EVALUATION

James D Lock AS Media Studies
Foundation Production G321 – Evaluation
In mid October me and my group, Tisya Khairuddin, Kane Wright and Elizabeth Wood were set the task of creating the opening sequence of new thriller, including titles, aimed at 15 or 18 certificate audience (approximately two minutes in duration). We have now completed this task and obtain our final product titled “Flashback”.
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The foundation of form and conventions used in our media product were developed by researching and analysing comparable media products during the early stages of production, for example, “The opening sequence of the film starts from what appears to be the night before, then follows to the next morning, it has a linear narrative structure, it shows a man preparing for his day, the audience are taken through his roles and routine.”, this is taken from what I wrote during the analysis of narrative structure in American Psycho, this can be directly related to Flashback. The start depicts the visions of Shelly’s nightmare of which took place the previous evening whiles in her hypnotised state, the following morning the audience are taken through Shelly’s routine, it too has a linear narrative. The similarities and influence of structure can clearly be seen in our opening sequence, when writing the film we decided to use a structure like this because we thought it was more effective than that used in comparable media products such as Jaws or Seven as in these films we felt that even though we found ourselves asking questions such as “Who’s that” and “Why isn’t he saving her?” they were the kind of cliché questions that became quite repetitive after we had watched allot of thrillers. Once we had come to this conclusion we started to develop our Ideas, one particular idea that stood out was the idea of incorporating dreams and flashbacks this allowed us to “jump” from one time to another and show two sides to Shelly’s life, creating binary oppositions such as good/day versus evil/night similar to those created in the opening sequence of American Psycho, In American Psycho such binary oppositions have been incorporated very subtly, for example, in the beginning of the opening sequence what appears to be the main protagonist is shown in a night club, it is very dark, and there is loud up-beat music playing, a simple jump cut takes the audience to the next morning, it shows the same man in his apartment, it is very bright and there is calm classical music playing. This shows the audience that the character is different person during the night. We chose to convey similar binary oppositions in our media product using the flash backs to show the audience a different side to Shelly, we chose to do this as we thought that communicated this through the flash backs had a much more dramatic effect and in a way confused the audience generating a second source of questions such as “Did that really happen?” and “Where and when did this happen?” we were happy with this is we thought it was the best way we could generate the maximum amount of questions from our audience and from the conclusion of comparable media products we knew that all thrillers used the question and answer module and we knew from our own experience of watching thrillers that making the audience ask questions makes the audience want to watch more.
When writing the treatment we used the convention of the transformed city as from our analysis of comparable media products we found that it was the most common of thrillers, we also found that due to the nature of our story the convention would have been created even if it wasn’t done intentionally, this is because our thriller is set in an average home in an average suburban housing estate, from are audience research we found that our audiences most preferred location was a desert, we could not acquire sufficient funding to film in this location, using this convention gave us the writers the opportunity to turn our chosen location something generally considered drab and mundane in to something laced with horror, mystery or anything else we thought would appeal to our audience. We also decided to include an element of mazes and labyrinths, mazes and labyrinths lead off in many directions and have many dead ends like, one example of this in the opening sequence is when is when Shelly is washing her hands and the water turns blood red, this was intended to hint to the audience that the blood was literally on Shelly’s hands related her to the visions of the dead girl, we chose to do this because it was the ideal convention that went with the storyline because we wanted the audience to think about what was going on, following this convention allowed us to give the audience clues and tricks to who the killer is, we knew it worked very well as shown in seven.
After Shelly suspects that she is the killer but dose no know why hires a private investigator to investigate her so called husband (Steve Wilson) the investigator (Mr Gool) finds out more information about Steve slowly unravelling the mystery until it’s too late and Steve confronts Shelly before Mr Gool can warn her. In the opening sequence of our production we chose not to include any shots of Mr Gool as he was purely a creation for the element of mazes and labyrinths which works by delaying information over a significant amount of time to the audience, since our opening sequence was only allowed to be approximately two minutes long we decided we wanted to concentrate that time on the main protagonist, Shelly.
