Thriller Task- Evaluation

Strengths
- I feel that our thriller was a huge improvement on our preliminary piece in all aspects. The planning was much more in depth, and the effort we put in to the piece was a substantial amount more. As a group we went out of our way to make the torture scenes more effective by getting in help to do the cuts and wounds. Also the location scouting though it took time for the torture scenes we ended up finding a place that was close and fit all aspects of the criteria. The editing is much more high tech and took weeks rather than days to try and create a thriller with suspense and tension.
-The refilming of the premoniton scene took time and looking back i'm glad we took the time to re shoot and get a more relaxed and realistic set of shots.


Limiations
- Some of the editing the group didn't agree on and at times it was hard to find middle ground.
- The main thing if i could go back and change would be the music, although we worked hard in finding and editing the music on there now, i felt with more time we could have found something more fitting.

Target Audience for our thriller is young males and female between 15-23, this is my opinion from what i found from the research i did.

The BBFC rating for the opening i would say would be a 15. But if the film was continued and the torture scenes were shown graphically, as in the openning scene we see the aftermath, it may become an 18.

1) In what ways does you media product, use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions?

As an opening to our thriller we kept to the task by having credits scrolling through, and we research the forms and conventions of a thriller so i feel in turn that kept us in the forms and conventions of a media product. The editing we used what i felt was high skill for our expierence with the technology, but wouldn't compete with films that have large edting studios and expierence.

2) How does your media piece represent particular social groups?

The only group of people shown are teenagers and i dont think we portrayed any of the themes associated with teenagers at the momoent in the media. They're seen as victims and seen talking about school work in the premoniton scene. They're attending a party, but no knife or drug crime is shown.

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

I see art houses producing out film if we were to make it full length or we would be part of the film four programme in which they discover new and upcoming directors and producers.

4) Who would be the audience for you media and why?

When making our thriller we didn't have atagter audience in mind but from research i conducted i see it attracting both genders between 15-23.

5) What have your learnt about technology from the process of constructing this product?

The production kit (camera, tripod e.t.c) i already knew how to use. It was the apple mac's editing suite where it took time to learn the skills. A lot of it was trail and error and you can improve just by playing around on the prgramme for an hour. Now i am confident with editing media products which shows how much i've learnt in 9 months.

Thriller Task- Final Feedback

Charlotte and I asked 4 people for feedback after showing them our thriller. We asked them two questions.
1) What do you think were the highpoints in our thriller?
2) What do you think were the low points?

Viewer 1:
1) The cuts and wounds looked realistic and believable.
The music fits in well and adds tension to your film.
2) In the beginning scene you can’t here the speech clearly so you could have spoken louder.

Viewer 2:
1) The plot was interesting and not cliché or boring to watch.
2) If you didn’t have the voice over, I would have been confused to what was happening.

Viewer 3:
1) The music gave the film an eerie feel.
The torture scenes were well put together, the fast cutting was really effective.
2) You didn’t show that the characters were at the party; none of their faces were clearly shown.

Viewer 4:
1) The party scene was realistic. The ending was dramatic and made me want to watch on.
2) You should have put the whole of the girls premonition in black and white to make it obvious to us she was looking into the future.

Thriller Task- Video

If you look back at my research i brainstormed the basic forms and conventions of a thriller in the context of the two essays i did on Taking Lives and Psycho.

Here is the brainstorm i did in context of our thriller (above).

This brainstorm clearly shows how we conformed to the conventions of a thriller.

How researched impacted out thriller.

The Hitchcock essay helped our group as we used his effective technique of up close shot and quick editing to create panic and distress and make the viewer feel uncomfortable.

We sped up the torture scenes, this is used in the phone booth trailer to show the fast moving city, but we just thought it looked more effective and continued our quick cut and pace pattern.

The voice over wasn't found an idea we came up within our research but it was an idea that came to us after the first bit of music made the thriller look like a music video. We wanted the distress to still be there, but the plot explained a bit or the vewer may have been confused.

