Evaluation Question 6 part 2 - Audience feedback and comment

We had the opportunity to see all media student's final thriller in the local cinema, and at the end I went around talking to different students that hadn’t previously seen our thriller in order to see what they thought of it, and if it was a success or not.  Personally I feel its great that we had this opportunity to collect opinions from our fellow students because they have too gone through this and know what things are required etc so they can mainly focus on the technical bit of the thriller when sharing their opinions of it I even recorded some of the students I spoke to, and over all they seemed to like it and feel that it worked really well.

This is a video of our film when it was played in the cinema. The recording shows the audience's first and last reactions.

(Sorry for the sideways filming)

Some of the Key things they mentioned:

The fact that it seemed normal at first, but it turned out that the girl was actually dead, received a great reaction from the audience as they felt it created great suspense.

The match cut between the girl outside and the male actor inside, made the audience want to know more about their relationship, which consequently will hopefully make them carry on watching the film.

The use of props was great, and the way the title related to the ticket, as it created a storyline.

The camera angles and different shots all worked well together.

The music was appropriate.

Evaluation Question 8 - Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned inthe progression from it to the full production?





No props were used.




Use of pops to create backround story.

Expectedly, there was an obvious difference between our prelim film (The Confrontation), and our final production (One Way 61363). One of the main reason for this difference I personally feel is to do with the planning. After all the planning is the bases of all filming productions, and with ‘The Confrontation’, we didn’t really get to plan it much, therefore when going in to shoot, we didn’t know what location would fit in best not only with the storyline, but also with relating to its audience, as well as other factors which I will get into later. Because of that, in our final thriller, we did a detailed story board and research before hand on our target audience, therefore we know exactly what location, props, music etc. would appeal best o them as well as relate to the thriller as a whole.



The location was in a classroom.

The location was a bedroom, it related to the
actual plot.

For example, in our prelim, the mise en scene was not planned out very well. The location was just a class room which meant it didn’t reveal a lot about the characters in the film, meaning the audience were not able to build this bond with them, also there were no prop used again revealing nothing about the background story. For one thing, it made it dull and boring, and also did not create suspense which is a key thing for any thriller. We took this away with us, and for our final production we had this in mind, and chose our location to fit perfectly with the plot (the bedroom, which not only related to the relationship the two characters have, but also reached out to the audience because everyone can relate to this location),  as well as focused on the props we used, for instance the frame with the picture of the two actors in it, which from the audience’s response I knew had a great reaction, meaning the film was interesting and achieved its aim.

 

The title of the film appeared in a plain way in
the middle of the screen.

The title appeared in an interesting way

and was left on a plain background for a few

second to really stand out.

Similarly, during the editing process, with ‘The Confrontation’, the actual titles were not planned our before hand, and were also done on Final Cut Pro, which is fine, however doing them on LiveType made a huge difference, as it added that extra detail through the animation we chose and made it more interesting, rather than having a plain, boring title come up in the middle of the screen, which is what happened with our prelim.  With our final thriller, the editing over all was much better because we were more familiar with final cut pro, and knew other effects such as transitions, or over lapping of scenes that we could use, which we didn't in our prelim, mainly because we were not so familiar with the program.  Also we had more time to work on our final thriller, which meant we could focus on another programs such as soundtrack pro, and choose the correct music as we actually had time to work on it, by blending different sounds together  etc. , because the music in our prelim was  really basic. Due to the lack of planning, the timing of the titles wasn’t that great and even their position, however for our final thriller, we carefully planned out the way we would interpret them within the thriller, in order to make them easy to read, not take up too much space on the screen, but still catch the audience’s attention mainly because of the way they appeared and disappeared.

Another key thing which helped us the second time, was the way our team worked with one another. For our prelim we were still new with each other, therefore were not as comfortable at sharing our ideas or even criticizing them if we thought they were not as good as they could be. This was not the case the second time around however, because everyone was comfortable enough with each other and shared opinions as well as helped out another our, for instance if running late on the day of the shooting we would try and get any shots which did not involve the person being late in them, that way leaving only their scene when they come back, which helped save time and calm the person that was late down so they do a great job on set.

