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

A thriller is a genre of film that uses many forms of conventions to create and form

Dramatic peaks of tension throughout, by wrapping itself in mystery; using red

herrings & cliff-hangers that build up suspense, uncertainty, excitement and terror.

We were given the opportunity to create a media product with the final cut lasting a maximum of two minutes with these intentions in mind.

The codes and conventions of the thriller genre are:

·       -  A lot of mystery, darkness, fast pace and suspense

·        - Music that builds tension, both diegetic sound but usually Non diegetic sound can build tension just as equally when used properly

·          - The whole mood of the film can be changed with lighting, especially the use of shadow.

·        -  Use of flashbacks and mysterious footage

·       -  Red herrings are used to throw the viewer onto a thought which will lead to a wrong conclusion – meaning the end result may surprise them.

Our thriller focuses highly on the psychological effects of drugs and speaks on a

Broad Scale to viewers about the anxiety and stress that can come from drugs, this

Could be classed as a unconventional approach to shooting a typical thriller film. By using primarily short and snappy flash backs throughout, I believe dramatic tension and suspense are created and keep the viewers enticed throughout the film leaving them wanting more. We filmed our thriller with the intention of sticking to our script and plot and received a variety of effective shots that we shortened and integrated to create high and low points of tension where needed. Doing this allowed us to fit in a lot of points we wanted covered in our short thriller opening adding lighting and sound effects to emphasis them.

The primary conventions we used throughout the product were the use of Flash backs, Fast paced shooting/Editing of scenes, sound and use of light and darkness. These were our primary conventions as we felt they all fit with our sub genre of thriller; Psychological thriller. The use of flash backs were heavily integrated into the plot as mystery and confusion envelops the mind of the viewer as they are confused and uncertain of what is going on. Switching from the conservatory to the lake scene allows the audience to see how the flashbacks are affecting the protagonists mind; as the flashbacks continue to happen, he begins to lose more and more concentration until eventually, fully losing consciousness.

‘As the flashbacks continue to happen, he begins to lose more and more concentration until eventually, fully losing consciousness.’

Typical conventions – Shots & mis en scene

‘Phone booth’ (2002) is a typical example of a unconventional thriller. There is very little darkness or action within the film as it focuses more on the connection between the killer and the victim. This connection being the strongest link to the thriller genre as u experience the story through the killers point of view as you see the effects on the male protagonist as the story continues and unravels with the use of conventions, flashbacks  and fast paced editing. I wouldn’t class this film as a thriller but it more strongly relates to our sub genre of thriller; a psychological thriller, as instead of showing you like a conventional thriller it plays with your mind and thoughts process instead.

Physiological thrillers are different 

from conventional thrillers as rather than focus on showing you the action to build up tension it often mixes up the conventions by losing one feature and focusing and enhancing another, ‘phone booth’ did this by focusing on the mind and life of the protagonist building up tension in distinct stages which is what we concentrated on with our thriller. We took these ideas along with conventions from other thrillers like ‘The happening’ where the mis en scene is conventional and begins calm however shows the viewer distinct changes in sound and behaviour to create suspense and tension; for example, ‘the happening’ begins with a shot of the sky with the clouds moving slowly and diegetic sound of wind building creating tension as a sense of unknown approaches then takes you to the normality of a ordinary day in central park. People walking around, dogs barking, children playing then it focus on two women on a bench continuing the idea of normality. A diegetic sound is then heard by one of the women quickly changing the atmosphere and mood of the scene. A scream followed by the stand still of everyone in park around this on women creates, supernatural, unexplainable and confusing emotions as the suspense of the unknown are unleashed scaring the protagonist and the viewer. We applied this conventional idea of trigger to signify change to our product as these films proved their effectiveness in creating terror and suspense, our trigger being the drug itself.

We selected conventions that we believed would be the most effective with some creative idea’s on how to portray them, for example, a first person shot of Ryan laying on the floor as he regains consciousness… he has no idea what has happened, where he is or where his friends are… he looks around frantically trying to regain his memory but stops to see his friends fighting, struggling as he realises one of his friends is holding a knife to the others neck. How has this happened? Why is this happening? These are things streaming through his head frantically, he can’t understand what is happening and this creates a sense of suspense and builds tension, the audience is going through these same thoughts and feeling’s as it has been shot in a first person perspective. Rapidly cutting to the highest points of tension in a scene and cutting out the slow paced and unneeded parts allows for a continuous and effective viewing experience that grabs the viewer’s attention and keeps them on edge. It also distorts reality and creates questions to be asked, whether or not they are answered is the whole point, people always want to know what happens next and so filming our thriller in this way keeps them guessing and hungry for more.    

Sound:

Sound is a very important element when creating suspense, tension and emotion in the viewers mind. It can be used as a signifier to express change or to imply something is approaching and so can be very effective when creating the right atmosphere in a scene. Knowing this we decided the eeriness of the piano was ideal for the atmosphere we needed to create. Starting slowly, and calmly building up and up, by getting faster and louder as the story progresses whilst the viewer experiences the protagonist getting dragged deeper into his memories of the events that took place. Improving the effectiveness of our intended atmosphere as both the pace of shots are increased, co-ordinate to the pace of music, adding another emotional layer to our product. 

 

Both of the shots above intend to clearly show the depressive, worried faces of the characters. The conventions used to do this in both shots is the use of close-ups. Close ups are an effective convention to present emotions as there is nothing else to look at other than that emotion.

The feelings felt in our Thriller are very similar to the feelings you would feel from many other famous Thrillers such as Memento and The Happening this shows we were effective at matching the Thriller genre with our conventions. These thrillers also have psychological hints to them as with my product, memento also shares different time scales which has a huge impact on the viewer. The main feelings felt in both my product, Memento and The Happening are confusion, tension, depression and darkness. 

