Evaluation - Rasmus Alexander Klingstroem

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

With the creation of this media product, much of the current adaptations of thrillers were used to influence the scene's creation and concept - through watching the opening sequences of several including; No Country For Old Men, 44 Inch Chest, Disappearance of Alice Creed, and Old Boy.

Old Boy Opening Sequence (K Drive)
When looking at the previously linked clip, it is clear that this had an impact on our finished production. This is shown through a couple of key elements throughout both clips;

• The desaturation
• The fast paced cuts

Another example of a real thriller which helped shape our product would be "No Country for Old Men" which I believed had several aspects to it which is shown in our product as well, such as;

• The use of wide open spaces
• The slow buildup

Although some things were changed, such as the fact that our product had the title sequence after the slow, yet dramatic buildup whereas "No Country for Old Men" had it prio to this scene.
Our media product does not challenge generally accepted concepts, instead it takes these concepts, such as desaturation, and tries to achieve what these big blockbusters have - to encaptuate an audience, specifically an audience seeking a thriller product.

A third example of a thriller movie which affected some of our decisions when making our media product would be "The Birds (1963)".

Although this particular movie sequence had little effect on our overall product, it did have an impact on the type of atmosphere we wanted to create. This particular clip has no voiceover, and no description of any kind - which makes an audience wonder; "What type of movie is this? What am I going to be shown, blood, violence, gore?", and that is the type of experience I had in mind when choosing the types of sounds for our first scene. Whereas other movies or title sequences have voiceovers, or other ways to tell an audience what is happening, or movie instead had very simple, but effective sound effects; some from GarageBand, and some recorded ourselves, an example of which is the groaning from the victim seen dragged through a field in scene one.

The nature of the POV seen in scene one I believe develops forms and conventions of real media products. I believe this is the case as I have not seen very many thrillers start their opening sequence with POV from the perspective of the victim in this manner, and thus makes this movie stand out among the droves of films using the same media conventions without deviation.



How does your media product represent particular social groups? 


Some groups have been specifically chosen and represented in a certain way to envoke a certain feeling from the audience. The generic teenage girl being abused/harmed has been used on thousands of occasions in many different genres of films, from horror to thriller, and even to sci-fi - yet this type of representation has not whithered and is still widely used today, and this is why we used it for our production.
The use of another type of victim could've envoked different feelings from the audience, when we wanted to envoke very specific feelings. An example would be that if we used another group, such as a young white British male, could've supressed an audience or some within the audience from feeling sympathy to the extent we wanted. An example of where this is the case is the thriller opening of "Goodfella's".

As you can see, the audience is not provoked to feel sympathy to any great extent for the man in the trunk - this is due to the nature of this character, and how unimportant he is in the entirety of the plot. Our production on the other hand required the audience to feel sympathy and understanding for the victim's circumstances, and thus needed the steriotypical; young, white, female to play the part of the victim. This is shown through camerawork, sound, and editing - much of what is shown to the audience in the first scene is of the victim struggling to get away.

Editing
When you look at the editing that was required to give the sense of struggle for the victim, it is quite tedious, these were the things that needed to be done or considered;

• A smooth flow between cuts or camera angles
• A consideration for consistency
• Continuity maintained
• Making sure the audio fitted appropriately

Camerawork
The camerawork was vitally important to maintaining the representation of the victim. the victim needed to look weak and defenceless throughout the first scene, if this was not achieved then the audience could become disillusioned with our media product.
It may seem easy to maintain consistency due to the nature of the first scene because of the POV - however, making sure the camera and the victim were lined up enough so the audience was still asking questions, yet aware of some of the surroundings of the victim was hard to achieve. Some of which was improved and fixed in the editing process.

Sound
Maintaining sound quality throughout was not hard to achieve - using Final Cut Pro made this a fairly easy task. However we did encounter certain problems with regards to the heartbeat heard throughout the first scene, it appeared that GarageBand did not allow for tempo changes to pre-existing sounds, and thus the heartbeat needed to be exported into Final Cut Pro in order for us to give our scene the correct feel throughout; of panic, and fear.


The antagonist on the other hand, does not represent any specific social group as his face is never shown in our product. We felt this needed to be done to give the antagonist a mysterious element, and to force the audience to ask questions, as is the nature of all thriller movies - if the answers were given in this short two minute product, then there would be no need to view the rest of the movie as you'd know whom the victim is, and who the antagonist is.