Something I feel the prelim has over our final thriller if the fact that we were allowed to include speech in it, by doing this it made the plot more interesting even thought not a lot was happening. In our final thriller, because we were not allowed to include any speech, it felt as though not a lot was actually taking place, therefore we had to rely more on our titles, the editing of the shots and music to make it more interesting as a whole.

As you can see our camera skills were not so great back when we filmed the prelim. A lot of the time the shots went out of focus, or were really shaky.  This was because we didn't use the tripod as much as we should have, and also didn't focus each shot if it was on manual setting. These mistakes however allowed us to see what we needed more work on, and helped us practice for the final thing.

In ‘One Way 61363, those things did not occur, we had smooth tracking shots and pans., all done while the camera was on the tripod. We had to always take our time with filming each scene, because the worst thing would be to have a scene that’s all shaky, out of focus, or when using the zoom while filming . if we wanted to use the zoom we would have to zoom in or out depending, before starting the actual shooting of the scene. If our scenes were our of focus, it may make the film seem unprofessional, as well as it could make the audience feel confused and question weather the out of focus bit actually belongs in the film or not, and if it even relates to the storyline.

Evaluation - Question 7: What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Together we created an animatic movie, including images, screen grabs, videos and voice-over to explain all the different types of technologies we used and came across right from the start up until the making of our thriller.

Evaluation - Question 6: Audience feedback and comment

Recorded audiences feed back of our thriller. Here we chose an audience that is actually targeted by our thriller as they are in their late teens, and our thriller targets audiences that are in their teens (because of the main characters being quite young), and above, because of the whole thriller aspect which is mainly enjoyed by adults.

Evaluation Question 4&5 - Whatkind of media institution might distribute your media production and why? How will you attract/address your audience?

Our thriller is a low budget student video, therefore it would have a low budget British Independent production company that would also distribute the video in varies ways. In our case, this production company is Candi Media Studios.  There are a variety of ways we can distribute our film in order to get a larger viewing audience. Our thriller will get a cinematic screening amongst the rest of the media students, as well as a DVD release of 200 copies. Of course, a major way to reach out to a larger audience is through the internet. Therefore, we can also release our thriller on Facebook, twitter, Youtube, Blogger, and Vimeo. All these are well known social networking sites that allow millions of people to connect with just a click, therefore it wouldn’t matter if its someone in college, at work or at home, they would always be able to see our thriller and also comment on it, that way helping us see where we might have gone wrong, as well as acknowledge the good bits in it.

Here are some of the places where we distributed our Thriller opening and the reasons for choosing them:

                                                                           

Evaluation Question3 - Who would be the audience for your media production?

Our target audience is both male and female based because thrillers include aspects that appeal to both genders, for instance the suspense appeals to the female audience, while the crime to the male. When it comes to age our ideal audience would be around 18 to 35 years old, because our actors are quite young and would therefore appeal to the younger age of the scale, however the plot would appeal to the 25 year olds +. Because our thriller revolves around relationship issues as well as the psychological aspect, it might appeal more to couples as they can relate to the storyline to some extend, however the psychological aspect of the thriller allows the boundary to expand to just about anyone who likes to think things through, and work things out for themselves.

Maria 24years old, works as a Loan Officer in NatWest, has been there for over 4 years and aspires to become Branch Manager. She enjoys spending her spear time with her boyfriend who she’s been going out with for over 2 years now. She also enjoys going to the cinema and mainly watches, drama, thrillers or horrors. Therefore she would enjoy One Way 61363 because it included romance as well as the main thriller psychological aspect, which she can enjoy along with her boyfriend who would like the physiological and thriller part of it mainly. She’s financially stable and can afford going to the cinema, and due to her work she has to think and take into account a lot of things, which might be the reason she enjoys watching thriller.  She can relate to the characters because she herself is still quite young, and too uses a blackberry just like in the film. She also likes shopping in shops like h&m, and River Island, but her favourite activity is having a nice night in with her boyfriend.

Maria's handbag with all her belongings.



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)

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.

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.

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.  

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

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