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.