How did you attract and address your audience?

We used the results from our questionnaire to determine who our target audience would be and what to include in our thriller to attract them. It was clear from our results that most of the feedback we received about the age of audience a thriller should be aimed at is 15-18 ‘there are traditionally scenes of violence and bad language’. The BBFC is the company that deals with the classification of film certificates, meaning any new film that has produced must classified by them before release.

BBFC Classification 15:

-          Drug taking may be shown but the film as a whole must not promote or encourage drug misuse. The misuse of easily accessible and highly dangerous substances (for example, aerosols or solvents) is unlikely to be acceptable

We kept this in mind when pitching our idea, we knew we couldn’t feature too much drug use/abuse but to achieve the right reaction from the audience, we didn’t need too. We only needed enough to show peer pressure in motion and the drug abuse itself.  using this information allowed us a wider scale of conventions we could include, for example nudity, violence, gore and drug use could all be used if we wanted, drug use being the idea we decided to incorporate.

‘The villain is usually a shady and mysterious character’ 

This is a fairly typical and conventional view towards villains within thrillers and horrors. It is widely used as it appeals to the audience as these characters traditionally bring a lot of dramatic tension and suspense. ‘The Joker’ is a character/villain from ‘The Dark Night’ played by Heath Ledger. The Joker is the Batman’s worst enemy, he isn’t a conventional criminal, he doesn’t look for money or power… all he cares about is destruction, playing with the basic physics of it all, what would this city do if I blew up a hospital? And the minds and lives of the people around him with no regard to life and death. This is something the batman has never seen or faced before which builds and develops into a strong connection between these two characters, the audience sees and experiences this connection drawing there attention, keeping them enticed in the film.

Conner played the role of John (Ryan’s friend) he appears calm, sensible yet worried when the mentioning of drugs accurse. The audience see clearly that this character does not want to participate, which implies that he is sensible and law abiding citizen. However as Ryan and James begin to push him to try it, using peer pressure and superior size to threaten him, he gives in and tries the drug. This scatters any good

Idea the audience may have felt towards him and like many others, he tries the new, unknown drug. At this point the drug has kicked in… the audience are unaware and confused as to wear these characters have gone and what they are doing. This was the perfect opportunity to show how quickly people can change and go from good, to bad, to worse. This unlikely, sensible little boy has taken this drug and the next thing the audience sees is him wielding a knife to another person’s neck, creating peaks of thrilling tension. A split personality, bloodlust, partial madness, all emotions we wanted this character to convey as we believed it would keep our audience enticed. When deciding what our thriller would be and what we wanted to include, it became apparent fairly quickly that it was going to be unconventional and unique. Despite this we believed a fresh new take on the thriller genre could be a great way to attract and receive a good response from our audience and that it was worth the risk. 

When asking about location and set most people opted for an unknown, eerie set location so we took this into consideration on deciding on a suitable location however we knew it didn’t matter to much considering thrillers can be set anywhere. Despite this our thriller was shot in a local area of the woods after attempts failed at filming at our original set location due to poor weather and transportation issues. We visited a remote location within the woods to minimise pedestrians and ensure that the thriller had a unique scene.

(Effects: Dream, High saturation)                                     (Effects: Vignette)    
       

We believed the location we had selected was ideal as it was remote, small and had a lot to offer the mis-en-scene. It is a unique location that we knew would appeal to the audience because of its aesthetic appearance.

We also edited a lot of shots; nearly all, using effects on the Apple Macs to provide more depth and feel to the scene. We used effects like ‘vignette’ and ‘Dream’ to emphasis the appeal for the audience, the shot above has been edited with ‘Dream’ as the effect. This shot was used to represent the boys vision and personal effects after the drug had been taken; heightened colours filmed using the camera effect ‘High saturation’ and then added the blurry curtain effect to frame the shot ‘dream’ to further emphasis the effect and the shot above is the result.

From posting this video on Facebook i got some very useful feedback, most of which was positive, here are the comments from the Video;

Alexia Martins good job, and nice effects ;)

Tinah Mummytobe Rye nice :P x

Kel Pinchin Good camera angles, nice effects. Multiple cuts in places really was effective. Nice confusing opening to a psychological thriller, will keep people watching to see what happens.

Emily 'Chubs' Dougall i like the variety of camera shots and effects, i also like the music as it works really well with the piece. i also think its a good plot and a good story to open a thriller with. To improve maybe do more with your titles? other than that its reaaaaaaaaaaaal good :)

Amy King Good variety of camera angles, and effects used... I like the birds-eye view shot, I think that works really well. Good start to a thriller, keeps people guessing and wanting to watch more to find out what happens

Callum James Cole It's good dude. Works really well.

