EVALUATION- AMY

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


Thriller Film key conventions:

• The Victim (Person in danger)
• The Threat (Villain etc)
• The Suspense (Build up of events)
• The Enigma (The Mystery)
• The Protagonist (The main character Usually the 'Hero') 
• The Antagonist (The person against the main character/Hero)

Answer

•  Our Thriller opening uses all of these key conventions, Our main character is the boy that you see in the beginning, we also suggest that he could be in danger since he throws the necklace away this suggests that he is trying to get rid of it since it could link him to the danger this could mean that he is involved with the threat or once was; and since we show that someone with the same necklace is killed it creates suspense as the audience are unsure if he himself could be in some serous danger as the boy who was killed could have been killed because of the necklace, also as the girl in the second scene has the same necklace is suggests that she is somehow involved in the situation. The enigma for our thriller storyline I think is very clear:

• What does the necklace have to do with everyone?
• Why is the male character trying to get rid of it?
• Who or What shot the Character who died?
• Why was he killed?
• How does the second male character know him?
• Why would four teenagers be in a nice garden in the first place?

These quenstions raised are very important because it makes the audence think about our product and the more they think about it the more likely they are going to talk about it to their friends or family and then they will watch it. This is good for us as they are  advertising our film without even realising and it is using no money and not much effort from anyone. The questions raised will also make the audence feel involved as they will figure our film out as it goes along leaving them feeling satisfied by the end because they will be like "hey! i knew that was going to happen", so yes it makes them feel like they are connected to the charactors and the actual storyline itself.


Format

• The first shot is a long shot at eye level to show the scene it shows how remote the area is and since the character is in the far right hand side it makes him less of the focus as you don't really notice him at first, this makes the place more of the focus.
• The second scene is a close up of the characters feet, this is showing some of the costume suggesting his age and sex as it is mainly male teenagers that wear these type of shoes. It also shows the way that the character is walking, the character is walking heavily showing that they are feeling down but the strides are confident so it shows that the character knows what he is doing. It also shows more of the setting and shows that it is muddy and wet, not somewhere that a teenager would be walking on their own so this raises questions in the audience:

Who is he?
What is he doing there?

• This third screen shot is of the first scene It is the first close up of the boys face, this is revealing who the character is. It is from a low angle and this makes him seem powerful as it is a close up it connects the audience to him as they are close to him, However as he has his hood up the audience can not see all of him and this shows that he is mysterious.  
• The fourth shot is what I call the forshadowing shot, Forshadowing is were you see something that gives clues to show the audience what will happen later on in the film, this is the necklace, the shot is from the side to almost make the audience feel like they are there with him watching him as he studies the object. It is from a very slight low angle this makes the character seem slightly stronger still. It is a Mid Close up shot, this shows his facial expression, some costume, some body language and most importantly his prop.
• This fifth shot is what I nickname the revealing shot, by this I mean that it is the first time that the audience fully see the characters whole face, The shots itself is a Mid Close Up from a very slight low angle, this makes the character seem strong and in power. The fact that it is a Mid Close Up shows the audience a lot of facial expression and emotion, it also makes them feel closer to the character.
• The sixth screen shot is off our title. It is very effective as it is layred onto our actual footage in the start of the second scene, this looks really nice and connects our whole project together.
• In this second shot you can see that the character titles are starting to appear, the titels move with our footage making them seem part of the on screen.
• This next shot is one of my favirites, it is the pan from right to left ending on the back off our character, the shot is a Mid Long Shot, we choose to have this to show a lot of the enviroment and setting but also to show the characters costume, he is wearing white and this sybolises someone who is clean and good, this will sub contiously make the audience trust this character and will raise questions when he is shot such as: Why would someone want to kill him? this is good because it means that the audience are really thinking about our project and they will feel more involved as they try and work out the mystery. The shot itself has a deep deapth of field, this is good because it shows the enviroment to be very calm and nice, not somewhere that would normally have a muder happen.
• The last shot that I have chosen is the close up of our necklice, This shot will really make the audence jump out of their seats as they realize that the characters are all connected the shot has a slightly shallow deapth of field to focus all off the attention on the necklice.

2.How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Social Groups : 
Our media Project shows the social groups with teenagers because as our thriller progresses you will see how the group pulls together and the individual bonds that the characotrs have, this will connect to the teenage audence and even young adults as they will understand how this feels to be part of a group and how people can work and protect eachother.










Gender:

Gender in a film is not about the sex of the person but more about the way in which the characters act more 'manly' or 'feminine'. Our film shows gender as being more aggressive and manly as the characters battle to survive against the threat.All of our characters are activists rather then pacifists, this means that they fight through the film rather then running and hiding. I think that this makes our film more exhilarating and builds more suspense for the audience. It also creates danger and more of a thrill for the people watching as they never know what could happen next. We show the gender of our characters through a number of things:

• Mise En Scene- The costumes: 

The three characters that you see in the second scene and the main male character are dressed very casually, this shows that they are very relaxed. They are all dressed in quite monochrome colours although the main male character has the bright yellow writing on his t-shirt, this makes him stand out and will attract the audience to pay attention to him.

Age:

Age is shown to be very important in our media project as all of the main characters are around the same age, in their mid to late teens. This will connect the audience as people may be that age themselves or have sons or daughters that age and would therefor create a sense that they would want to defend the characters.The villans in our production would be revealed to be in their mid thirties, making them seem evil and making it seem very unfair on the protagonists as they are trying to fight for their lives again people that are so much older and more experienced then them.

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

I think that the best way to distibute our media product would be to purely use the internet and word of mouth distribution such as creating an event on facebook to watch it and by putting it on youtube,and as the two sites are very well known by putting a link to youtube from facebook we can monoter how many people watch it and in some cases what age and what sex of people are watching it. this would be better for our target audence of people from the age of 13 to 20 because this age range is very involved with the internet. I would also say that we distribute it on itunes as most of the people would watch it on their phones, I Know this as our youtube channel with our final film on it has got 22 views over the last day and 7 of those views are from people viewing our product from mobile devises. I think that this would be a very good way of distrobuting our product as it would also be much cheaper then making film for cinemas or making the disks and packaging for DVDs. However there is a chance that we would earn less by doing this but it would make our product more well known and it would be a worldwide release through the internet were as if we made it film for cinema and we wanted a world wide release we would have to pay even more to get subtitles onto our film for the non english countries to understand it.



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

I think that the best audence for our thriller would be males and females from the ages of 12-20 I Think this because our film will be widely distrobuted over the internet and people from this age range will most likely come across it or look it up online. I think that it will however attract slightly more males as it does have a main male characotr and this will connect to male audences slightly more, i think that both sexes will enjoy our thriller though.Therefore I would give the film the BBFC's rating of a 12, this would allow all of the people in our chosen age range to watch our film as there may be content in it that is unsutible for children such as the first death in the start, it is also quite a complex story line and it might confuse small children as they would not make the connection between the characters.




5.How did you attract/address your audience?


The main way that we attracted our audience was by using the world wide web. We have used three websites: Facebook, Youtube and Blogger. We did this because as teenagers ourselves we understand that our audience will most likely hear about our production online. We also used word of mouth distribution by telling our relatives and friends and then they told their other family and friends, this made it so a lot of people were talking about it and going online to watch it as this is the only place that it can be seen, as the video gets more views it will become more popular especially over Youtube and its rating will go up making more people interested to watch it.


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

Personally I have in the past used various editing programs, especially Adobe After Effects. I had only very briefly used Final Cut Pro so I found that I learned a lot about the program itself and how it works. I learned how to add in shapes to create our widescreen effect and how to add in titles. I absolutely love the way that our title fades into our second scene creating the transition; I also learned a lot about transitions and how they work, for instance how different transitions can make your product look processional or novice,I realised that the best transition to use in productions is the clean cut.  


The first project I made was for my Media Studies GCSE course in year 11, I was the post production editor for this, this means that I cut everything together and added transitions. I also did the sound editing, this meant putting in a non diegetic soundtrack in behind my teams project. I feel that I have improved a huge amount since then.

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

Over all I think that I have leaned the most about planning. I have found that by planning for everything we keep our time keeping in control and the whole production went much smoother. We also took a number of shots for each scene so that we had options to choose from when it came to editing. I think that the hardest thing here was deciding who was going to edit at certain times but by the end off the making of our opening we had managed to work as a team to get everything finished and sorted.

I think that I have also leaned to edit things more smoothly together with the conuiety editing, for instance the footsteps in our opening in the first scene; we spent a huge amount of time making sure that our non diegetic foley went in time with the footsteps and that it had the right type of sounds.