When creating our media product for the most part we tried to follow all the codes and conventions we could as it being our first time making a media product of this time it seemed sensible to abide the rules and get it right, although we did try to develop and add a twist to some conventions such as all the thrillers we analysed had a male killer, with the exception of Jaws, In our product the literal killer was female but she did not kill under her own will, she killed because of the hypnotic influence of a male, who she must then kill to break the hypnotic spell, so technically we have not broke the convention.
When story boarding our media product most the angles and types of shots we planned to use were centred around making the audience feel like Shelly is vulnerable, that she is being watched and what the audience were watching is something they shouldn’t, we planned to do this because from our analysis of the thrillers we found that all the camera work attempted to do this, although some thrillers attempted to use camera work to make the main protagonist in the opening sequence very powerful but this only occurred when the main protagonist was the killer, in our case Shelly is the killer but yet is the victim
How dose your media product represent particular social groups?
In our opening sequence we planned to represent Shelly’s character as that of an everyday person, as our opening sequence is set in a “Transformed City” we are trying to show the extraordinary things that can happen to normal people, we thought this was our best choice as our audience mostly are “average people” therefore we thought we would have a better chance of connecting with our audience, I would say that in our opening sequence even though our killer is the female, this is not her wish, she is being controlled by a male, and the male has the power to make her do anything he wishes and when Shelly tries to do something about it, Steve puts an end to it. Therefore I would say we have represented males as superiority, we chose to do this as in all the thrillers we analysed the theme of male superiority is apparent throughout.
When choosing the right person to play the part of Shelly we had a select a female from the appropriate age group which was anything from 20-50, we had decided this because we thought it was a believable age for somebody to own their own home and get involved in the existing situation, the other important factor that we had to consider is that ourselves do no own our own property therefore we had to use someone else’s which limited us to who we could star in our film and there times of availability.
A dead female is shown in our sequence, this yet again follows the theme of male superiority in thrillers, we made the choice to have a girl because in the storyline the girl who is murdered previously accused Steve Wilson of sexual harassment and attempted murder, but charges were dropped and Steve seeks his revenge, we could have replaced this role with a male but considering the events in the storyline we thought that would be too much of a controversial issue that may shock or disturb our audience. Even though we chose not to challenge this subject the fact that we chose not to use a male still raises issues of how socially things are accepted for one sex but not the other.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
I think the place most likely to see our production would be on the internet on websites such as youtube.com, these kinds of websites have become highly popular for amateur film makers as it is free to distribute your film and can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.
I think that it is possible to digitally distribute our production on the internet, I doubt that our production would be distributed any further than this as we would not be able to raise sufficient funds.

Who would be the audience for your media product?
We chose that our production would be certificate 15 because our selves are not 18, therefore it would not be suitable for us to watch or make it, also we believe that certificate 15’s have a wider range of audience as they can be watched by any age from 15 where as certificate18 cuts out 3 years of potential audience. Even though we chose on certificate 15 our production is aimed at 15 and up, I think our film would appeal to a very wide age range as we have an interesting story that isn’t to complex but at the same time is too simple, our production deals with mature issues such as murder, paranoia and agoraphobia and on top of that building up tension and suspense with the odd flash of blood, I believe from 15 the age group of our audience is in no way limited, although we could not prove this as our audience research was aimed at an audience with in a close proximity of the film age certificate (15-18)
How did you attract/address your audience?
To attract an audience to our film we first created a questionnaire which was distributed to the public so this gave use both general and specific results to what would appeal to our audience, using this as a guide to the elements of our production. Fro example the questionnaire showed us that our audience preferred the villain to be male, there for in our story the villain was male. When considering the location for our thriller we found that the audience preferred a city, followed by house and country which were equally preferred, even though the highest location preference was the city we chose to film ours in a house, we did this because the weather and lighting outdoors is highly unpredictable, also we did no think it was safe for us to take the camera equipment out in to the city. I think our completed production is appropriate for our target audience because we have followed are audience research very closely and met the demands that the audience wants through out or come to a high standard of compromise such as location.
