Evaluation - Alea Holland

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and convention of real media products?
For our thriller project we relied heavily on conventions of thriller whist researching to help construct the concept of our film and what it would entail. In class we looked at openings of several thriller films: "Old Boy", "The Dissaperance of Alice Creed", "44 Inch Chest" and "No Country for Old Men" being some of them. We took most of our insparation from the inroduction to the film 44 Inch Chest as we wanted to use the conventions of creating enigma using discontinuity editing and having no dialouge allowing for the audeince to piece together the narrative for themselves.

With these techniques providing the main base to structure our thriller around we then turned to ideas we could use to make our work more unique when comapred to other thrillers. This is why we decided upon using a point of view shot for the first scene allowing the audeince to be immediately placed in the centre of the action in the narrative which was praised in the feedback from our target audeince commenting that it "almost creates the sense that it is in an expository documentary style and the audience will believe the footage is real". In addition to this we decided we did not want and diolouge to occur in the opening to add to the enigma of the scene and to allow for the audiences interpritation of the scene to rely on decoding the narrative through aspects of camera work.

To create the atmosphere and mystery that is usually coupled with a thriller film we did focus on use of the camera a lot as it would be our main tool for creating tension and essentially help to narrate the story with the lack of dialouge we used a conventional camera technique known as restricted narration. Whilst researching openings we found a good example of restricted narration in the "The Dissaperance of Alice Creed". We felt this was key in order to achieve one of the conventions of thriller films by making the audience ask questions about what is happening in the scene. To create our restricted narration we decided to use entirely point of view shots in the first scene of our opening as it does provoke the audeince to question what is happening, however, POV shots are uncommon in terms of being used in a film opening so this does challenge a convention of thrillers and makes ours more unique.



A feature that is also present in both these exracts that had an impact on our product is the lack of dialouge that has been previously mentioned. In our group we agreed that this was the best way to go as it did allow the audience to piece together what is going on in the scenes for themelves. This also makes the scenes more thrilling as is the overall objective of a thriller film as there is no clear indication into why the actions in scene are taking place or the characters and thier place within the narrative so relies heavily on audeince interpretation for the first scene.

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The characters in our piece reperesent the average middle class young adult aged around 16-19 years. In the opening of our film issues on status and sterotyping is addressed as in our piece the female character is the victim which is also a convention in other films and also in one of the research thrillers: "The Dissaperance of Alice Creed".

We show this mainly through use of camera work. In the first scene as the first few shots are low angle point of view shots looking up at the male antagonist character immediately establishing the antagonists power over the female character.

The idea of using discontinuity editing allows the audeince to see how the protagonist is victomised due to the future events of the narrarive so when in the second scene the film moves back into chronological order the audience can sympathise with the character as the developing narrative woul clearly show the progagonists innnocence and that they truly are the victim. This does however create a negative representation of the female gender by showing some aspects of the female stereotype come through in the character.

3.What kind of media distribution might distribute your media product and why?
Being an independant film it would'nt be possible to get our product distributed through major film production companies such as "Universal" so we would more than likely get our product distributed by an independant company that handles independant films like Soda Pictures (http://www.sodapictures.com/).

Soda Pictures have released many films onto DVD as well as cinema releases from independant directors from several different countries in Europe so we could go for either a regional release or try to reach a wider audience by releasing in Europe. However as we are first time independant film makers our distribution buget would not be able to streach far as UK distributors spend £300 million a year on bringing new releases out for exhibition and to create 1 film print costs £1500 creates a large cost and risk for us as if it does not do well on it's release very little profit will be made. Also the competion faced by the much bigger blockbuster released could severley reduce our chances at being able to get multiplex cinemas which are more popular than arthouse to distribute our product. In addition to this we could loose out on gaining good audeince numbers as our target audience would only have a certain amount of leisure pound to spend and would most likely go to watch the more anticipated and highly advertised Hollywood films and generally tend to visit multiplex cinemas rather than independent ones.

