In concluding my Blog, I am now going to answer these questions:
1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product uses the content in the style and structure of the overall look to generate generically authentic and spontaneous tension and rising fear in the viewer’s minds and hearts. We were aiming to play on the audiences most basic worries and let them enjoy the suffering of the characters but at the same time feel sympathetic for the mother and child. You have to focus on just the title sequence in isolation, as we are not producing rest of the scene. For more on this specific topic, refer back to the post on the evaluation called ‘Final Evaluation And Analysis Of Finnished Product’.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
We represented three main social groups, being young mothers and women, who are negatively stereotyped as ineffective, weak, oblivious, complacent and helpless. For example when she is obliviously watching TV whilst the intruder is taking her child. Also we represented, again the negative stereotype of aggressive, strong, logical and predatory males. For example when the intruder cleverly makes his way into the house through the window without being heard. Lastly, we represented the middle class through the use of mise en scene, with the typical stereotype of as large houses and big gardens. For more on how we tried to represent social groups through the choice of costume and props refer back to the previous post called 'Account Of Props And Costume'.
3. What type of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
This comes down to whether it is the distribution of the product that we made ourselves or if it is a big budget remake of it. This is because with a big budget available, our idea could be a big Hollywood success as it plays on the same themes and voyeuristic style as the very successful thriller movie ‘Halloween’ (2007) used. Although the product that we made was with a very small budget and would only be suitable for television.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
When looking at the types of audiences that are out there that you could target your product at, you should think about the complex unwavering narratives of the sequence, variety and intensity of suspense, age, gender, adult/teen audiences or mainstream TV dram audiences. Dependant on the group you target the product at, will dictate weather it will be a massive box office success or only have a small cult following. For you to achieve your desired success you must target the right audience. For me; we would want to target the main stereotypical male teenage to young adult thriller genre follower who would want to see the film in the cinema, buy the DVD and become pulled in by all the traditional and viral marketing techniques used. This meaning that through this type of person we would be able to generate the most amount of money.
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
We attracted our audience through the production style, by targeting expectations of a thriller audience. We made it accessible as a mainstream text, which delivers a fairly predictable abduction based thriller suspense inducing narrative that gratified expectations and needs of the viewer. For more on this, refer back to Blog 'Account Of Lesson On ‘What Is A Thriller?’' when we learnt about what makes a thriller successful.
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
The amount of new skills we have learnt is so vast. We have gained so much experience from working with different video cameras, using proper film lights to create the best light for the situation and the different editing software’s. Working with the cameras has taught us how to use and change the settings so as to be able to let the right amount of light into the camera, using different exposures, changing the white balance so the camera reads the colours correctly for the current lighting conditions and focusing correctly so that you make sure everything in your frame is sharp focus. From the beginning of the year when we edited and filmed our preliminary task to now, we have progressed in the ease of use of all the technologies available to us and it has now become a second nature to us. We have learnt about all the very complex stages of post production a film goes through and have applied them to our project. From continuity editing using Final Cut Pro, choosing and mixing the music, diegetic sounds (recorded during principle photography) and non diegetic sound effects from the effects library, building titles and finally coloring and grading. Refer back to the blogs called 'Intro To Using Final Cut Pro Editing Package', 'Intro To Video Camera', 'Account Of The Editing Process and Difficulties Encountered' to read more about the skills we learnt through making our thrillers.
7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
The development from our preliminary task to our main thriller is humungous. Our understanding of filmic techniques in pre-production planning, on camera and set during principle photography and editing it together in a coherent and generically authentic way during post-production has significantly improved. During our preliminary task we didn’t worry about dressing the set, giving costumes to the actors, etc. so therefore we progressed in our film making skills and used much more detail and professional filming styles and skills. We created a massive production file that had planned through in huge detail every step of the principle photography stage. We were using more equipment, lighting it properly, used two microphones, one direction boom microphone and one on camera. We used audio tracks in editing to enhance the tension and spent much longer during the editing process in generating a product that’s style is authentic of a thriller movie. Refer back to previous blogs called 'Account Of Editing Our Preliminary Task' and 'Account Of Shooting Our Preliminary Task' in comparison to the how much more we took into account and executed during pre production, principle photography and post production stages of our thriller sequences, shown in past blog posts called 'Review of Shoot Day' and 'Account Of The Editing Process and Difficulties Encountered'.
Audience Feedback Based On Youtube Viewings
Link to video: Click Here
We uploaded our video to Youtube in the hope of getting audience feedback in the form of comments to give constructive criticism. I have now copied some of the comments into this blog post and am now going to reflect on them and talk about the points made.