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


When looking into the different ways of distributing our media product, there are several ways which look very appealing to us, as it is an independant low-budget film. Companies such as 'Columbia Pictures' would never distribute a film made by unknown directors simply due to the low profit rates of such films. Our best choice, if we were to get someone else to distribute it for us, would be a company such as 'Soda Pictures'.
They are a UK based company that has released several independant films, and has had success with a few films including; Frostbite, Into Great Silence, & Old Joy.
http://www.sodapictures.com/
However with such large quantity of popular film releases, this company will be unlikely to handle our distribution due to the fact we are unknown directors.
This is why we were thinking of premiering our film at the London: Future Shorts and the London: Valentine Film Festivals - this would be done as non-subtitled versions as it is shown to a UK audience, and otherwise would require more money, which a low-budget movie wouldn't have.
From there we'd make the movie a viral video which would be downloadable for a small fee, £4.99 - this would be done to entice customers into buying the video, and building a reputation on the internet for having a good viral video.
From there, we'd consider trying for a cinema release, with the popularity of our viral video behind us, we'd hopefully get 'Soda Pictures' to distribute our film at a national level - if not european, on a small scale. 

Who would be the audience for your media product? 

The targetted audience for our media product would be teenagers aged between 12-21, this is due to the nature of our film, the characters within it, and the plot in general. I would argue that the targetted audience would generally be females between this age group, mainly because of the narrative within the media product - jealousy, revenge, and anger are themes that mostly attract a female audience. Whereas the type of thriller that attracts young male teenagers are those with a lot of blood, violence and fast paced action.



How did you attract / address your audience?


The audience was attracted through the use of the internet, using both my own, and Alea's facebook to try and get some comments on our video which was posted on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=361_PdMPlTk
Having our media production on a worldwide level, via Youtube, we've made the first steps to making our product a thriving success.
Secondly, some of the comments we have recieved on Youtube has been very positive about our production which gives me high hopes about what this production could potentially achieve, both on a national level, and international level.
The fact that we've also attained a comment from a person of German origin, shows that this film is already getting watched internationally.


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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G6uUQtNEcY

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


I personally feel I have learnt a lot since the preliminary task. When doing the preliminary there are several things I would not have considered which I now know must be included or considered every time. Such as; Depth of Field, Lighting decisions, Framing, Timing, Pace, and Length of shot.



Camerawork and Editing

Much of what was done with regards to Camerawork had been planned out carefully throughout the development process of this media product - this is shown in both blog entries and the Animatic video. Length of shot was very important when thinking about the scenes, as the product had a very specific time limit, the film could not be filmed with careless disregard for the length of each scene.
Secondly, Continuity - although continuity was carefully thought about for the preliminary, we had to consider it to a far greater extent with our final piece. With the preliminary, we chose a very small room, with no reflective surfaces simply so we wouldn't have to deal with reflections of the camera, or other persons. The final piece did not have this luxury as we filmed inside someone's house, and thus had many reflective surfaces such as tables, pictures, and mirrors which had to be avoided, and camera placement had to be considered carefully.
However, this does not mean that our final piece was faultless - the second scene clearly has a problem with reflective surfaces, dispite our best efforts to avoid such, we can clearly see the camera in one of the pictures, which was only spotted during the editing of our film.
There was much which we could not achieve in the preliminary which limited us greatly, firstly, we found out that using the standard cameras supplied by the college we could not achieve any sort of movement from the camera, as we had problems with bluring, and the white-balance reseting itself. These issues were resolved when we had to produce our final film as we had access to the HD cameras which fixed the bluring and white-balance problems - as well as the fact we were allowed outside of the college to film which allowed us to work a lot more freely with what we could and could not do.


Sound and Mise en Scene

Unlike our preliminary, we had to edit sound seperately from the main visual piece and add them to the final product, this presented a new set of challenges because we did not need to do this for our preliminary - although it was overcome fairly easily through the use of a much better piece of software, namely: Final Cut Pro.
The use of, and addition of pre-made sounds from Garageband made our job much easier as it allowed us to focus a lot more on the editing of our film instead of having to find out ways of implimenting real sounds and making them believable.
Mise en Scene wasn't really expanded upon from our preliminary, some of the same costumes were used, and our focus was mainly on the camerawork and editing to make our film believable for the audience. However this is not to say that we ignored Mise en Scene completely, costume was mainly only considered for the antagonist as we needed his face covered to keep the mysterious element intact for the audience's benefit.

Overall, I believe our group has developed quite a lot since the preliminary, considering ideas and using media concepts which we otherwise did not, including; framing, depth of field and using a varity of different styles, and I am quite proud of the final piece.