CONNOR BARBOR

AS Media Coursework Evaluation

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

In our final product the generic conventions of a thriller arent generally challenged, they are more or less follow more generic conventions of a thriller for example, a grabbing narrative. The first instance of this generic thriller is when the protagonist is shaving, the shot is a close up which indicates to the audience that the shaving is significant. The razor connotes a blade or weapon, which is a lead onto the story and what is going to happen later on, razors slice objects and in the sense of a thriller, the audience could recognize that there was going to be some form of murder in this feature. Another feature of how we kept the generic convention was how we suggested that the location of scenes where separate, something specific that was hard about our film was the fact two people were doing the same thing made it even more of a challenge, however cross fades to black is appropriate places gave the audience the appreciate feeling of differentiation between scenes. To keep the audience not believing it was a flash back/forward and keep the generic conventions of a contemporary film, as the characters got dressed they matched each other, when one was ready so was the other one. However this could be seen as a generic convention if the storyline is seeming obscure of undeceive, it leads the audience to their own devices to figure out what is going to happen. Another would be our choice of music, as much as it is eary and dark. The conventions of a thriller score and seedy and never particularly miss leading. I believe we developed the conventions of thriller scores, as much as it matched the conventions, it had some aspects of horrors in the score, at any minute it sounded like it was going to cut and have an extremely high pitched violin and there was going to be something that would jump the audience out of the seat.

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

An example of our score work was compared to the film Se7en. The picture from our film was taken at point (0:54). The score in Se7en was very similar to ours. They both were slow at times and very seedy. Both had a considerable amount of suspense as that s their primary objective. I am pleased that our score matches the generic conventions of a thriller. We found the score for our music on the internet on a royalty free source. This piece and around 5 others were played over our final film. We chose this one and edited it down. We wanted the peak parts of the piece and the highest volume parts to be in the the most appropriate places, for example we wanted a screech to unfold while our antagonist was pulling out the knife for impact. Se7en does the same as when the antagonist in Se7en cuts the skin of his fingers the music shutters and screeches because that s all for effect is makes the audience focus in and feel more vulnerable and uncomfortable watching it.

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

The titles from our thriller convention both reflected the stereotypical mysterious and dark aspects of a physiological thriller. Our titles faded downwards and had a slow zoom inwards. The tittles even though they where white were slightly low opacity. The low opacity ties in with the thriller convention of a mystery. We liked the idea of have multi sub genres for our thriller as that would make our film more enjoyable and therefore appealing to the audience. The titles from our film on this picture was at point (1:45). The other was from the film The Prestige, another thriller that includes some of sub genres such as crime and mystery. We have matched the generic conventions of thriller because of real media products such as the prestige use the same titles aspects as us. The minimal background and title font again holds the characteristic of a mystery, because there is less to look at, this reflects back onto the sub genre, the audience knows less about the outcome of the film, therefore we have used the convention of the titles effectively in my opinion.

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

However, my only critism to the titles was we did not keep a house style. We had 3 different types of titles, which I did not approve on in the end. The angels productions (at point 0:20) was too flash compared too the reduced titles. However, it was the production title, which means normally companies have there own title for brand regonistion. For example, paramount have the stars collecting around a mountain. In this case we should of put this title at the start of the piece, to not distub the rest of the titles and film. The other different title was rose (at point 0:23), which was the title for the film. It was not flash and it did fit which I was pleased about. We as a group wanted a title for Rose to be something different to the others and the original titles where too small and we wanted to make it more of a impact, not to mention we wanted to title Rose to be red. None the less we are happy with our rose title.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The film was very atypical in the sense we included a red herring, because we were using the audience stereotypes of males being the antagonist in films to lead them on. We only showed the audience that the female was the at the end to give the story some plot twist. We didnt want to take the audience for the same old story line of man kills woman. We wanted our film to be different and making the women that antagonist would have been different, plus we enjoyed the idea of having cuts between the two characters changing. This idea of changing leads me onto the next point of the question, the social we try to aim at is around late teenager from 16 to young middle aged adults around 30. The reason our targeted social is this age because the is the most popular age that people go out for nights, so they connect with the characters on getting ready to go out for the night. We believe our product represents the target social group because as they as the most common for going out at night, this also means they are the consistent for dating,. Our piece is about two people going out on a date with the womens intention on murdering the man, reason? As the audience knows none. But thats the beauty of it, because the social group is constantly in the situation the audience makes there own assumptions about why. However that our social group is targeted at around 16+ our rating is a 15 because the film itself would not show the content and the vivid imagination of the social age group. However, we may have presented that age group in a negative way, most murder films involving love are characters at around this age group, which could imply they are sensitive to love at this point and could make the audience feel uncomfortable.