Marc Bull Fryer That's Gd man

All of the comments above clearly show that our target audience recognises the effectiveness of the conventions that we used.

Filming in two time scales also attracted the interest of veiwers as it adds more to the storyline and adds hints of confusion. Another attarction was concept of a psychadelic thriller which is quite un-heard of  to many. Also the wide range of effects used in the product has a very enticing, attractive effect on the veiwer.

What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing this media product?

Like any process you get better with practice; this media product helped us to learn to using I-movie in order to get the best possible look and feel from the footage we captured, whether editing the movie itself on I movie or the sound track on Audacity.  We had learnt previously about the 180 degree rule, the golden mean; if it the scene is of importance and using camera angles effectively to portray expressions and emotions from our prelim task and new these things needed to be taken into account when filming our final thriller film. After set relocations, and poor weather conditions we eventually managed to get enough footage to create our product and I believe we captured some effective and enticing shots. 

 

Left - (Audacity)

(I-Movie) - Right

To get the best quality footage on camera we had to learn about camera positioning, how to operate a tri-pod and lighting conditions. The best looking shot is stable and well lit so we aimed to ensure a these conditions were met. In the conservatory scenes we had dim lighting however this is what we wanted to portray the effect we wanted, we used the tripod to get steady, smooth shots of the actor and mis-en-scene. However on our filming day we were without a tripod and lighting conditions were beginning to fade so we had to make use of what we had… our bare hands. We did each shot multiple times being as steady as possible to make up for lack of equipment and were forced to work fast due to the fading sunlight.

  

To edit our product after collecting and importing our footage on to a Mac was fairly new to both of us; we were inexperienced and so were not fully aware of the capabilities of this editing software. We started of by altering different function on I-movie to see the different effect we could get for each shot, using knowledge we took from editing our prelim; however, after a while we discovered lots of little tricks like ‘Video smoothing’ to further stabilize our shots and nice effects like ‘Dream’ ‘Slow motion’ and ‘high saturation’ that we added to enhance the feel and emphasis the key points of our thriller movie. Unfortunately on the day of filming we had no tripod (stuck in boot of mate’s car) and were forced to film free hand making sure we held the camera as steady as possible… however its almost impossible to get a completely stable shot this way and so by using the ‘Video smoothing’ tool we improved shot stability which allowed us to take out screen shaking and improve the overall professionalism of the product.

We also added titles and credits to name our product and give credit were credit was due. Having titles slide in and out of shots was effective and easy and an ideal way to get information across. However, saying this I would have preferred an alternate method of incorporating titles to keep the audience focused and enticed in our thriller rather than computer generated effects, for example we could have written our titles and credits on leaves, trees, and walls or in blood which would have made for an effective alternative. When it came to sound we wanted to use minimal sound effects to keep the believability and realism of the film. We used ‘Thunder’ and ‘heavy rain’ in a few conservatory shots to give the scene more depth and add a sense or mystery and wonder, finding, adding and removing sound until we felt the scene was perfect.

For the soundtrack in our piece I wanted; from the start, to create the music from scratch using just a piano to create an eerie and atmospheric piece of music to accompany our dark, flashback styled thriller. We did not have the permission or knowledge to use the professional recording studio that was unavailable to us within the school facilities and I believe this to be a point of improvement when next creating a media product; learn to use the recording studio, if this was possible the music would have been a lot crisper and more effective in my opinion. We did however have a laptop with recording capabilities, which did a fairly good job of recording the piece. We took time out of lesson to record, we set up the recording functions on the laptop and I proceeded to play. During this process we found that because we were only recording using a laptop, background noise and vibrations also got picked up by the microphone. This meant that the sound was not crisp diluting the emotion of the peace. To try overcome this problem we recorded multiple times at different volume levels and keyboard settings, ‘Grand piano’ ‘Upright piano’ ‘Strings’ until we got the best quality sound.

For the budget we had. The piece was recorded multiple times to give us a range or sounds and tones for us to then select the most effective. Now that we had the music recorded it was time to edit  and tweak any areas of the song that sounded flat or echoed and Laurence accomplished this by using the software Audacity.  

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our thriller was designed to portray  3 characters on a natural; quiet, calm, ordinary, day fishing on a small lake in the woods and so our characters were dressed in typical outdoor clothing however we leaned towards the stereotype ‘Chavs’ and ‘Druggies’ by wearing hoodies and joggers. Wearing typical makes such as ‘Nike’ and ‘Adidas’ clearly represented this stereotypical view that we wanted to get across to our audience. There are many different aspects to think about when trying to achieve correct representation of character; ages, gender, social groups, are just a few.

