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

Here we have a still shot from the thriller series 'Dexter' and our own thriller opening (One way 61363).  The similarities between these shots are that they are both taken from the daily morning routine of the killer within each film, both have been shot from over the shoulder and the setting for both is within the bathroom, however, with the shot of Dexter, the audience cannot clearly see his face; this adds to the levels of suspense and builds tension since we are unaware of what he is thinking or feeling.

Both characters from each film are represented in a way that make them seem suspicious or as if they have something to hide,  although, I believe that a more suspenseful atmosphere has been created by the over the shoulder shot of Dexter since the camera focuses on the back of his head so we cannot see his face, and we cannot see his reflection in the mirror as the background is more out of focus.

Evaluation Question 2 - How does your media production represent particular social groups?

I decided to create two character similarities from two different films. In one of the films the male actor is seen as the antagonist while the females are seen as the protagonists. Whilst in the other thriller, the male is seen as the protagonist, while the female as the antagonist. By doing this I’m showing the possible outcomes of our thriller and what might happen later on, because the opening leaves us with a lot of questions which is good because it means the audience would want to carry on watching.

The Last Seduction (1994)

Bridget Gregory   (Linda Fiorentino)

In The Last Seduction, the female who is also the mane character is seen as the antagonist, as she manipulates her way from guy to guy, and manages to make her new husband act the way she wants him to. In the process she lies to him and makes up stories. In our thriller, the girl that is outside and looks up at the man actor could later on be revealed as actually being the main reason why the other girl is dead. She too just like Bridget from The last seduction could have manipulated our main actor into killing the girl in the bedroom for personal reason, or maybe just for the thrill she gets as it is a psychological thriller after all.

Mike Swale (Peter Berg)

Similarly in The last seduction, Mike is the new husband who is tricked by Bridget to kill for money, and that too could be in our story line where we have the male actor killing because of the girl that passed outside. The fact that they also looked at each other and he nodded could very well re enforce this idea of them being in some sort of conspiracy together, just like with Mike and Bridget.

The Stepfather (2009)

David Harris (Dylan Walsh)

In the Stepfather, the main actor David, is the antagonist this time as he goes around killing innocent families and then changing identities. In our opening thriller the male actor could relate very well to him, not just by the way the thriller as a whole is structured with both man at first tricking the audience into thinking that everything is normal, when in reality it isn’t., But also they are similar in the sense that they both killed someone who they were in a relationship with, and seem to be leaving the place for good, by packing up all their bags ect. Of course for our thriller we can only infer those things through certain props and action, but over all those are the similarities if we went with that story line. The difference between the two men however is that in our thriller, there seems to only be one antagonist so fat, whiles in The Stepfather there’s the whole family.

The ex wife

 Similarly, in both thrillers the dead women are the protagonists who are now just exs and something from the past to both men, which is therefore their main similarity. However the difference, between the women in the Stepfather is that at certain points he has flash backs of her, but we haven’t got that in our thriller.

Evaluation Question 1 part 2

The order of our title sequence was inspired by the Stepfather. Just like it we start with the company that presents our film and the production company, however then the actual name of the film comes up in The Stepfather, however we decided to place our name right at the end by following What lies beneath. We did it that way because we thought it would have a greater effect on the audience as it would be the last thing they see, which means it would make them remember it. After the tittle the Stepfather has the actor's names and then music, editor and director of photographer name. In our production, we changed that order by having the actors names come after the rest of the names so that its not exactly like The Stepfather, however there is still intertextuality.

Evaluation Question 1) In what ways does your media production use, develope or challenge forms and conventions of real media productions?

 I compared 9 shots from the title sequence of the film DEXTER, with 9 shots from our title sequence in order to show how our opening uses, develops and challenges the forms and conventions of real media productions.

(Click on each image to zoom in if you have trouble reading it)

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

Panic Room title sequence 

Here I have chosen to select nine still shots from the title sequence of 'Panic Room'. This opening choses to use a range of ariel long shots and high angles in order to establish the surroundings whilst also incorporating the titles in to the setting itself. However, for our two minute thriller opening, we chose to use basic, plain and simple titles that appear then fade away after about two seconds of being exposed, we chose to do this since it links to the simple theme, idea and environment in which we filmed our thriller.

Since the title sequences within our media product does not reflect the titles seen within the opening of 'Panic Room' and our shots are not as difficult to achieve, our media product therefore challenges some of the forms and typical conventions of real media products.