Comment 1)
Good use of sound and music creating atmosphere and tension. The credit on the stairs is very good and works well. I like when the light is turned off and the music stops then starts again. Creates a lot of tension.
Reflection and Analysis 1)
We took a long time deciding over the sounds so that it would create tension, however we decided to use sinister innocent creepy music at the beginning whilst the child is going to bed as we wanted it to sound like a child’s toy as we thought it would help the audience to feel uneasy as to what might happen next. For example the film ‘The Orphanage’ uses childlike music throughout the film to increase tension as the juxtaposition between the scary situations with calming innocent music works well to unnerve the audience.
Comment 2)
Very effective mise en scene. Like the credits on the stairs. Very good - disturbing music, creating a scary atmosphere! Bit long, but I really enjoyed it! Well done x
Reflection and Analysis 2)
We did find it very hard to keep the length of the thriller down to as short as possible as we had shot 2 hours worth of footage and our first edit was about 5minuites long. It was a very painful process having to cut much of the footage that we really liked out of the sequence to get it down to 2:21.
Comment 3)
I think that the thriller is really effective. I think it is really realistic and believable. The only things I did not like so much were the font of the title at the end and also I was unsure of whether the lady was the mum or a baby sitter. However it was engaging and I would carry on watching the film. I thought the continuity and editing was very good as well.
Reflection and Analysis 3)
This comment is very useful as the writer obviously enjoyed the video as they would want to carry on watching the film however their comments about the choice of font for the title at the end of the sequence is interesting as our group spent a long time going through many different fonts trying to find one that looked both scary and suitable for the concept of the film.
Comment 4)
This has made me paranoid about being in my own house! Excellent casting, intruder very believable, convincing mise-en-scene, but I felt that it was maybe a bit too long. Well done anyway.
Reflection and Analysis 4)
This person mentioned our success in achieving a genuine and authentic Mise-en-scene of the film which we worked hard to try and achieve. We had to spent a long time and been very pinicaty over trying to find a location that was suitable for our needs and would give off the right vibe to the audience.
Comment 5)
I really liked the way it felt as if someone was being watched. The last credit also I thought was really good and the transitions between the shots worked very well.
Refection and Analysis 5)
I am very pleased by this comment as this is what we were hoping to achieve, the voyeuristic style and filmic technique that we saw in the movie of influence (Halloween).
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Final Evaluation And Analysis Of Finnished Product
We were required to research, plan, shoot and edit the opening of a thriller film sequence, for us to succeed in making our thriller sequence a sensation, the final product had to be generically authentic and generate significant rising tension and atmosphere.
In our initial lessons on thrillers we were taught the basic aspects that can either make a thriller scary or not and create fear and suspense in the hearts and minds of the audience. We learnt that by playing with our most basic worries and drawing on the most infantile and therefore subdued thoughts (these thoughts can be voyeuristic, sexual or violent) you can provide significant tension and have the viewer in the palm of your hand to manipulate them in however way you want. We used this point in the development of our initial idea. We decided to focus the sequence around a child being taken by an intruder, using the child to represent the helplessness and the love of any mother and the intruder as someone no one wants to ever find in their house. If you raise these questions in the minds of the audience they will feel unnerved and become removed from their usual safety comfort zones.
Having learnt all this we tried achieve and apply as much as we could to the production of our thriller. Firstly, the production style of our thriller had to be thought through and planned very carefully so as to ensure that we provide sufficient tension and fear; this was prepared during the pre-production stage when we produced a production file containing all the details and planning for principle photography. Things that we took into account that had to be looking authentic to enhance the realism for the viewers to sufficiently believe what was happening and to take into account what will get them scared. All this comes under the heading of Mise-en-scene; this means everything that you see in the frame, the firstly topic is costume. Costume played a major role; the costume had to be looking genuine, as they are vital for generating realism. A very important one is the setting and location. We had huge difficulty finding a suitable location that would create fear and alarm in the audience. We were looking for a fairly big quite oldish house that was secluded so that the audience would feel vulnerable with no one to help. We saw an example of this in ‘Don’t Look Now’ (Nick Roeg, 1973) when there house was isolated and there was no one to help them when their daughter died. We did find one that was sufficient for what we needed and not much set dressing had to take place, it was good as it gave off the old creepy look very well just from the look of it. The lighting played a very important part in creating tension. We had to generate a very dark, unwelcoming and sinister look so the lighting was key in the success of this. The casting had to be real and stereotypical, due to the fact that the sequence had to be so short we had to get across as quickly as we could the meaning and interpretation of each character so the casting had to represent the most typical person you would connect to the role.