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

Vertigo films (uk) distributes many films of a similar genre and I think would be good choice for the distribution of our thriller.  Films such as; Shrooms, Monsters & Wakewood all use tension and suspense to keep there viewers interested, similar to what we have tried to produce. ‘Shrooms’ is a film closely related to our thriller as it uses the effects of the drug ‘magic mushrooms’  to create a host of mystery and confusion throughout to disguise the true reality and fatal effects some of these drugs can have other wise described as ‘a bad trip’.  Our film is based on an unknown; perhaps untested drug, that has unknown effects on the user, and shows how peer pressure and age can have a dramatic effect on the amount of people that decide to try drugs in their life. Our thriller focuses on what some of those unknown effects could be… in this case the fatal and mind destroying effects. We chose do our thriller in this way as it clearly shows how quickly things can go from good to bad as we try to get to the point by creating a worst case scenario in which we could portray these effects clearly. 

Vertigo films (UK) only distribute four films a year, so I imagine the selection process for which films they decide to move a head with is pretty tough, however our media product is only the beginning and with time and planning could be adapted and created into a full length media product that could prove very appealing to this distribution company. ‘The happening’ is another film that uses similar conventions too our own. Quick fast paced shots and the feeling of the unknown all come into both pieces as is common with the typical thriller genre. It was distributed by 20^th century fox which is one of 6 major film studies in America producing hundreds of films and TV shows. This company could also be used to distribute our thriller as it can guarantee large viewer ratings because it’s such a well known company. However again to use this company would be very expensive and prove unpractical to use as our institution.  I believe vertigo films would be a good choice to distribute our film as it has produced films of a similar genre in the past with great successes, is UK based and would be more suitable over large American multimillion dollar corporation. 

In my research I found that Film 4 productions were a far more appealing institution to distribute our film. Film 4 develops and co-finances films that deal with the most innovated talent in the UK.  The reason this is ideal for our choice of institution is that they are UK based and work with new or established producers meaning a higher chance of this company taking on our film. The other benefits of using film 4 as our institution is that it has a large viewing audience within the UK because it is a well known film institution. They show films everyday on there own channel and rake in a considerable viewer rating.

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

From way back when we filmed our prelim to present I feel I have learnt a lot of valuable editing and filming techniques that I can use and take forward into future media production’s, ranging from key editing techniques on the Apple Macs such as, image stabilizer, video smoothing & cutting too editing and recording sound on software like audacity allowing us to get the best sound for our production.   Basic knowledge of using the Macs software during the editing of our prelim has advanced into a clear and useful knowledge of the many different features and helpful applications that are available.

Skills development

Our preliminary task was given, to give us a basic understanding of key skills used in media:

-           180 degree rule,

-           Golden mean

-           Continuity

-           Filming

-           Editing

 The 180 degree rule is essential in any piece of media because its keeps the action in line meaning the viewer does not get confused while watching. In our preliminary task we filmed using this rule which was effective, making it easy to follow which is what we needed for our final media project. We applied the same rule to our final project to ensure it did not confuse the audience, developing and building on it by adding a broader variety of camera shot and angles like the over head, birds eye view shot we used to get a close up on the struggle between the two drug induced teens.

We found that representation can be shown through various types of camera angles and shots for example; birds eye view shot used to emphasis the struggle between the two friends, pan shot to set the scene. Building on this we found that we could use these techniques to portray characters in a certain way, the victim on the floor to signify weakness, the reflection of the killer in the bloody, water to show dominance and power. Filming techniques were a key part of this project as we needed to provoke the correct audience reaction. We wanted the audience to have a constant sense of mystery and uncertainty and I believe we achieved this using these conventions, flashbacks, fast paced shots, heightened colour and slow motion.

Editing our prelim was fairly straight forward; it was a minuet long, with a few basic shots and camera angles. When it came to editing our final media product, this was not the case, there was a lot more footage that needed to be cropped and cut, with a complex plot to follow. However using what we had learnt from our prelim we dealt with editing in steps

-          Cropping all shots (picking the best shot from three)

-          Piecing the footage together accordingly

-          Adding effects to key scenes (motion blur, Heightened colours)

-          Recording and editing audio (using audacity)

-          Adding audio to product

-          Adding sound effects too key scenes (thunder, rain)

  

Strengths & weaknesses of Prelim

Strengths:

-          ran smoothly

-          effective camera angles

-          interesting plot

-          Effective editing

Weaknesses:

-          acute variety of shots

-          continuity errors

-          poor dialogue

These were the main strengths and weaknesses of our thriller product that I picked out. I was keen to incorporate these strengths and improve on the weaknesses for the final product. A wider variety of shots was essential if we wanted diversity in our product, we wanted to keep the audience engaged at all times.

Another thing I took from this experience was learning never to rely on the weather or alternative transport as on multiple accessions due to these factors filming was halted and postponed which in reality was extremely ‘time wasting’ and annoying for both me and Laurence. Being prepared with the correct equipment and props on filming days allowed us to make good use of time; once set up, not having to worry about anything and getting straight down to business.  Organisation is key to making good use of time and ultimately ensuring you receive good footage on the day and I have applied these skills to my other subjects making this a very useful skill to take forward.

Problems with communication and team work can be a contributing factor to the waste of valuable time, however thankfully deciding to work in a two man group paid off which allowed us to easily and clearly convey our thoughts, feeling’s and ideas towards each other about the thriller and the direction we wanted to take it. This proved to be a major advantage on filming days as any problems could be addressed and dealt with quickly and efficiently.

Overall this experience has taught me many valuable and useful skills that I can apply to future media products and work in general. It had some frustration moments and a lot of funny ones however ultimately was an enjoyable experience and I look forward to taking these skills on to my future media products.

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.