However, Panic Room and our thriller opening (One Way 61363), both chose to input the production studio, production company and the main actors names as the initial titles within the film, although, we chose to place the film's title at the end of the movie rather than the beginning since there is a link between the title and the penultimate shot.

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

 As you can see there are similarities between some of the shots used in "Dexter" to the shots used in our thriller opening "One Way 61363". For example the over the shoulder scene while the character is looking in the mirror, the putting on the shoes scene, the sink scene. 

 While there are some similarities, there are also some differences between our shots. We do not have a close up of the character's face, a match cut of the character locking/unlocking the door. Also while our character is walking inside of the room, in "Dexter" the character is walking outside.

Question One - Thriller Stills

In the television drama 'Dexter' the opening is very different compared to our opening, this is mainly because of the type of camera angles used. Most of the camera angles used in this opening are close ups and extreme close to emphasize the connotations of blood and murder.

For our movie opening we have used many long shots to establish the environment in which the scene is happening. The use of long shots was also useful because it shows all the Mise En Scene in the scene to, as most of the Mise En Scene is important.

Evaluation, Audiences Feedback

Audiences Feedback 

We all watched each other's films in class, and afterwards asked our classmates for their thought and opinions of our thriller. Now, they were not our original target audience, because thrillers are usually aimed for mid age 25 to about 30 year olds, even though our one starts at about 18 plus mainly because of the young actors, but the story line is still in the mid age boundary. Even thought they were not our target audience, we still gathered useful information on technical issues such as the different shots, lighting, music issues etc, because everyone that watched it, had also produced a thriller of their own and therefore was able to give us an opinion from a film maker's point of view. After talking to our classmates, we went on to wordle.com and created a word cloud of all the feedback. Most of it was positive with the audience liking our match cuts and shots over all, however although they thought   the music went well with the film as whole, some felt it was overpowering and too loud.

6) Audience feedback and comments

The audience felt that our 2 minute thriller had good music throughout, good use of Mise en scene, good shots e.g. close up's, shot reverse shots etc. In addition the audience also felt that our film was very suspenseful and atmospheric however they said that the music could have been slightly more sinister.

Question 6 - Audience Feedback

 

These are some of the words people used when describing our Thriller opening 'One Way 61363'

Evaluation - Question 6: Audience feedback and comment

 Using a site called  www.wordle.net we each typed up feedback given to us. Wordle mixes up the words and makes it like this.

Bloopers

 

 As you can see there were times when the actors did not know if it was time to actually act or not and so we wasted a lot of the camera's battery on this.

 

 Some shots were really hard to do because we kept laughing, but in the end we got there :) .

                                                           And more laughing..

At times because the actors were not sure if they were within camera focus, they were not in the right position for instance the girl on the bed was originally meant to have her leg falling out, but because she thought the camera only focused on the male actor she didn't have this and also the male actor started laughing, because he too thought she was in the shot.

Structure of Openings with examples:

Donny Darko Opening sequence 

Panic Room Opening sequence 

Final edit - One Way 61363

Editing

This is a screen recording of us producing our sound. We combined two sounds to make it sound more dramatic and have a bigger impact on the audience, however the top sound was not long enough so we had to add the same one and over lap it in order for it to last throughout the whole thriller.  

Testing Sounds

Rough Cut Evaluation

Live Type & Sound Track

Final Cut Pro

How we came up with our Thriller title

When thinking of what our title should be we knew it had to be short and catchy otherwise it would be too hard to remember. At first we thought about having it as just the number of the ticket one of our main props, however after doing a bit of re search we realised that there aren’t really any films which use numbers for titles, and for good reasons. Because of that we finally came up with ‘One Way 61363’ which reflects the ticket the main actor was holding, and the fact that its one way suggests that he does not plan on coming back here, to her. The number 61363 symbolises the number of the ticket which we found online and printed out.

Also by using numbers in our title it rule out the possibility of attracting only a certain type of audience, because numbers appeal to everyone, and thrillers too appeal to both female and male audiences, because they have crime which is more toward a male audience, but they also have suspense which leans more towards a female audience.

Re-editing

Once our rough cut was done we noticed that there were a lot of changes that we needed to do (I talked about them in more detail previously) however once we worked tem out, we noticed that the best way to cut the time down was to cut out whole scenes and added effects in certain places to make it run smoother.