Due to this factor as well as budgeting advertising to be able to get our film noticed amoung the blockbusters the methods of distribtuion we thought would be best are:

• Film Festival showings
• Internet downloads

 For the showings at the film festival we would most likely premiere our product at the London (October onwards): Future Shorts which would be a good time of year to premiere with the lack of seasonal Hollywood films. This would allow our film to be shown to an audience in a cinema and gain feedback allowing us to see how sucessfull our film would be when released to the general public.

Making the film acsessable to download allows us to reach a global audience as well as being able to easily reach our target audeince. To download we will most likely use popular sites such as iTunes as many people use it, its is popular with our target audience who would be able to download the film to watch on the computer or iPod so they can consume film on the go. We believe this would appeal to our target audience as they could watch the film on public transport on the way to work/college. The download price would be around the price of £5 to entice customes as it is a cheap price for downloadable film and this also can help us build a good reputation and popularity. Also is the film festival proves to be popular a follow up of the internet download could provide great popularity for the film so at a cheap price it could still make a profit.

 4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

The audience for our piece would be the teen market ranging from 12- 21 years as the main characters in our film are teens it is easy for the audeince to relate to them as our piece is aiming to be realistic. However with a low age rating of a 12A we would be able to reach a wider audience as the content of the film wouldn't be inceredbly violent or explicit. The gender of teens that would most likely be more interested in our film is the female gender because of some of the issues that are raised in the narrative with themes of jealousy and revenge whereas a male audience would be more interested in a film containing more action and violence. The main issue raised in the narrative is one of abuse in relationships as our story is based jelous ex boyfriends fighting over the ex girlfriend and as established in the first scene things go beyond petty fighting.

5. How did you attract/address your audience?
We attracted and addressed our audeince through posting our thriller opening on YouTube along with posting the link to it on mine and Rasmus' Facebook pages. This allowed us to reach our target audience easily and aquire feedback on our project as it is easily accessable using the internet. We did recieve some positive feeback from Facebook and YouTube comments as well as some constructive critisism and the majority of people commenting were amoung are target audience and those comments were the most positive. Alos we recived a comment from a person in Germany showing that we are reaching a global audience successfuly.

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

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?
Looking back on our preliminary task I can say with confidence that we have definitely improved on our work. Most of our technical skills have improved in the short time between making our preliminary and our thriller opening as we have gained more understanding of how to use the technology to its full potential and how to be more creative in our use of camera work and editing. Our camera work in the preliminary was rather limited as we mainly just had simple shot types with no camera movement and when we did try to incorporate some more interesting camera work we found that we ran into problems mainly to do with the camera and the settings that we had to film in with white balance issues and blurring of focus whenever the camera was moved too fast. Also being confined to the college campus meant that we were limited with ideas for creating the narrative for our preliminary and coupled with little experience using the camera it was a rather basic piece. Being allowed to use the HD cameras and being able to film off the college campus gave us the abiltiy to have more diversity with the shot types and some more freedom in choosing the overall narrative as we had some ideas for locations that we could use already established before the story was even created and allowed us to use appropriate settings that I feel worked really well with the piece. Despite our efforts to spot errors whilst filming some reflections of equipment can still be seen in the second scene as it was only noticed they were visible whilst editing.

 Our visual editing I think has improved from the preliminary as well as our sound. However I do not think sound has improved as much as visual editing. With our visual editing we have been a bit more ambitious and tried to use the editing to set the pace of the scenes with the first scene showing short clips of the action with black transitions between them to try to heighten the pace. In the second scene shots were longer and transitions were just smooth dissolves or straight cuts so the pace and overall mood of the scene is calm. When it came to sound editing we did come across some problems which made it hard to achieve the effect we wanted as some of the sounds we had recorded ourselves came out too quiet each time we recorded it and in our final product there are some shots with no sound. Unfortunately it was picked up on by the audience as the main area that we needed improvement on. Overall I think that our thriller opening is a great improvement over our preliminary. Yes I admit it still has its faults but it is a more well executed piece that I think we are all quite proud of.