Evaluation 7- Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Here is our evaluation 7 when we looked back at our prelim task and how far we have come in terms of our use of editing and camera work.

Our skills have developed so much with our cinematography and editing from doing our prelim at the start of the course. We have learnt from our prelim by using a tripod in our thriller to avoid having an unstable camera and also our digital technology skills have developed as we have now learnt to use more advanced cameras and editing software. We have also learn to keep the setting the same as in our prelim we made the mistake of having papers and a phone in one shot, then in another it suddenly disappeared. This disrupts the flow of the narrative and therefore we have learnt from this.

Evaluation 6 - what have you learnt from the technologies while making your media product?

Evaluation 5 - How did you attract and address your audience?

Evaluation 4-Who would be audience for your media product?

Evaluation 4

Here are two examples of our target audience. We have chosen these as they are above the age requirement to watch the film, however still young enough to experience the types of problems that we have addressed in our thriller. The female protagonist in our thriller opening is being bullied and tormented by a young black male who is stereotypically seen in the media as violent and aggressive. As these people may be aware of these stereotypes and the themes presented in our thriller, we believe they would be perfect to target our audience at.

Evaluation 3 - What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

 

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

Evaluation 1- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real mediaproducts? (i.e. of film openings)

Evaluation 1

Changes we have made

We had a lot of feedback on our text we had put on at the very start of our thriller. We had hoped that it would link to the narrative of Sarah growing up and experiencing the same issues that she had when she was younger (the flashbacks) however we had not made this clear in our thriller and thereforte our audience had a negative reading of it. We have now decided to take it out and the thriller begins straight away without any writing. This new effect puts the audience in the thriller straight away and immediately engages them to watch our thriller.

When we filmed Ellie (for the flashbacks as a young Sarah) we filmed all of the shots vertically instead of horizontally and therefore this shows an obvious contrast in the shots in the video. This disengages the audience and the cinematography comes across as very unprofessional and it does not have the right appeal that we were hoping for. To solve this problem, we have now decided to delete the flashbacks and not include them in our thriller, as when we wanted to re-film, Ellie was not available so we could not use the same shots. We also couldn't use Ellie again as we had changed the actor of Lucy from Sarah to Jess. As Ellie and Jess have different hair colour, the flashbacks would not make sense to the audience and the narrative would therefore become confusing.



We have only decided to re-film some parts of the thriller as we feel that there are parts in the thriller that still remain effective such as the shower scenes. Our main influence was 'Psycho' for these scenes and therefore we have kept it as Lucy is represented as vulnerable and she is much unguarded. By her wearing no clothes, this is a metaphor for having nothing to hide against when the antagonist comes. Although, we had concerns of having to re-film, as Sarah (the last actor for Lucy) was unavailable to re-film with us so we have now changed to Jess to play Lucy. As both girls have completely different hair colour, this would disrupt the flow of the narrative if the hair colour suddenly changed in the middle of the clip. However we watch our thriller and noticed that Sarah's hair looks very dark in the shower and as Jess has dark hair, we believed that this would be invisible to the audience and they would not recognise a change in the characters.

 We had also gained feedback from this shot, where Lucy has just come down the stairs and the antagonist is hiding in the shadows in the background. Although, people told us that it was unrealistic that Lucy would not have seen him and therefore we have cut any unrealistic shots and scenes from our old thriller. It is very important that although our thriller is fictional, it still needs to be realistic so that the audience can relate the thriller and gain a preferred reading on it. We have specifically chosen a typical everyday house as a location and typical everyday clothing as costumes, so that it is scarier for the audience as it is relatable, so our thriller therefore needs to reflect on these elements and themes.

 

People had also pointed out that after Lucy got out of the shower and saw the text messages, she just got changed and went downstairs and read the newspaper, which is not a realistic act somebody would do if they found out somebody was sending them strange text messages. We realised that the situation did not make sense to the audience, that probably to not engage them as they were left confused. To resolve the situation, we have now changed the narrative and the story of our thriller opening and have re-filmed it and created a completely different situation. We believe that our new narrative makes a lot more sense and is more realistic to how somebody would react in the situation.

We also had to change the title of our thriller as we had changed the narrative by taking out the flashbacks. We no longer had aspects which included the victim being tormented in her childhood therefore 'Remember Me?' was no longer appropriate. We have now changed our title to 'Through The Shadows', which means we had to change our poster also.

Pitch/Brief

As we had bad feedback on our first attempt of making our thriller due to a complicated narrative and un-needed jump cuts, we decided to change parts of the storyline so that the narrative would make sense to our audience. It is important that our thriller opening makes sense as otherwise our audience would develop a negative reading of our thriller and will not want to watch it. We have decided to keep the first part of the thriller the same and we are going to change the last bit where the antagonist enters Lucy's house. We will now change the storyline so that the antagonist actually goes upstairs to look at Lucy in the shower. We think that this will build tension in our thriller as our audience will wonder if Lucy will notice he is there. We also believe that him going upstairs to watch her in the shower represents him as more of a stalker and this is clearer to the audience that this is his role in the thriller. We will also include Lucy not getting changed after her shower as it is unrealistic after seeing scary text messages and she is also more vulnerable by not having proper clothes. We will then have a shot where the antagonist has sneaked back downstairs and shuts the door loudly, which then makes Lucy curious to go downstairs. The thriller will include a tense moment of Lucy slowly walking down the stairs which will build tension as she is getting closer and closer to the antagonist and the climax will be the end then there is an over the shoulder shot of the antagonist grabbing her shoulder. This last over the shoulder shot is an effective choice as we believe that the audience are put in her position and they get to experience the same experience as Lucy's. This is what we want to achieve from our thriller as we have set it in a modern day house with a typical teenager, creating the suggestion that it could also happen to the audience. Therefore we believe that ending the shot by putting the audience in her position is a very effective way to end our thriller clip.

Feedback on rough copy

After we had finished our thriller opening, we noticed that there were several problems with it. We looked at the year belows criticisms on it, then wedecided we would reshoot certain parts to make the narrative more clear. Here is some things that they picked up on.


    "The opening sentence does not make any sense, it states "What you had thought you had left behind is now catching up with you.." it slows down the beginning of the horror and leaves the audience feeling confused. They did use an ellipsis which helps build the tension however as it was not a correct use of language this did not work.

· An over the shoulder shot of the boy was seen on screen whilst introducing the character ‘Sarah Walker’ this clearly wasn't the correct character and it interrupts the flow and confuses the audience as it looks unprofessional and doesn't introduce the characters properly, which could create confusion amongst the audience.

· The camera is shaking; this lowers the quality of the video, making it harder to watch. They could have improved this by using a tripod.

· When the text appears on the phone its blurry so the quality is not great and cannot portray the story.

· Chris James standing underneath stairs while girl walks past gives too much away, unlikely she wouldn’t have seen him, would be more suitable to use in middle of film (main plot)

· Chris James not in suitable outfit of a villain, too casual (grey hoodie and jeans) too modern and unprofessional

· Sound doesn’t escalate with scene, e.g. girl reading newspaper goes to man with hammer, still same suspense, doesn’t create tension or good atmosphere for audience.

· Dialogue is too staged, doesn’t create tension, would be better with face reactions etc. rather than speech."

I then spoke to another media studies student and asked for their opinion on the thriller.



After reviewing some of these points, we will be sure to fix any things that are unclear in our thriller. We will include our decisions and why we created them in our blog as some of the things they picked up on, we had not explained in our blog, therefore they do not know why certain aspects are relevant.

Thriller First draft

Here is our final thriller opening video.

Re-shooting

This is our original shot of the key going into the door.

We had to re-shoot this because we had made a visible mistake which we could get marked down on. We used 2 separate keys in our clip and the first shot of it was on its own, but when Cj put the key in the keyhole, (when we used the second key) we noticed it had other keys on the key ring.

We decided I should re-shoot this as I had easier access to the house and also Cj (who was the antagonist and the character needed in this scene.) This was shot on the 30th of April.

Here is the shot when I re-shot it. It is important to notice these small details as it can confuse the audience into thinking they were 2 separate keys in the clip. We could also have got marked down on this as it does not make sense if we kept it the way it was.

Pictures of filming

Here are some pictures from Thursday the 28th of March when Jess and Amy were filming a scene in our thriller opening.

Location

I have created a video showing 4 pictures of one of our locations (Amys house). I have also analysed why we decided to use them and how effective they are in creating our thriller.

