Media Evaluation

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

Our thriller conformed to a fair few conventions of the thriller genre, whilst challenging one or two others.

The one setting of our thriller opening is in a forest. This is a similar setting to films such as the book of Eli, and the Blair witch project. The verticle trees represent bars, and a sense of entrapment. This is a convention used in some way or another by many thriller films, although not all are quite as obvious. A lack of any characters apart from our victim and our villain also gave the audience a sense of isolation. This coupled with our metaphorical bars gave a sense of entrapment.

A convention we decided to challenge was gender roles within a thriller. In our thriller, the usual gender roles are reversed. The main helpless victim is a male, relinquishing a female from this role. in our thriller the main villain, and intimidating / overpowering character is in fact a female. We wanted to emphasise how physical size and strength are not a contributing factor into who has over over who in this film.

A convention we felt it would be appropriate to stick with was masked characters. Characters wearing masks give a huge sense of mystery and unknowing. Wearing a mask also makes the viewer feel they don't know everything about the character, and that there is more to find out about them. This leads to heightened anticipation, and curiosity. Masks often also make a character appear more sinister, as though they have something to hide. In our thriller we thought this was highly appropriate. Being a hallucination character we wanted her face to be obscured most ( if not all ) of the time. The mask we chose also threw of a bit of a nightmarish feel, something we definitely wanted to know our main character was experiencing.

Our thriller uses a few shots that conform to the thriller genre. A POV shot was used to show the viewers how alone our character felt, and in fact was. A POV shot from another mysterious character ( possibly the villain? ) was shown to give a sense of voyeurism. The camera peered round a tree, and quickly hid as our character approached.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The main social group represented in our thriller opening is British youth, namely late teens. We also aimed to show how social roles and conventions ( particularly gender ) are possibly changing.
We also represented the ' Rave culture ' of British youth, one that partakes in Alchohol abuse, crime, sex, violence and Drug abuse. This is how the seemingly normal Rhys manages to mix his prescription medication with illegal drugs, and ends up in a nightmarish situation.

The clothes used on our main character attempted to represent the average teenager today.

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

Its no secret that we're amateur producers, and our clip is pretty small time. However, with new technologies such as youtube, it would be hard to distribute this around the world, gaining thousands, and even millions of viewers around the world.

Asides from being completely free, this method of distribution would hit our target audience exactly where they spend a huge amount of time - the internet. Our target being teens and young adults, using a site like youtube could make a a great start for small production company's.

If a small film like this could take off on a huge film, its a good bet a film released on some kind of payed format ( dvd, payed download ) it would sell, and people would know about it ( youtube used as free advertising )

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The audience for our product would mainly be from teens, to middle aged people. It would be enjoyable for any fan of psychological thrillers, however some scene wouldn't be appropriate for some younger viewers: a guideline age of 15 was set for this reason.

The audience of our film would have to have an intuitive mind, intelligence and a good attention span for the film. It would be a film you could enjoy, but have to think about. The kind of film to wait until the end and then say ' oooh! I get it! That's some clever stuff.'

How did you attract/address your audience?

We decided to involve themes, and characters relevant to our audiences life (potentially ). Although having said that, twists such as an S1 sufferer and drug abuse may not be a daily thing for our audience, this is what added the suspense and excitement to our thriller.

The questionairres we gave out gave us some ideas of what to include in our thriller as these we're mainly distributed to our target audience. We found the sub genre of psychological / horror where the most popular. Films that people enjoyed recently were also of the same sub genre ( Shutter island, gothika ect. ).

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

First and foremost I've learnt that technology can be very temperamental, and incredibly frustrating whe your still learning how to use it!

Having said that, i have come out of making this media product with a great many new skills. First and foremost a more in depth understanding of how to use a digital video camera, and editing software on a Mac.

using a Mac after using a pc for the entirety of your life is one of the most indescribably frustrating experience of my life. However...after learning the shortcuts, and how to use many of the programmes, it became bearable and did produce a piece of work to a pretty good standard.

Some of the things i learnt about how to use the digital camera were as simple as ' Why not to film in HD ' and how not to accidently record over 30 seconds of footage by accident.
Over the course of the project i did learn some great camera shots, and techniques along with the basic use of the camera itself.

On top of this, editing programmes such as Final cut pro were used. this programme is horribley daunting at first, however after playing around for a little while it was a useful tool. I found this programme to be a great one, as it can be simple when you need it to be, yet incredibly in depth when required too.

A music/ sound editing programme was also utilized by myself for the creation of our music soundtrack, which ran for the entire opening. This very simple piece of technology can produce some great stuff. However i learnt leaving the track in smaller pieces made it much easier to match with the timings of the video footage.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you think you have learned in the progression from it to the final product?

Apart from being a much more professional piece of work, with more well informed skills on how to create a product, this is a totally different ball game!

this product ( hopefully ) showed how far we've come along in not only our technical and practical media skills, but also in our understanding of genres and media pieces. Our pre-lim task was just a practice run, with no real story or background whereas this is an elaborately planned piece of work with background story's, Character profiles, storyboards and many other factor involved!

What is TV drama?