The use of dark eerie locations in Silence of the Lambs encouraged us to have low key lighting in our torture scenes and to contrast that with the high key lighting in the sixth form centre scene and the artificial flashing lights in the party scene.

The research into the best directors of all time made me see a link between good/ memorable films and scene and music. The "Psycho" shower scene's music named "the murder" was created for that scene making it fit perfectly and intensifing Hitchcock brillant directing. The same with Steven Spielberg in "Jaws" the two notes created for the approaching of the shark were so effective and now notorious as villian music.

Thriller Task- Initial Feedback

Our initial feedback was off classmates and our teacher.

The general comment was that the filming and editing of clips was really good but that the music didn't create enough tension and suspense.

I felt this was a fair comment and we did change our music because as a group we felt the same.

Some people criticised the beginning scenes because the speech wasn't loud enough and we had noticed that and tried to edited it but the programme wouldn't allow us to after a certain point.

The initial feedback was taken into account and im glad we had it because it allowed us to improve our piece before the final feedback was given.

Thriller Task- Music

To begin with we had decided to have Calvin Harris Flashback as the music to go with our thriller.



We edited all of the music, but when we all watched it we decided it looked like a music video not a thriller, we needed music that intensified the suspense and tension of the images on the screen.

We showed it to our teacher Mr Silverwood and he agreed (SEE INITIAL FEEDBACK)

So we brainstormed other ideas, we decided to have a voice over explaining what the girl who has premonitons sufferers from and what it is like from her point of view.

I went on YouTube and tried to look for some tension building music.



I thought parts of this track could be used to create for tension, but when we looked through CD's at school we found two tracks which we edited and used in our thriller.

A slower track to build tension and put the voice over, over the top.

A faster track to put in over the party scenes and some of the torture scenes.

This made the clip look more like a thriller, and i feel is effective at building tension. If we had more time prehaps we could have found a track tht went better with our filming but i am satisfied with the outcome.

Thriller Task- Advertisement

As i was conducting my research on thrillers i noticed that when i typed in a certain film to a search engine a poster would come up. Me and my team mate Charlotte decided to make a poster as our advertisemtn for our thriller piece. The back ground four pictures are our still photo's from the torture scenes and the foreground photo's which are in colour we collected from the social networking site facebook.

When we'd finished i looked at the film posters in more detail, as well as sometimes including good reviews and A list stars there is usually a "punch" line.

I began to think a about what our "punch" line would be for advertisement purposes, also to entice people into watching the film after seeing the poster.

I wanted a line that would increase interest to see the film and tell them a "snippet" about the plot. I looked at Final Destination's "punch" line.

Final Destination- You can't cheat death- this is an effective way in giving people a snippet of information, this is the kind of punch line i would like to create for ours.

I brainstormed ideas to try and collate my thoughts about the plot and the message i want people to get from the poster.


After trying to brainstorm for a while i couldn't think of it by myself so i asked team mates to help me brainstorm for a sufficent "punch" line.

Thriller Task- Wardrobe & Make up

Party Scene
As the party scene was dark with flashing lights and crowds of people dancing it is hard for the audience to pick out certain people so for the costume it wasn’t for us to wear the same outfit to the party and to be tortured in.



Premonition Scene
For the premonition/sixth form centre scene, everyone in the frame were wearing there own clothes as our sixth form allows us to wear our own clothing so we didn’t see the need to change the clothes we were wearing.



Torture Scene
The torture scenes were when make-up became a big factor as we need to look like we had been beaten up, tortured or dead. A friend of ours older sister is really good at costume make-up so we asked her if it would be possible to come in on the day and do our make-up for us. We asked her to show us pictures she's done before, so she practiced the make-up on two girls and posted the pictures on a social networking site where we could view them.



Here are some of the practice pictures;















The entire group was really impressed by these photo's so on the day of the torture scenes being filmed she came in early and did all of the make-up.

These are the photo's of our make-up being done and of the filming of the torture scene.


Make up being applied;





















On set still pictures of filming;