Final piece to end the blog

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

Evaluation - How did you attract/address your audience?

To attract our audience David and I wanted to create an opening that was full of suspense and would really set the scene for what the future of the film would bring, however we were very careful not to give too much away and spoil the rest of the film as we left it on a cliff-hanger and didn't give anything away about the characters that could tell you about them or why they were there. We also tried by using the insert shots to create a creepy aspect of the setting and location of where the characters were without giving too much away about why or where they were. By using all these aspects to try and create this classic thriller opening scene atmosphere we feel that the audience will be left on a cliff-hanger and the tense atmosphere will leave them wanting more.

Here are some of the answers people gave me about our film when I showed it to them:

Evaluation - Who would be the audience for your media product?

To decide who my target audience would have been for my media product at the start was determined by the questionnaire that I handed out to people I know or random people to find out their age and what they liked about thrillers/our thriller. The results were that we asked 8 16-21 year olds, 1 22-30 year old and 2 31-49 year olds, this clearly shows that from the people we interviewed the 16-21 year olds category was the best and our audience that we had to target our project towards. However there are a lot of young adults about 30-40 years old that like thriller films/programmes therefore we can also target our product to cater for this age group as well, this will not be hard as both age groups have a very similar interest when watching these films as all you need is good suspense and a good plot to keep them watching.
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Here is a video where I explain what certificate I believe our film would get had we carried on and published it:

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

Evaluation - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

One of the ideas that some thought the two men were in the same place because the stalker in the hood was going to murder the other man in the suit, therefore I researched online the connections with males and murders I found that of 215,273 victims in murders 77% were male and that men committed 90% of murders between 1976 and 2005. This means that males can be associated stereotypically with murders and being murder victims. We also felt that males are seen throughout history as a more dominating force between the genders and we wanted to only use male actors to try and cement the fact that there is a more dominating force, if we used a female antagonist we felt that it wouldn't have the same effect. We tried to create this idea of a dominating male character by keeping him mysterious and getting an actor that is tall and broad at the shoulders to make him seem more tough and manly. We also found that we beat the stereotype of the male stalking and killing the female as we used a male victim instead, we wanted to create something a bit different so that it wasn't the same as every other story line that has a similar theme across it.

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

At the very start of our piece there is a skyline shot of Nottingham city centre where David gradually walks into the shot to look over Matt as he is walking across the playground, i took inspiration of this shot from a David Fincher movie where he has a skyline at the very start where 'Directed by David Fincher'. Although it is not as good as the skyline that David Fincher uses we feel that it serves the same purpose and gives off the same effect, i would have liked to have had the skyline at night however it would not have fitted in with the time of day that every other shot is set in.

 

 

Our production company titles were also inspired by another real professional production company's title: Walt Disney Studios. We decided to use the old production titles because of three reasons, one the new one is very hard to replicate as it was made by qualified computing staff whereas the old one was very simple, two the old version had a lot of features that we could use on Adobe After Effects such as the revelation of the castle and the glow of the Walt Disney and three the old one was very euphoric and is a well-known symbol of great entertainment which is what we wanted our audience to remember. Here is our and the old Walt Disney production company titles:



Our second insert shot of the hallway where the camera pans around to the right to show the full extent of the hallway and all the graffiti that are on the walls, we thought that this shot would set the scene well as, like the others, it would show a side of the place that they were in that you wouldn't have been able to see if we hadn't put them in. It also creates a creepy atmosphere for the setting as you can see how awful the state of the place is, we can link this scene to the one is paranormal activity where the camera pans to the right and reveals the boy under the sheet then he vanishes as this shows the full layout of the house and gives the house a creepy sense to it.

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

Final Edit - class reviews

We got our class to sit down together and watch each others final edits and gave each other positives of our end product and some stuff that we could change to make it better if we could go back and re-edit.
+ The positives that we got were that they liked the inserts such as the window and the slanted hallway shot:












+ They also thought that our music worked well with our piece as it fit what kind of atmosphere that we are trying to create and a lot of our shots mimicked the beats of the music.
+ They also thought that we created a good enigma as they could tell what was going on but couldn't imagine what was going to happen and wanted to know more.
+ They liked the hardest part of our final edit which was the ambient sound, this was hard as we constantly had criticism about it and we tried really hard to make it work and sort out these problems.
+ The titles on the piece were positively spoke about as they told us that they were well placed so that you could read all of them clearly and they had nice font that didn't look ridiculous and very professional.
+ Our class also said that they liked the variation of our getting ready shots as they weren't the usual and boring getting ready scenes, they said that they were unique and kept the suspense of the thriller the same as it was in the shots before.

