Evaluation - Jamie Parrett

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

The hidden identity of the person who owns the phone which is calling everyone in the opening makes the audience ask questions and create an enigma about the opening which is what openings of thriller films aims to achieve, this also makes the audience want to carry on watching to see what happens. The characters we ended up using are being shown in a normal everyday environment, creating realism in the opening and also allows the audience to have a introduction to where the setting of the film will be. The use of camerawork allows us to give very little insight into the characteristics of the characters we have in the film, once again making the audience want to carry on watching and find out more. Using this approach for our opening makes it similar to the opening of the thriller film '21 grams' as that too had restricted narration into the characters. The titles used in the opening reflect on the phone aspect of the film. The protagonist used in our opening is the phone and the fact that it seems to be phoning random people by itself. The sound is used to create realism and put the characters into context and show some sort of characteristics. The dialogue used by each character shows the confusion by the characters themselves about receiving the phone call.

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

• Masculinity been shown, male character walking home after being in for a gym session
• Feminity been shown, first female character walking from bed to toilet anf then to make up dresser, sorting out her apperance, very modern idea within society. Second female character in the kitchen making toast, both showing mise-en-scene of traditional women and stereotyping
• All characters are of the younger generation, doing what the modern day teenager does (go to gym, making sure the apperance looks presentable)
• mise en scene has male character in the outside world exercising, female characters in the house, taking their time to get ready
• positive representation of male, being active and going to the gym, whereas there could be a negative representation on the modern day women as they waste time on apperance, possibly!!

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

After discussing as a group we decided that the best institution for our production is Diffusion as well as the film potentically being shown on BBC short films to distribute our product. This distribution company focuses on short films from british filmmakers. Our film fit into the type of films they would distribute as we ahve produced a short film. We also decided to have the viewing of our film on the internet as it stops us from having to pay out money for producing reels to allow the cinemas to rent them out to put them on view, they also weigh a lot, up to 25kg so it would be difficult to carry them around everywhere you go. However, having the film only accessable by internet, we will be relying on word of mouth by people who watch the film in the first place to get people's attention to go and view the film. Therefore by having the film on a certain link on the internetm there will only need to be one copy of the film, saves time and resources trying to get the film across the cinemas across the globe. The release day for our film will be on a wednesday as all the low budget and short films commonly release their films.

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

We chose to target our thriller film at the 15-21 year old age range, teenagers from a modern British lifestyle. We decided it would be suitable to certificate our product as a 15 which according to the BFCC allows for: ‘Strong threat and menace are permitted unless sadistic or sexualised.’ As we have certificated it as a 15, it allows us to put the audience on edge throughout our film and creates suspence for the viewer, hence why we think we will attract the 21 year old audience to view our film. As it's a 15, it also allows the strong behaviour and language used throughout the film, making the film aimed at the age range we decided feel more relaxed and maybe build outside knowledge of the characters used and even make them associate themselves or friends to that character.

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

We have tried to attract our audience by using themes and issues which are unusual to everyday life and that way attract the audience's attention by having characters which are similar age to the viewer and have characteristics and personality traits which remind them of some of their friends, hence attract them to see it and furthermore make them come and watch it again. We have tried to address the audience by having the characters using informal language throughout the film so it makes the film itself seem realistic to the life of a teenager in real life, hence using strong language and some violence in some scenes, giving the viewers something to look forward to.

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

·        How to set white balance and why its important,

·        How to cut shots, making them shorter and losing the footage we don't need 

·        Use garage band to add sfx to make objects within the film sound realistic

·        180 degree rule, shot reverse shot etc

·        Avoid getting the camera in the shot, never look directly into the camera

·        Using the tripod to create stiller filming, avoiding the handheld effect but only effective  to create realism

·        Zooming in to avoid moving the camera, better quality.

·        Pace is created not only with the length of shots, but through the amount of cuts used

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

• On the preliminary exercise, used simple editing programs such as imovie whereas in full product we used final cut pro, which allows more complex and better quality editing.
•  Used a HD camera for the thriller project improved the quality of the filming whereas the normal camera used in the preliminary exercise made the filing seem low budget.

• In the prelim we made mistakes by choosing a variety of locations and making it difficult to pick certain areas and started to run out of time to complete the filming, whereas in the thriller opening we learnt from this and didn't choose so many locations and as a result of this, we complete the filming earlier and was able to concentrate more time on editing the scenes we had filmed.
•  Camerawork improved as in the prelim, the camerawork was shakey, the use of the tripod wasn't used with great effect and had very little knowledge of each shot/angle/movement. Compared to the thriller opening we have produced, the camera shots were less shakey and the moving camera shots were more under control and we used the tripod a lot more.
• Editing improved a lot between the prelim and thriller opening as in the prelim we used the editing programme 'imovie' which allows very simple editing to be done to a clip, whereas in the thriller opening, we used an improved editing programme 'final cut pro' which caters for more complex editing processes to occur, hence making the thriller opening look a lot more realistic.
• I felt that the biggest improvements between the prelim and the thriller opening was the sound as the sound used in the prelim was sound caught on the camera while we were filming, compared to our thriller opening, which we used a sound programme 'garageband' which allowed us to emphasis the sound the objects make within the film, making it seem more realistic





Thriller opening







Preliminary Exercise