Evaluation

How did you attract/address your audience?

There were many ways in which i attempted to attract/address my audience. They were first attracted to the main components of my short opening thriller such as the plot, setting and characters etc. The setting for my media product was used to target a specific segment of society. For example, my short clip was filmed outside a school, near a closed off, abandoned house. This could attract young teenagers from local urban areas as they have an interest in abandoned areas

The storyline of the media product determines whether the audience will carry on watching the movie. If the storyline is easy to predict and boring which many thrillers are, then the audience may get bored and stop watching. If the storyline is too complex for the audience, they may lose interest and decide to stop watching. I tried to make my thriller appeal to the audience, meeting somewhere in the middle of not too complex, but entertaining. This is to ensure my audience enjoy the thriller.

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

The conventions of my thriller were categorised under 5 different areas, these areas being;

Introduction of characters
Psychological thriller
Setting
Music
Titles

Introduction of characters

The introduction of the characters is fairly obvious throughout the opening scene. As i find it hard to trust other actors, i went for a scenery/thrilling opening scene to contradict the psychological thriller. I believe using one character instead of two in the opening scene delays the exceitement, but hints it. So that the audience will want to carry on watching but will not be able to guess what will happen later in the film. By introducing the characters at the end of the scene it allows the story to be told of what has happened in the past. I believe this is a good way of portraying the story as it saves images which are more exciting for a further point in the film.

Psychological thriller

As the thriller we have chosen is a psychological thriller, we can play with the audience mind but not making it too complex. This allows us to use images such as scenery to enforce the story and really portray it. The story mainly consists of a build up into what will happen during the rest of the film. As the audience know what has happened previously, the have an idea of what will happen next but are limited to ask questions such as 'do they survive?'

Setting

The setting we have chose is a wood and abandoned house which appeals to the audience as it scares them. Abandoned houses have always been portrayed as spooky, so this is the main reason we chose to film it there. The house is used as a summer home for a couple but only the man has appeared in the opening scene. The story uses the house to interest the audience in the opening scene, getting them ready for what happens next.

Music

The music we have chose is slow, dark and gloomy music which was chosen because it really relates to the opening scene. We used the idea of the strangers opening scene which is similar to ours. This music really allowed us to express the story and relates well to the actions of the music. Such as the change in sound when the car drives past.

Titles 

We searched a lot of titles, the main title we came up with was 'In darkness they wait'. This is because it uses the darkness well with the storyline, and portrays to the audience that 'they' ensures their are more than one person used in the film, so they have more to look forward to after the opening scene.

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

The reasearch and planning progression has seen the vast improvements in my knowledge. The preliminary task reasearch consited of minimal thinking and minimal research this was partly due to there being a strict product brief in place. However as this was the first stage that I had to plan or research into a media product, consequently everything that was achieved was learnt. The planning was formulating the lines of dialogue between the characters and where and how these would be spoken. Looking back now I can say that my planning was an area where I learnt about dialogue and how to represent what I wanted into my media product. I have learnt many things which have allowed me to progress from my preliminary task to now. The first being the use of the digital technology used to film the actual footage. At first i had no idea of how to use this technology but with a little help and practice i was able to learn and master. I also have been able to use the editting technology well as we have spent hours practicing using. I do not think i have mastered the full use of this programme and wish to carry on practicing until i do. But for now, i believe i have made a relatively good effort in doing so. The main way i have progressed is my time management. Although i have not kept to my time management well when crteating this project, i have learnt my lesson in trying to fit all the work in, in little time. The full media product has seen major improvements in both research and planning which included, questionnaires, analysing media products both in the opening sequence and the title analysis. All of this research has taught me about the conventions of the thriller opening sequences as well as title sequences. The planning aspect of my full product involved taking what I had learnt in the research and adapting it to what I wanted to achieve in my media product. I used brainstorming, storyboarding, location scouting and clothes and props planning.

 

Editting

During the editing process myself and Jack shared an equal amount of ideas and work on the video opening sequence. The main concept of the film was for it to be slow and build up tension while telling the story to the audience so that they would understand what is going on within the opening sequence and the shots that we have filmed make sense. For this to work we needed to put in a large amount of editing as we needed to cut each filmed sequence so that it would have the effect that we wanted and add tension through the transitions of each sequence and through the music that we had found from an independant website which allows you to download free sounds which we could then use to go with our film to again help add the tension that we wanted to make the psycological thriller look and sound authentic. We both had littel knowledge of how to use the adobe proffesional video editor which caused us to have many problems when editing and made this process last much longer than normal. We both started by inputting the videos that we had filmed into the editor and had to render them so that they would play normally as they where filmed in high denfinition they would not play properly if this was not done. Next we played with the transitions which are key parts of the opening sequence as these are what creates the tension btween each sequence with the music. We found that the tranisition called 'fade to black' worked the best with our video as the slow dark transitions helped to add tension of what was about to show up in the sequence, and also allowed the audience to start asking questions which is what the research showed is vital to creating the suspense and tesnion that we wanted.



I then cut the video into sequences which I put into order so that the video would make sense when played back to the audience. We had a problem with this as at first we did not know how we do this to the video and after founding out with help from our teacher I was able to cut the video properly. After this stage Jack added in the titles which I came up with which started to tell the story of the film and helped to set the scene of the opening shots.



We then put in all of the transitions between each of the sequences which made to the film look proffesional and added the tension and questions that we were going for. The last parts where adding in the music that we had downloaded from the free website which really helped to add tension and I added the title sequence at the start of the film which we both decided should be simple and look the same of the rest of the titles within the film as this helps to keep the continuity of the opening sequence.





Final Edit: