KNGSFoundationPortfolio(TomWilletts): March 2013

Evaluation

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

I feel that my movie opening follows the conventions of a psychological thriller very well, this is because we leave an enigma for the audience like many other psychological thrillers do. Another reason I think we follow the conventions is because we use close ups to show the emotions of characters, this gave a good outcome in our final product because we can show the emotions of our characters. The function of our sound is to create tension in the opening shots so it gets the audience interested in what happens next, this follows similar conventions to what happens in other thrillers because they try to build the tension throughout the opening of their film, for example in ‘Texas chainsaw massacre’ sound in vital to building up to what is going to happen in the film because mainly non-diegetic sound is used which is different to our style of thriller because we have a lot of moving images and diegetic sound however we try to use a similar use of sound in our opening to help create a similar atmosphere to this movie. I feel that our opening has developed well from the preliminary task because of the editing we have used and shots that have developed compared to the preliminary task, our preliminary task also differs to our opening because we use some editing in our final text such as black and white which is also used in other thrillers such as ‘Savages’ this creates an idea that it is clearly in the past which we used, this I feel follows the conventions of thrillers because thrillers often give an idea of what tense the movie is set in.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

We mainly represent age throughout our film because the weakest character is the younger brother of the hero is taken which represents him in a weaker way because he never really has any control of what happens in the movie and also the main character appears to be the oldest throughout the film because he is stronger than the villain in opening shots. We showed this in our opening mainly through the physical power that the characters have over each other, for example the youngest character Dave is carried by the villain Damien which shows that he has very little power in the film, we did this because we originally planned to have a girl in the opening instead of the younger character however we had to compromise and use a boy instead but decided it had to be someone small as we could still show that this person has very little power. We also represented men in a very stereotypical manor because we showed men being very aggressive which is typical of what you would expect of men in a thriller as they are usually shown as the dominant characters, such as the villain which in the films I analysed was always male so we decided to continue with this style in our opening and movie; I feel this will be successful in our opening because of this reason. We mainly used low angle shots on the dominant males to try anchor this idea that they are the most powerful person in the shot and also used the mise-en-scene to represent men in a powerful way such as when Damien is stood over Charlie after he kills him; this was very successful in showing he was the most powerful person in the shot because it was very clear he was more dominant than Charlie. We decided to do this because in our audience research it said that our main characters should be the most powerful and also our villain from our research was suggested to be tall, violent and mysterious, I feel that our villain was all of these in this scene because he was taller than Charlie and also he was shown to be prone to violence and because we don’t see where he takes the victim we don’t know much about him so it creates this enigma about the villain making the audience want to know more about what’s going to happen which also leaves the ending on a cliff hanger; this was successful because previous thrillers also leave the openings on cliff hangers which I found to be a positive because it keeps the audience interested in the film from the start which is important and I feel that our movie did this.

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

Our movie opening company we decided to use was universal studios, this was because it was a large brand and was well known to our audience, universal has also created a lot of large movies in the thriller genre such as ‘Se7en’ this benefited us because it shows that our movie looks realistic to something that universal would use. Universal cater to a number of different viewers and their needs but the main social group they focus on with their movies is men of a wide variety, they also create movies such as ‘Fast and furious’ which is an action movies and also movies such as ’40 year old virgin’ which is a comedy movie, this shows the wide variety of movies that they create which benefits the audience we are trying to attract because I feel that our movie opening is mainly focusing on a male audience because although it is a psychological thriller it also has some action in which will attract a male more than a female audience. Universal studios is a very large company with many other brands across media such as resorts and also have other franchises they own such as illumination pictures which is also focuses on the creation of motion pictures. Universal pictures are also a distribution company, which would be beneficial to out company because the distribution will be more productive because it goes through the same company. We also however used MGM as our distribution company this was because they have a long history of creating movies similar to our movie opening. MGM are owned by MGM holdings inc making them a vertically integrated organisation as they are not owned by outside corporations, this is significant because it may be cheaper to promote the company and what they are selling because there are less companies involved. This company have produced a number of high standard films such as the James bond films, this gives our movies a high prestige because of these previous films, these all link to our movie because this movie is also involved with some thriller aspects and is a very highly rated movie series making it a positive aspect for us our movie follows similar thriller aspects. We have decided to use an independent company because of these reasons and that they are a large distribution company which supports our movie being a high end product. There is very little cross convergence in these two companies because they both focus on motion pictures rather than any other type of media however they can have links to other companies which do have branches into other media types so we can use these to advertise our movie which will be useful when in promotion because our movie will get more publicity.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our target from the research we completed before making our movie opening suggests that it is more likely to be a male audience who are in the age range of fifteen to twenty, and from this research we did we found that we should use a combination of both fast and slow paces editing which I feel we did successfully because our audience wanted a mix of slow and fast paced editing which we incorporated in different ways because we included a scene of action and also a scene where slow editing was needed to create suspense which was reinforced by the music which we wanted. We decided to use this suspense creating music because in our research the audience’s most common answer was suspense creating music which was fairly easy to add into our movie because we had already planned to add this in for when our main character is doing a voice over on the still shot of his younger brother David.

This image on the below shows what will be shown when we are using this suspense creating music. This is a still shot which builds up the story line because we start to understand what is going to happen and because of what we have just seen we know what has happened.

I feel that we have appealed to our audience and what they enjoy well because we used settings which they most wanted to see in a thriller movie for example we used a dark housing set in the second part of our thriller. We also use a mix of editing as I said earlier and also suspense creating music to support this. Our audience also asked for a wide variation of camera shots such as close ups and long shots which we used well because we needed to show emotion on our characters and then also establish the setting. This image on the below shows this close up that we used to try and show the pain on the characters face, which I feel worked well because in this scene it was important for the audience though, the use of the camera shots because these help the audience gather what is going on and who the victim in the scene is which is clear seeing the pain and aggression on the faces of people.

Our audience also wanted the opening to make them interested in the rest of the film which I feel we did with the use of an enigma because we faded out from the villain circling the hero’s name which may lead the audience into wanting to know more which I feel helped our opening because most thriller movies open with a cliff hanger making the audience instantly interested in the movie. We created this enigma by using various types of editing because we went from fast cuts in the ambulance to using slower editing and fades in the second part in the house to show that the action has slowed, we decided to use this because it allows the audience to see more of where the setting is and understand what kind of person this villain is, we followed our audience research with how we represented him because we tried to make him mysterious because we know little about him but we also show he is violent and dangerous which was some of the expected characteristics of a villain in thrillers anchoring this idea that he is the villain.

What technologies did you use in the making?

In our research we mainly used Microsoft products in creating things such as our presentations which were made on Microsoft PowerPoint and then we used Microsoft word for creating our questionnaire, which I found useful because I already understood how to use it and also it was simple to create questions on this software. We also used YouTube to research thriller openings, which allowed us to collect and compare a lot of different movie styles, which helped us develop our thriller opening because we could see what other movies had done and try to emulate their styles in our opening. During the filming we used a digital video camera and I feel that our skills with this developed from when we used them in our preliminary task for example in the preliminary task we mainly used still shots with no movement however we used pans and tracking in the actual opening which shows this development of our skills because we have more control over the camera and felt more confident in using these skills. We also used a tripod in the making of our movie opening which was helpful for the still shots that we made, this made our still shots a lot clearer because when we attempted it hand held it did not look as professional compared using the tripod.

To edit our movie we used Imovie which I found easy to use after creating our preliminary task, in the preliminary task we used very little effects or sounds to improve the video, this change a lot once we started editing our movie opening because we used a lot of fades and different paced cuts, I improved my skills using the technology when using this because I did not know how to use many of the programmes compared to now I know how to develop our opening because I helped to put some of the effects in for example the fades we decided to use.

We also used Xtranormal for our character profiles which was another programme, this is where two characters with one being male and the other being female talk about what they expect from a thriller movie and some of the things that we tried to include in our opening. For example the characteristics that they expect to see from our hero which included brave and strong, we learned these from our audience questionnaires which we completed prior to making our extranormal and these helped to develop it and also our opening.

How have yours skills developed from the preliminary task?

I feel that our film opening is more developed and looks more professional than our preliminary task because in our preliminary task we used very little editing, I think this may partly be because we did not do an audience research for this which would have improved the preliminary task because we would understand what our audience would want from us, however we did create one for the main task which benefited us because we understood what was wanted from s which is similar to what they do in professional films for example ‘the talented Mr. Ripley’ follows a similar audience to what we follow, both have a mainly male audience however the audience age is on average slightly older than our opening is looking for because our characters are of a younger age which automatically attracts our younger audience ages between 15-20, I feel this supported making our opening compared to our preliminary task because it helped to make our movie more specific to audience needs and also made us understand what needs to be in a movie opening more than when we made our preliminary. The editing was another big part of developing our skills from when we made our preliminary; our preliminary had no editing in because we did not understand how to use it very well and it made our task look very amateur so we decided to not use it, however in our main task we had developed our skills because we had practiced how to use it and using the Imovie had helped to further this development. The filming also helped with the editing because we understood and had a better idea of what shots we were going to use, we used a wide variety of shots which developed throughout filming. During the creating of our preliminary task we used no camera movement compared to the final product we made where we used pans which shows this development of my skills whilst using the camera, we also developed our skills with the camera in terms of our camera shots because used establishing shots in the final task for example when we see the house we can clearly see that it’s an establishing shot, this made our thriller look more professional because we can see a lot wider variation of shots in our opening which is similar to other thrillers however we mainly use close ups as our camera shots which again supports this idea of our opening being more professional because it follows a similar outlay to other thrillers.