However there were some improvements that they touched upon which we took into consideration and we realised these faults that we didn't notice when editing, if we had more time to go back and edit then we would definitely change these as we think that they would make our final piece perfect. The negatives were that:

- The title where it says 'Directed by David and Guy' is very informal compared to our other titles, therefore it probably should have read as 'Directed by David Thomas and Guy Nicholson'.
- They also spotted that there was a slight wobble at the end of the shot where Matt is being watched whilst walking across the playground, we tried to combat this problem before however we didn't cut enough off to enable people not to see anything.

Thriller opening scene - Final Edit

Thriller opening scene - bird noises

For our window insert we wanted some sound that would fit with the insert so we thought of putting in some bird sounds as through the window it was an over grown garden, we thought the Blackbird sound in the first few seconds of this clip would fit just right, the bird noise finishes at 20 seconds:

Thriller opening scene - Third draft review

The overall opinion from the people that we asked is that we need to include more original ambient sound, we have looked through some of our original footage where ambient sound would fit perfectly. We found two scenes where it would fit and the audio was of great quality, these are when Matt is taking off his coat jacket and when he is walking down  the long corridor. Here is two screenshots of the scenes that we are going to include ambient sound in:

Thriller opening scene - Third draft opinions

We asked Chris and Molly what they thought of our third draft and whether we had improved on their criticisms and what they thought we could do better, they both said that it was good that we added in ambient sound however it sounded very plain in many areas and that we should get more of our original sound into the piece. As all we had used was the breaking of glass sound under feet which wasn't our original sound it was one that we found off of YouTube:

Thriller opening scene - third draft

Thriller opening scene - sound effects for the hallway

We needed some more sounds for our piece that wasn't our soundtrack and we felt that due to the poor conditions of the ground in the hallway that we shot David's character in, this was because our original ambient sound that was recorded whilst shooting this was not good as it had voices and other noises that were not good enough for our piece.

Thriller opening scene - second draft review

In our second draft opinions post we were told of a flaw that we have in our second draft which we know we need to change, both people said that we need to build our soundscape more and to do this we need to go through our shots and collect all of the ambient sound that is present and insert it into our piece where appropriate, hopefully it will be in our third draft if not then we will create a fourth to showcase it.

Thriller opening scene - first draft review

After getting feedback from our peers on our first draft of our thriller opening we decided to take some of their advice and change our thriller to combat these flaws. One of our comments was that our soundtrack was too repetitive, this was due to our soundtrack being 20 seconds long therefore we had to cut and paste it over and over again to last the full length of time. We have changed our soundtrack to a lengthier piece which lasts the full amount of time that we need it to, therefore it is not repetitive and we feel that is fits our piece well.

We were also told that we needed to add more titles throughout the film, so we went from three titles to six not including the production company name and the title of the thriller. Here are a few examples of the ones we added in: 

Thriller opening scene - second draft opinions

Thriller opening scene - first draft opinions

Thriller opening scene - opinions of our production company titles

To see if our production company opening is good enough for our project we wanted to get the opinions of some of our classmates and others around the college, this means that we can change anything that the people don't like or redesign it to make it better. These are their opinions of this production title:

Emily Brookes: 'I am very impressed with it and it looks very professional, the music also fits well with the title and makes each word and the name in general stand out more.'

Finley O'Neill: 'I like the concept of the title and thought it was done to a very professional standard, the sound effects work well and the transitions flow very nicely.'

Thriller opening scene - Production company sounds 2

For our production company logo which shows up at the start of our thriller project we used this sound for when 'Legend' comes up onto the screen this makes the word 'legend' stand out more as it appears on screen, this is similar to the sound effect that we put onto the word 'entertainment'. The sound that we used is at 4:47 in this clip and is labelled Horror Loop 2. This will help it to have more of a professional feel to it and similar to how an actual production company would do it.

Thriller opening scene - Production company sounds

We used the sound effect that starts at 0:11 of this YouTube video, we put it at the start when 'Entertainment' on our production company video flashes up at the start of our thriller piece to make our production company stand out and be like the actual professional ones you see like Paramount and Dreamworks. This allows us to create a more professional feel to our piece.

Thriller opening scene - The Hunt second draft

Thriller Opening Scene - Actor update

We still have Matt as our main actor but we added in a new actor as a stalker to our main character.
The person we chose was David as he is 6"2 which can fit the description of a stereotypical pursuer and he is already an established actor inside the school/college and goes to a drama school. This is a picture of David and he is the person on the left hand side of the picture: