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

From the time at which my group and I made our prelim, we have made a substantial amount of progression. This progression and development of our idea's, ability and understanding, led us to create our final thriller opening production.
However, in order for us, as a group, to make it to the stage we are now at, it was essential for us to encorperate everything we had learnt into our filming and to also absorb all the knowledge and advice given to use by our teachers.

We were taught how to make a detailed and descriptive analysis of all our footage, this included our prelim, bag swap scene and final thriller opening.

In addition we were introduced to some new and interesting programmes that allowed us to display our work or even arrange it into forms of presentations in very imaginative ways, these included; Blogger, Vimeo, Prezi etc.


We Have also gained understanding on how to
create clips/scenes that will attract certain target audiences, for example, for our thriller opening,
we chose to use young actors and gave the film a plot that would appeal to both male and female viewers ranging from 16-25. We were able to do this since our opening had elements that both genders would be able to relate to i.e. 'romance' for the female audience and 'crime' for the male audience,
however, since the overall sub-genre for our film is psychological,
we have 'ticked every box' and created a film that will appeal to an even broader audience.

Over the course of time, from when we first shot our prelim to when we made our final thriller opening, we gained a variety of technological skills including how to carefully and effectively handle and use the media tripods and camera.
We learnt about focusing (using Manual and Auto focus),
how to adjust the hight of the camera and the legs of the tripod, how to render our clips once we had recorded them and also how to transfer them onto FinalCutPro (FCP).

FCP was a programme we used when looking at any of our clips. it allowed us to add effects such as; fade, dissolve etc.
In addition FCP allowed us to assemble our clips onto a timeline in order to arrange them chronologically then alter the length of clips, the effects over them and the overall timing of the clips once on the timeline.

Additionally, we learnt how to use LIveType and Soundtrack Pro which are programmes that allow you to add texts and sound over and clip that we created. We were able to demonstrate our abilities to transfer our clips to LT and SP when we created our final thriller opening, which had opening titles such as; production company, starring actors, director etc. Also, we created and then added on sound to our clips via soundtrack pro; this is where my group and I, picked from a selection of music genres that suited our film and our target audience.


Here is a screen grab from our Preliminary task, as well as one from our final production. We have made some major progression, including; how to alter the lighting, angles and focusing of our shots.
Also, our editing skills have substantially improved. Including our cuts, transitions, effects music etc.

4&5) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product 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.

3) Who would be the audience for your media product?

We have a broad target audience for our thriller opening, appealing to both genders and all races of people, however, since the main actors within our film are quite young, our film appeals more to a younger audience ranging from 16-25.

 Thriller films can also have many sub-genres that appeal to both male and female watchers, such as; romance, suspense, horror, crime, action, Sci-Fi etc.  Specifically, the suspense within thrillers appeals more towards  female audiences, while the crime to the male. When it comes to age, our ideal audience would be around 16 to 25 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 aspects of the thriller, allows the boundary to expand to just about anyone who likes to think things through, and work things out for themselves.

Lewis is a typical target member for our thriller opening, he's 16 years old and is a student at City and Islington Six Form College. He is currently doing three A Level's including; Biology, Electronics and psychology. He enjoys, skating, going to the cinema, playing xbox 360 and spending time with his friends.

Here is a few of the items he carries around with him or in his bag:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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

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

Second day of filming..

Our second day of filming went by much quicker than the first one, because we tried to film as much as possible in our first day that way if we looked over and didn’t like anything and felt the needed to re do it we would have had enough time to do so on the second day of filming. However, at the time we thought everything was fine the way it was and so finished off the final few shots and rapped it up for the day.

However, once we were back in college we realised that a lot of the material we had we had to re shoot again because of technical problems such as the lighting changing from scene to scene, or because we decided to add on a bit of mise on scene such as the picture frame, which meant we had to re shot that whole scene. As a result of which, during one of our Tuesdays 3 hour media lessons instead of going in to college, we went back to our set and re shot the scenes that we needed to do. Because we had previously planned out exactly what we needed to fix or change, it didn’t take us that long and we were able to get back to college on time for our afternoon lessons. Nonetheless if we had spotted the problem before on our second day of filming, we would have never had the need to go back and re film some shots. Still this all gave us a lot more footage to work with and made the editing process a bit easier as we had a lot to choose from.  

Rough Cut

This is just a rough cut of our thriller, but we still have quite a lot to do before the final dead line.  The good thing about our rough cut is that it tells us what stage we're at and allows us to see that there are many aspects of our thriller opening that we need to improve and add on, such as; the soundtrack, title sequences (length of titles) and the overall length of our film, since it goes over the 2 minute limit.