Editing

These are some pictures from our editing process. Most of the pictures were taken when we were still cutting our opening shorter on Final Cut Pro, because it was 3 minutes instead of 2.

 

To begin with we saved any sounds which we thought might be good for our thriller. Once we had them to one side we knew we can listen to them and begin putting them together and so on. When choosing our sounds we mainly stuck to the ‘Intense’ and ‘Sark’ genres because they related mostly to our thriller and the mood it tried to put forward. Because of that, we picked sounds that were slow yet had a sense of normality to them for instance a piano playing, which added an eerie effect, but also calmness, because in our thriller the actor seems very calm going about his daily routine, however in reality something very disturbed had happened in that bedroom the night before, and the audience to some extend get this idea or feeling thought

the music we choose.

When it came to choosing our sounds for the thriller we had to take in considerations a few factors. First it had to relate to the thriller as a whole, what I mean by this is that we needed an eerie, dramatic music that would grab the audiences attention and make them think, this way relating to the thriller’s plot as well as mood that is trying to set, after all say we were to put un upbeat happy song on for instance it would defiantly not go.

Secondly, we had to consider the fact that it has to appeal to both teenagers who may relate to the actors as they are young, but at the same time not put off other type of audience, because usually the main audience for thrillers is middle ages male and female audiences, perhaps 25 and over, who would actually pay to go see a thriller in a cinema. Therefore the sound we ended up putting on our thriller ticked those things, because its something that doesn’t exactly lean on either side of the target audience, however is still great at grabbing the audience’s attention because of the backbeat to the main sound which adds that ‘something is not right here’ effect onto the thriller.

In the end we combined the sound ‘Disoriented’ with ‘Beautiful Tension’ to make our final background music of our thriller. The reason we chose those two sounds in particular are because we felt beautiful tension was dramatic yet gave the thriller that extra edge, while the disoriented kept to the thriller side by adding that uncertainty and suspense to the Beautiful Tension.

Also at the beginning disoriented starts off the thriller until beautiful tension comes in, and Disoriented finishes the thriller off because its slower and more eerie that Beautiful Tension that way it will create more of an impact at the end when the audience are shown for certain now that the girl in the bed is dead, and as that happens the thriller finishes off in a low dramatic music that fades out. (The fade out is achieved by pulling from the end of your sound inwards).



Titles

This was filmed in the lesson while we were testing what sounds we could use for our background thriller music.
Unfortunately the sound disappeared so I replaced it with music :)

^^^^^^
WRONG ONE!
THIS IS THE TITLES VIDEO!

Titles

During the making of our titles we had to come up with any names we were to use in it,  the main reason being because it gave it a more professional look, instead of just having our names there. Due to that reason we made up names to put under certain headings such as who the film was by, which ended up being a film by Jeff Cole, or music by Anthony C. Chase. We also came up with fake names for the actors in our thriller, as shown bellow:

Creation of titles

This is a talk to camera of what went wrong during editing and filming >.<

Ideas for actors who might star in our thriller

Because it’s a low budget thriller, the actors that we would look to higher would logically be ones that we could afford. We would have to think of the budget that we have, in which case top Hollywood actors would not be our best choice. Also we need to take in consideration that fact that our thriller is a small British production, therefore most of our audiences would be British and a good idea might be for  the main actors in our thriller to be British too, in order to relate to our target audiences.  So after doing a bit of re search if we could use real actors, the ones we might consider would be perhaps someone like;

Troy Glasgow who starred in Adulthood, but had a minor role, suggesting that he might be in our budget. Or perhaps Katie Henney, who appears in an episodes of Skins. Both these actors would be great at starring in our thriller as they are both young, represent British teenagers, and therefore relate to our target audiences.

Troy Glasgow                                                                                Katie Henney

Changes to be made from feedback

• The rough cut was very useful in showing us exactly what things we still had to work on and even change a bit. For instance, the titles themselves on the rough cut were only there to represent a rough idea of where they would be placed in our final edit, however we still had to produce the titles and place them with the correct animation.

• Also we still have to finish creating our sounds and add them to our thriller, because in our rough cut there were no sounds apart from the diegetic sound, which we plan on removing anyway.

• The last change we need to do in light of the feedback from our rough cut was concerning the timing. The time limit for our thriller opening is 2 minutes, however at the moment our one goes over that limit by 50 seconds, which means we have to cut out a whole scene or cut down a few of the scenes.

Editing process