The main message we wanted to communicate to the target audience is that Shelly was vulnerable, scared of something that she didn’t understand, that she is confused and paranoid, we wanted Shelly’s emotions to transfer to the audience we to wanted them to feel shocked by the flashbacks and like Shelly want to find out why she is having if there are a figure of her imagination or really happened.
What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing this product?
During the process of constructing our product I have learnt to how to use the Adobe Premier Pro and After Effects software, Once all our footage was captured we converted it into a digital format that can be editing using a computer, the majority of the editing was done through a process called key framing, this involved choosing a desired effect for example, “dissolve to white” which we used to create the flash back effects, the effect was inserted to a time line which reflected the duration of footage and a start and endpoint to the effect inserted, I have also learnt how to operate the cameras correctly and import the footage on to a computer. During the process of filming I always filmed the shots we wanted two to three times which usually gave me a better quality of shot each time I did it whiles learning in a practical method, it was also good to have a range of shots to select from when editing the footage as the quality of one given shot can sometimes be hard to determine while concentrating on filming. We took a small amount of unplanned shots during the process of filming, most of these shots were taken on the second day of filming and were we had to correct errors such as lights being turned on already, which in some case looked unusual, so to amend this we filmed such things and light switches being turned on/off, door handles being turned etc. One of the main problems we encountered during filming was keeping the shots fluent and smooth in motion or steady when stationary, problems like this occurred on shots such as when we filmed Shelly in bed the tripod had to be placed on the mattress over her which was a soft uneven surface, this was something that we just had to try and improve through practice and taking care at all times. We did encounter some small issues with costumes and props due to us filming in an active household when filming shots on another day it was difficult to ensure that things were in the right place to avoid creating any continuity errors, when we found a major continuity error there was nothing we could but go back and film the shot again, but in some circumstances we were able to sacrifice a small part of the shot during the editing stage so the error did not appear. We encountered similar problems with lighting, yet again as we were restricted by the time we could film on certain days we found that a difference natural lighting in the shot was sometimes visible, we tried to correct this using indoor lighting whiles filming but we found this often just created more problems such as unwanted shadows and contrast. Out of all the shots we had captured I would say the most problematic are those which
zoomed in/out, panned or both, this was mainly due to inexperience but at times the tri-pod and zoom control on the camera proved difficult to use.
When editing our production we used additional sounds that we obtained off a free website as we were not permitted to use copy right music, we added titles and credits using a specialised text tool in the software, this was relatively easy to do, all we had to do was type what we wanted, select a desired colour/font from a palette and position the text where we wanted it, the credits were adjusted in the time line just like footage, we learnt how to changed and replaced colours in a scene using more of the tools in the software, changed the pitch of certain sounds, slowed down sounds and footage and also added audio files that we created. at first I found I found it difficult to use the Adobe Premier software as I had never used the software before but once I had become familiar with how the software works and how to perform certain actions the software became easy to use.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full production?
Starting from the preliminary task to now a full product I have learnt how to construct an opening sequence and how to do it successfully, I have learnt how to analyse an opening sequence and how to apply what I have learnt to a working piece of work, I feel I have adopted a logical understanding to what makes a product successful, If I was asked to do this again I would know how to do it correctly and what works, and I would have the proof. The only real difficulty I found during the project was writing the treatment, unlike the other tasks where I was able to research to find out what makes a product successful, I feel that I struggled piecing together Ideas in to an understandable story line. I know I have fulfilled the terms of the brief as I have created an opening sequence which I could Identify as thriller through it codes and conventions, opening sequence was assigned a classification to which I feel the product is appropriate for, it includes titles and is approximately two minutes long. I am pleased with the opening sequence I believe it has met all the requirements stated in the brief and meets our audience’s demands. I think that when comparing our production to that of a professional standard I think one clear difference would be in audio and visual quality, secondly I think our special effects are of a limited standard as we ourselves cannot use the software at a professional standard, but most of all I think our camera work is the most obvious contrast.