Diary of shooting

Diary of Shooting

Diary of Shooting

Diary of Shooting

Shooting Schedule

Media Shooting Schedule

Costumes

I decided to use VoiceThread to show everyone my costume ideas in a visual and auditory way.

Questionnaire explanation

The reason we are getting people to answer the questionnaire is so we have a rough idea of what the audience like to see and what they believe is in a good thriller movie. We are finding out the age range of the people answering the questionnaire and also their gender, this will allow us to find out what males like in thrillers compared to what females like and also what teenagers prefer compared to middle aged people. We can then get inspiration

Thriller Soundtracks

To gain some ideas about music for our thriller. I researched into some old and new thriller soundtracks and put them together in a video to compare them. 

Social Networking Benefits

Social Networking

Bloopers

Here are some of of our bloopers from when Jess and Amy did the filming for our thriller.

Marketing

Marketing

Film poster Analysis

Film poster analysis.docx

Setting and Location

Sample film poster

We decided to create a sample film poster to see how we will set up our thriller poster when we have the right images that we will include in our final poster.




We created this first one (on the left) as out first ideas. We were unsure of whether we thought this poster was entirely effective so we decided to create a second one and see what layout the target audience preffered and thought was more effective.
This poster was just our intial ideas so we thought it would be better if for our second try at the poster to have a completely different to see which on the audience preffered.

Our second poster idea was to have a image of a girl in the corner to create a isolated atmosphere. This poster has a lot more detail compared to the first one and this is why we personally prefer this sample poster. We want the audience to be confused and want to know more just from seeing the thriller poster and we think that this poster would be effective in doing that.

We then decided to ask our target audience of young adults from the age of 18-30, to look at each sample poster and the layout and see which one they prefered and why.  When we got our audience feedback results it was clear that not many people out of the 30 people we asked preferred the 1st poster with the eye through the keyhole. Most people thought the other poster was better with the little girl scared in a corner this is why we have choosen to use this layout. In our final thriller poster we will recreate this picture of the little girl in the corner with our own image from the filming that we have already done.

   

Costume Research

Marking other Students Work

Twelve - 60/60 (A)
This AS thriller film got full marks, because of it's good use of lighting and sound. It had an extremely well set up storyline, and the flashback's they used were really effective. Out of all the AS thriller's I watched, this was my favourite. It uses a non-diegetic soundtrack to build up the audience's tension, and I personally thought this worked really well. The close up of the eye is very effective, as it makes you wonder what they're looking at. The transitions used looked really tidy, and were placed well. This AS thriller definitely deserved an A, and full marks.

StoryBoard of our thriller

Twitter page

We have created a Twitter Account so we are able to promote our company and make our Thriller film known to the target audience. We will post tweets to allow the audience to keep updated with the latest news to do with our company.

 

Rivergate Productions Logo

First Initial Ideas for our Thriller

Mood Board Analysis

The mood board was made up of pictures and word associated with thriller movies and what the audience would expect to find within a thriller movie. The mood board gives us something to aspire to and gives us creativity and ideas for us to use for our main thriller task. As you can see all the colours that are used are dark and dull with no bright colours, this gives us an idea for the mood that the thriller will be setting. If bright colours were used it would completely take the effect of the tension building away from the audience and wouldnt let the film have a mystery feel to the movie.
The connotations of the colours used in these photos; red and black, is blood, aggression, fear, death and doesnt have any nice connotations as that would create a completely different effect for the film. We will definately take inspiration from these photos and will make sure the colours and lighting that we use have connotations to thrillers and will create the right suspense for the audience.
These images of are all very simple and not telling to the audience much so they do not give too much away. Which is something we will use for our thriller opening because we do not want to give much away too soon but we have to show a sense of storyline but simplistically. The images do not give much away so this is a clever way to intrigue and get the audience more interested so thic might be something we use in the film poster we will create.

Mood Board

Media mood board by

Survey Monkey

 

PSYCHOGRAPHICS

DEMOGRAPHICS

Audience Research - Joe Varty

Questionaire answer

Here I have recorded somebody answering our questionaire we created. These results will show evidence for our phycographics and demograpics. We will link our results to them at the end once we have all of our results in.

Thriller questionnaire

I emailed my mum the thriller questionnaire so she was able to get her work collegues to answer it and give me feedback.

Thriller Questionnaire

Thriller Questionnaire by

Insidious (2010) Analysis of the Title Sequence

The Woman In Black Comparison