Evaluation:
Different thrillers genres are shown through many different aspects, thriller bases its self on other overlapping sub genres such as psychological, action, crime, conspiracy, horror, and the supernatural. Characterized by fast pacing, frequent action, whilst intertwining extensive use of cliff-hangers, red herrings and suspense as well as horror and mystery conventions. The idea of the thriller genre is to make the audiences feel uneasy within their viewing through these elements; thrillers are seen as unsettling due to their originality within the genre, an individual thriller can differentiate greatly to another thriller due to multiple genres and unusual plots, plot structures don’t usually resemble a typical film structure further contributing to the suspense factor due to abnormalities within the film. In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and convention of real media products? Our production is the opening sequence of a thriller film. At the beginning of the film you see a blond girl running through the woods. We used a blond girl as this shows how stereotypically vulnerable a girl can become. Films such as Scream and Psycho use this to portray this kind of character, because generally men are seen as stronger than women, the audience is put on the edge of their seats as the idea of a woman alone in the woods near a psychotic man, is extremely fearful, which is a typical convention of thriller as this is the way gender roles are usually displayed. Furthermore panning shots are used to create an effect of following as her expression gives away that she is frightened, scared and looking for something or someone. When the silhouette of the male is seen, the facial features are not seen clearly which a common fear is known as the fear of the unknown; a point of view shot then shows her running toward an opening in the woods where there lies a pond. An establishing shot shows her surroundings and it really adds to the eerie effect of being in the woods as the blonde girl is all alone, and the audience knows that there is no chance of anyone being able to help her. Most thrillers and horrors use shots at night time, for the central scene however our production challenges this convention as it is filmed during the day. The shot then focuses and zooms in on a figure across the other side of the pond.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
our media production is meant to represent an innocent but intelligent girl who is portrayed as vulnerable individual as she is seen in a woods, alone and as the camera would suggest, being followed. She is presented as weak which is a negative portrayal of women.
What kind of media institution might distribute you product and why?
Because of our lack of funds and low budget our film will be distributed by an independent film company and will only be shown to regional audiences as we plan to attract young target audience, between 16-25 years of age. A professor of psychology called Susan Burggraff once looked into why people watch horror/thriller films.
The ‘relief’ theory relates to horror films in two ways, the arousal theory and the social theory.
The arousal theory is that in the atmosphere/circumstances created by a horror film there is a sensation of excitement which would cause the person to enjoy the horror in the film or overall the horror film. An example of this theory would be that horror films tend to appeal to the teenage/adolescent age group, this age group would be the most common in seeking this sensation. Therefore we have decided to make our target audience brit-teens as they are the most common cinema goers which is seen in Burggraff’s study. Our advertising scheme can loosely be compared to that of Cloverfield as they had a modest budget on their advertisement. This included a website where a few very vague clips of the film where and a Blog to post stuff onto. Using the idea of a website to advertise our film could be really good for publicity as the forum of Cloverfield proved to be very popular as they gave a EMBED code which is where you could share the video with your friends. This idea was clever as who ever shared the most videos would receive free tickets to the movie debut.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
In the production of our film, filming took a lot longer and their where many other stages that I hadn’t even anticipated would ever have to be done. This included a location recce. This was hard to do as we were filming on a public walk way therefore we had no control over who walked down it. We would constantly be interrupted by people waling in and out of our shots. To overcome this I asked a few people if they wouldn’t mind waiting while we took the shots and I found that generally people where happy to wait. The story board, script, risk assessment, costume & props list and shot list where not as hard to do but were more tedious and time consuming as these could done without interacting with other people.
During the course of this project, I learned a lot of new editing skills such as logging, adding music, and adding the scenes/clips together. It took me some time to get used to such programs but by spending the time doing it, I now feel that I understand how to log and capture and do a lot of the things needed to make a short film. The editing took some time but it is worth it when you watch the finished product. Editing a thriller that was all shot in broad daylight had its problems but changing the saturation and the colour filters we made it look pretty good. Cross fading and fading the sounds at the right time was crucial as we needed to be able to hear every breath of the victim while hearing the noise from running and the noise form the Killer. When watching thrillers I noticed that the cast names usually come up when the character is being shown in action, this was another code of thrillers as it introduces the characters as they are usually very much made up with masks, props and make-up etc and it can make it very hard to see exactly who they are.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
Looking back at the preliminary task, I can see how various things have been changed, mostly for the improvement of the film itself. The only thing I wish we could have done was to either film at nigh but early in the morning when it is all foggy. To find the location we had to do some research as we needed a pond and woods but it was hard to get to places further then kings Langley. In conclusion, the finished production was pretty much how we had planned although a few alterations had to be made as we had forgotten certain props which would have added to the effect if we had used them. But overall i believe that our production went well and we accomplished what we had se out to do, it fitted the task well.