- Age

Age can effect representation drastically, depending on who the character you’re representing is. James bond for example; slick, charming, skilled and professional are his main characteristics and so the actors that play him are aged roughly 30-45. A fully grown man in lemans terms which is what the audience would expect to see. By this I mean if a character’s profile is to be a secret agent, stereotypically we think of a mature male/female not a 10 year old child or 87 year old man.

-Gender

Gender is important when thinking about representation. Both male and female can play or act almost any role and work under the same conditions in this age, due to equality. When specifically targeting the social group ‘Chavs’ the male and female dress code are similar with distinct differences and its these differences that need to clearly be portrayed when representing a character.

 

 Male ‘chavs’ typically wearing ‘Adidas’ and ‘Nike’ clothing, jeans, chains (bling) and track suits are common with the main colours being white and blue

Women ‘Chavs’ typically wearing ‘Adidas’ and ‘Nike’ leggings, jeans, track suits and chains (bling) with main colours being white, pink and blue.

When it came to dialogue we used a lot of swearing and sayings such as ‘mate’, ‘bud’ ‘geez’ to stay true to the stereotype of ‘Chav’. Many different factors make up character and when thinking about this particular character, social group, we could use ‘Accents, clothing and body language to correctly represent these characters to maximise believability and realism however during the editing of our product we decided the piece would be more effective with minimal dialogue and so most dialogue was cut.

Our killer is unconventional as well as unpredictable. He is both small in stature and young in age making him a very unlikely killer. When thinking about correct representation and image we discussed clothing and all wore ‘Nike’ or ‘Adidas’ for the shoot. Our killer wore a bright blue ‘Nike’ hoodie sticking to the image we wanted. His behaviour, to begin with  is typical, the subject of drugs has been brought into the situation and he feels both worried, as he has previously learnt about the effects drugs can have and curious, as he has never tried them before. There is a dramatic change in behaviour after he takes the drug which is clearly shown when he holds the knife to his friend’s neck. This represents the powerful effect ‘Drugs’ have on the mind and body and their ability to alter the way one thinks.

Filming evaluation

On the day of filming everything that could have gone wrong, did. we were scheduled to get a lift to our desired shoot location (Pickworth lakes) however, due to unforeseen circumstances, our driver did not show, putting the shoot behind drastically. however despite this we cracked on with what we could do... shooting the conservatory scenes (resulting in smooth and effective footage) overall us being happy with the first day's shoot.

As previously, our driver had not shown, we promptly set another time and date and thankfully this time we got our lift. we arrived at our desired location however ten minuets in, heavy rain set in and we were unfortuanatly forced to return (we attempted to shoot in the rain however could not get desired shots to do fear of damaging equipment)

after two failures we decided to change location to somewhere more local  that we could reach on foot (Bourne woods) there we found an ideal location to shoot as it was remote and unused by the public. however on the day of shooting we had no tripod (stuck in boot of car) and so were forced to shoot free hand. after around four hours of shooting various scenes multiple times we had collected enough footage to create our product.

AS Media Studies: Fragmented Memories

AS Media Studies: Fragmented Memories

Storyboard

Fishing scene:

1) Pan shot of

Environment,

Shots of teens fishing,

Mainly wide angle shots    

        

2) Shot of Laurie approaching with a bottle of pills in hand,

Close up of Laurie shaking bottle of pills,

Close up of Laurie talking about the drug.

3) Close up of Conner pulling concerned face,

Conner expresses that he does not like what’s happening

4) Close up of  Steven pressuring Conner.

Extreme close up of pills in hand, then pills being given out.

5) Close up of pills being taken; switching between each character.

6) Same pan shot as at the start but with high saturation to emphasise the effects of the drug.

7) Tension rises Conner grabs a knife.

Steven witnesses Conner threatening Laurie.

8) Steven witnesses the murder of his best friend (not shown)

Conner lunges for Steven but he escapes.

9) Shots of Stevens escape

As all of the fishing scene is filmed as a flashback the fishing scene shots will be alternating with the following shots;

1)      Steven working in conservatory ( 3-4 alternations between this and fishing scene)

2)      Steven Collapsing from trauma

3)      Steven coughing up blood from drugs long term side effects. ( 2-3 alternations of this.

Location

Our initial location idea was that the fishing scenes would be filmed at Pickworth lakes  and the office scenes would be filmed in Stevens conservatory (with the appropriate mise-en-scene to create an office).

But after a pilot filming test we found that the person who was supposed to be driving us was extremely unreliable so we decided to choose a more local location to ensure we could get the right amount of shots and have plenty of time to do it, so we chose Bourne woods ponds. All though we where advised not to use a local location we thought this location was fairly suitable as we have chosen to film at the smaller pond which is less familiar to locals and is out of the way of families.