Involved with the film, as In they will get sucked Into It.
I think that as this sort of film s the sort of film people want to see due to audience trends, this would be a perfect product for a large profit making organisation to make and produce, as this sort of film is a guaranteed success films like this have proven to do well, like the film hostel.
This film If released I see being a typical big blockbuster, a must see film for people that would want to see this type of film, after going In the cinema I would like to think It would also come out on DVD. I do not that that this particular film would have a sequel, but this film would be a film, for just that... watching.
Our target audience would be between the ages of 15- 40, the reason we said 15 was because that is the age certificate it would be, so legally we cannot aim it to any younger as they technically will not be able to watch it, the reason for the high end being 40 is because peoples taste of films don’t tend to change until later In life that that.
What I have noticed though is that both sexes would like to watch it as 16-17, but as you get older more into the late 20’s it moves to mainly the male market. But even though many females would like it, I would say it’s more of a male product, this would be mainly because of the dark theme to It, and that the protagonist s a female, the male may become slightly protective of the female and would like to see what happens, or they may like to see a women to be put n a very vunriable state and passive. Also due to it being a thriller-horror a lot of tension would be built, I’m not sure if a women would enjoy that and even be able to stand that.
From what we found out our target audience was very much the people that enjoy similar films available to the consumer. For example Hostel very much appealed to the male market due to it being quite a dark thriller.

Due to the fact that a women is playing the part of the protagonist it would involve the women part of the audience and they would then feel that that may affect them, and would make them thing what they would do if they were in that situations, also due to the fact she is young, it would make people age thing it could happen to them. When our main character is tied in the shed it would engage people as it would make thing wonder how she would get out and then they would start to think how they would if they were put in that situations. I personally find it frustrating in films like thrillers as they do things that people would not in real life, for example go and find what they heard in the forest... it makes you want to scream at them to run, this feeling is shared with a lot from what I found from the audience research.
By having to plan, film, direct and edit this project I have come to be more confident in what I know in media and how to use the equipment. For example, when we first started I had no idea how to use the editing programs nor did I even know how to upload the film from the camera to the Mac. To start with I struggled to cut It all, and so did everyone else in the group, but a few a while we knew that what we were doing was wrong, so we went online and then looked at the programs tutorial. What it turned out we were doing was just putting markers in the film.

Apart from the Issues with the cutting of film one of the Issues was just general working of programs such as final cut express and garage band, but that was just practice that got us over these issues, and a lot of trial and error!
What was hard was the quality of the cameras, it was hard to get the detail and then to get the professional touch we wanted when filming with low definition cameras, but we had to use what we were given and we made the best of what we had.

When adding the music that we made in garage band it did not play, what we had to end up doing is making it merge with the film which all it needed was the press of one button. After cutting everything we found that it was not really how we wanted it to be, we wanted it to be a lot dark, so what we ended up doing was play around with the effects, and we ended up changing the contrast to just give It a dark look.

Making the credits was a first for me, I never knew how to do it, but after one of my group members showed me what do it was rather easy. We looked any many fonts and compared them to many other thriller credits to see If It fitted and after a long time we found some that we did. But after that we had to look at how everything else would work, like how would it appear, for how long, and then how it would leave, and the size of everything.
When making the music it was very hard to find a base to start at, as we were very picky over what we wanted our product to sound like, we wanted music in the minor key, so it it wouldn’t be too happy and we wanted to use it to help build suspense. When we did find something we had to change the tempo a lot to make it fit in with the film, so it stopped at points we wanted it to, we also wanted certain load parts to come In places so that was very fiddly. We also wanted to add a few sounds effects over the top of the music, so we had to change it all a lot to make sure that it either one didn’t drown either one out when it wasn’t meant to, but we also had to be able to hear them both most of the time.

When we did the preliminary work we did not really take it seriously, we felt that we could go out, with no planning and then just film anything in anyway, and no one would be the wiser. That was not the case when we went and did the full product. I learnt that you had to do a lot research to see what people wanted to see and not just make what was easy for us to do. We had to look at what other films like our own were like and then look for general thriller conventions and then follow those if that was what people wanted to see. We learnt that we had to take into account everything, such as if we shot somewhere we had to think about everything that you could see in the shot, that means looking at the background and think, should that be there? When filming the final product we tried to get as many different shot types as possible without it looking silly, we used worm eye view, which was a low angle shot and many POV’s close, long and medium shots. Developing the skills need just took practice. I think all considered given what we had to work with and the time we did a very good job, we took into account what the public wanted and acted on what, and that resulted in good reviews.