The basis of a TV drama is a fictional action dtory in the form of narrative. Tv drama's over the years have split into many different sub genres, and its important to know how and why they have.

Examples of TV drama : Dcotrs, Heartbeat, Doctor Who, Lennon naked, Lip service, being human, sherlock, casulty.

Examples of TV dramas mixed with other genres: CSI, inspector morse, and heartbeat. Many drama's are mixed with detective / crime type genres. Often Tv dramas contain fictional action, but something that could happen in real everyday life : hospitals ect.

Genre means a type of programme.
Genres is a term used to generalize programmes with the same theme.
Genres often break down into sub genres, however some of these sub genres have become genres in their own right.
Because of television many new sub genres have arisen.

No Country for old Men : Coin toss scene

No country for old men is no doubt a tremendous film, and one of my favourites to date. The ' Coin toss ' Scene is fantastic, and even the inanimate food wrapper deserves and Oscar for its performance! 


The scene begins with a long shot of the open desert, with a small convenience store and gas station tucked away in one corner ( use of rule of thirds ). This shot shows the absolute desolation of the area, and gives the sense of isolation, and possibly entrapment, with nowhere to run. 


The scene is then put inside the convenience shop itself, showing the main character, and the store owner. 
The body language between the two is very noticeable. Both stand sturdy and sure of themselves to begin with. This shows almost a wild west style ' showdown ' between the two. As the scene progresses however the shop owners stance, and facial expression show he is faltering. He is confused and slightly worried about the intentions of the other character. The main characters body language shows hostility and seriousness the entire way through the scene up until the last moment.  

The shots used in this scene define the characters also. High angle shots are almost always used on the main character, to show he is imposing and powerful. The tension in the scene comes when the coin is tossed. A close up shot is used in this instance, and this adds to the intensity. The result of the toss is not shown however, and this scene genuinely gets my heart beating every time. The main character delays in telling answer of the toss on purpose to build suspense. 

The room the entire way through the scene is very dull, and the main characters face is slightly shadowed. This is a thriller convention, and adds to the mysteriousness of the main character. 

Initial ideas

Here are some of our initial ideas, kindly put together by Catrin Hamer. Most of our ideas to begin with were based on a psychological element, agreed unanimously to be one of our personal favourite type of thriller. This type of thriller makes you think, and really makes you want to find out the conclusion of the story. Suspense and tension were key here. Eventually we settled on Beck Bigwoods idea all agreeing it had the strongest plot line.

Thriller opening ideas mind map

View more presentations from Catrin Hamer.

Casting

Rebekah Bigwood as The Lady in the Gas Mask

Becky from our group has been chosen to play The Lady in the Gas Mask. Our reasons for this include the fact of convenience, as it's easier to choose somebody from our group to be apart of our film as then we don't need to sort out filming schedules with a lot of people. By view of appearance, Becky is a good choice as she has a feminine build to clearly show that the character in the gas mask is a woman. She is also fairly tall, which adds to the character's feature of intimidation and power – this goes against many film conventions of women being submissive and powerless to the comparison of men. Also she has longish brown hair which is a feature we wanted for the character, and extends on what she and her features represent i.e. brown hair is fairly generic and not necessarily modern which could build on the fact that gas masks were also used in wars a long time ago which perhaps could represent the duration that this woman has existed. There is also the point that Becky owns the appropriate clothing and props to be used for her character.
In high school I worked with Becky in making videos for certain subject projects and she is a very agreeable person to work with and also holds fairly good acting skills.

Jos Banham as Rhys

Again, for convenience we decided to choose Jos to play the character Rhys to prevent having to arrange a filming schedule with people outside of our group. Rhys is a character that looks fairly normal but in fact is not; and Jos is pretty ordinary looking and has a fairly casual personality which fits the appearance of our character. As Rhys is meant to look fairly ordinary, but in actual fact is not. He is also relatively tall and has dark hair, so could come across as frightening and suspicious is filmed in the proper way to emphasis this. We chose this kind of character in order to show the audience that ordinary-looking people can have severe background stories and problems; the casting of Jos allows us to create this illusion of a normal person.

Rough cut Feedback

On Thursday 25th November we  screened our rough edit of our thriller to other media and college students. We hoped to gain constructive criticism as well as some positive feedback from the session so we can make our final edit the best it can be. 

Here are the feedback questions that will be handed out to viewers:

What did you think was going on during the film?


What do you think the rest of the story might be?


What are your thoughts on the characters? (whether you liked them, your interpretation of them)


Do you think the music was appropriate for what was happening in the film?


What was your favourite aspect of the film?


What improvements do you think we could make to the film?

Character development and backrounds

As a group we all had a pretty good idea of what our 2 main, and only characters were going to be like. The idea was first put forward by Becky and then further developed by the group. We all had our own inputs and ideas into what each character should be like in every way; appearance, background and peronsality.  Our group member Catrin Hamer took what we said away and produced the final characters we were going to put into our Opening. Here are the links to her ideas:

http://catrinhamerasmediablog.blogspot.com/2010/10/character-background-rhys.html

http://catrinhamerasmediablog.blogspot.com/2010/10/character-background-lady-in-gas-mask.html