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

Touchstone Picture is a division of Walt Disney Studios. Founded in 1984 in California where the Head Quarters in located they specialize in motion picture. They quickly broke off from the Walt Disney path as they wanted to do little family and cartoon films as possible and focus on more older rated films. Recently DreamWorks signed a deal with touchstone to release their productions through touchstone pictures for the next seven years, starting in 2011. Not only do Touchtone stay within the boundaries of film based media. They stretch to televised media in TV series. They have produced such television series as Lost, Greys Anatomy and Scrubs. I believe that Touchstone Pictures would distribute our product as they have a tendency to distribute more mature themes and darker tones than those of other distributers would do. For example they distributed The Prestige, Armageddon and Good Morning Vietnam. A lot of the films the produce have content and themes similar to ours. Most beneficially they arent afraid to take on quite high budget productions and advertising costs and they are rather relentless compared to other distributors. They have a reputation of making the right choices in the industry and are reliable as producers. Touchstone unlike some distributers have very little say to the editors and the directors have very little change. This means very little is changed from the original story which pleases everyone. Again, Touchstone has known to be very loyal as Production companies once distributed by Touchstone have a tendency to distrube again without much convincing, this is a bonus for film makers as that is one side of film maker they dont have to stress about.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Because of the mature themes within our piece for example the dark side of love, murder and mystery. We feel the audience would be from age 16 to 30. However, contrast to beginning at 16, our film is rated 15 as some of the mature themes could be translated into something else through slightly younger minds and there would be made appropriate. The reason why our target audience is 16 to 30 is because of the theme of going out on dates and getting ready for night life. People at this age could relate to the actions being shown on scene such as applying lipstick and locking cufflinks.

How did you attract or address your audience?

The aim of how we attracted out audience and keep them interested in our film. Was to get them hooked, get the story to be gripping so the viewer would want to watch it to the end. We used this by using characters of the same age so that the audience could relate to them and get stuck in. In my opinion within the first 10 seconds people want to see what happens in the end, as the extreme close up of the shaving is so powerful enough to grab the attention of everyone watching. That is why we put that right at the start to set the tone for the rest of the film. Just the general connection between characters and audience is strong enough to get the audience hooked. Plus the reason why we had a lot of Reponses asking to see what happens left is the fact our ending can lead any audience of in a multitude of different ideas, for example what is going to do with the knife? What's the connection between Her and James? Boyfriend? Serial Kill? We can tell we have succeeded in our film to address and connect with our because over 80% of the people watching enjoyed our film and wanted to see it again.

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

I came into media knowing a fair bit about software and computers. So when we got placed into each of our film project groups Myself and Harriet tried to help the other two as much as we could. Our primary program we used for editing the footage for both the final product and practice films was Premiere Pro. I have some experience in it and my Diploma trained me in using the basics of it. After using it both at school and at home I really got the hang of basic editing, I was able to create our final film easily. The only problem we could have solved was how we moved our film about, it was a pretty solid idea and it worked. We use my 1 Terabyte external hard drive, placed all the footage and all the files into one folder on it. This was brilliant because it allowed us to open our product in any mac. However, the word external falls into play here, sometimes I would forget to bring the external hard drive in because I use it for personal use as well. This was a problem because there might have been some days where we needed to get some serious editing done. As I was moved my to a new group, leaving the old group with nobody with any skill in software. So whenever they asked or they looked like they were struggling which was a good once a week, I would sit down with them for 5 minutes and just show them the basics of iMovie and Premiere Pro just so they dont have to struggle so much, so when you begin to teach people how to use something, that doesnt only benefit them, but benefits myself as well because that makes me more confident with what I am doing in the software now. Plus a way we could have organized the editing would to have been do it together more, I know we learn sometimes best when its independent, but a lot of the time people would edit the groups film and completely move parts about and cut parts out without the group knowing.

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

On reflection on the work that I have done, the preliminary task to now. We have come a long way because we are more trained in editing and more importantly understand shots better, so we could include the shots in the final product that would have suited our final product. Plus, the part I enjoy a lot that was different from the final product was we had to hire actors in our final and that was enjoyable and it gave us a professional feel. Most of the people who help in media films do drama so they are beginning to be actors. This time we went into deep consideration about the details involved in our final piece. For example in our product we made sure that we made anything associated with the antagonist red. I have also learnt to work in groups to create final media pieces like our final product. I wasnt keen on it, I think it would have been different if all of us had different jobs instead of working on the same thing. However, that could have been avoid if we separated the work up effectively. But hey, the group as a whole wasnt easy to control.