Then in the principle photography stage, we had to generate the tension from the shots that we chose to capture. This came from the composition and setup of each shot, for example, if you were wanting to produce a scene that illustrated vulnerability and helplessness, we would shoot a high angled shot, this creating the desired feelings through the shots themselves. We used some of these high angled shots of the mother throughout our sequence, as we wanted to create a helpless vulnerable view of her. We also constructed some shots that used different angles to create a sense of enigma and disorientation for example the shot of the intruder walking up the stairs. A typical way to make the viewer feel uncomfortable and uneasy is to do a right to left pan, this happens because its unnatural to us as English because we are used to reading from left to tight. Some other techniques we decided to exercise were to have very distinct hand held shots and POV shots of the intruder; this enhances the voyeuristic style. As soon as people feel like someone is watching them secretly we become very paranoid, so this works well to create tension. We used this style for most shots of the intruder.
Lastly, creating anxiety in the post-production stage was the hardest as you can totally change the meaning of something through the style of editing and the type of shots you place next to each other. The meaning becomes contextualised by it’s positioning in its relation to either key filmic elements, which helps to anchor down its meaning significance and potential interpretation. During editing, another technique we used was the scene of delay to create discomfort for the viewer. In our thriller sequence cross cutting and cut aways were used to show the second storyline of the intruder entering the house, slowly introducing him ready for the climax in the middle of the sequence. The quick speed of these cuts makes you question what and who it is and therefore increases tension. A factor that also helped with this is providing the audience with privilege audience knowledge (the bomb under the table technique) and showing them through the quick cross cutting the intruder entering, meanwhile the mother and child are totally unaware of anything being wrong, so this makes the atmosphere during the build up to the climax very tense.
I feel that the main weaknesses in our product is down to the narrative being to drawn out and not enough focus being placed on the ambience and more focus needed to be turned to the isolation of the child and the oblivious vulnerability of the mother, due to this we did not put in enough little snapshots and quick cross cuts. My other main regret is that we lit the shots to brightly so the finished product isn't dark enough to give it the sinister feeling it needs. On a much smaller scale there are a few shots where you can very briefly see the corner of the red head lights/lighting stands, but it is very hard to notice so it is not a major issue.
On a more pleasant note, the main strengths are that it is generic in what it looks like and achieves, with full realism throughout. We fulfilled the unit brief, therefore the sequence is an overall a success, reaching out to the audience and providing them with an entertaining piece of film. A major strength of ours that was a massive contributer to our success was our organisation as a group during each of the stages of the project, making it much easier to accomplish. I am also pleased with the success of the technicalities we had learnt in class before hand and were able to put to practice during the making of our project.
In our initial lessons on thrillers we were taught the basic aspects that can either make a thriller scary or not and create fear and suspense in the hearts and minds of the audience. We learnt that by playing with our most basic worries and drawing on the most infantile and therefore subdued thoughts (these thoughts can be voyeuristic, sexual or violent) you can provide significant tension and have the viewer in the palm of your hand to manipulate them in however way you want. We used this point in the development of our initial idea. We decided to focus the sequence around a child being taken by an intruder, using the child to represent the helplessness and the love of any mother and the intruder as someone no one wants to ever find in their house. If you raise these questions in the minds of the audience they will feel unnerved and become removed from their usual safety comfort zones.
Having learnt all this we tried achieve and apply as much as we could to the production of our thriller. Firstly, the production style of our thriller had to be thought through and planned very carefully so as to ensure that we provide sufficient tension and fear; this was prepared during the pre-production stage when we produced a production file containing all the details and planning for principle photography. Things that we took into account that had to be looking authentic to enhance the realism for the viewers to sufficiently believe what was happening and to take into account what will get them scared. All this comes under the heading of Mise-en-scene; this means everything that you see in the frame, the firstly topic is costume. Costume played a major role; the costume had to be looking genuine, as they are vital for generating realism. A very important one is the setting and location. We had huge difficulty finding a suitable location that would create fear and alarm in the audience. We were looking for a fairly big quite oldish house that was secluded so that the audience would feel vulnerable with no one to help. We saw an example of this in ‘Don’t Look Now’ (Nick Roeg, 1973) when there house was isolated and there was no one to help them when their daughter died. We did find one that was sufficient for what we needed and not much set dressing had to take place, it was good as it gave off the old creepy look very well just from the look of it. The lighting played a very important part in creating tension. We had to generate a very dark, unwelcoming and sinister look so the lighting was key in the success of this. The casting had to be real and stereotypical, due to the fact that the sequence had to be so short we had to get across as quickly as we could the meaning and interpretation of each character so the casting had to represent the most typical person you would connect to the role.
Then in the principle photography stage, we had to generate the tension from the shots that we chose to capture. This came from the composition and setup of each shot, for example, if you were wanting to produce a scene that illustrated vulnerability and helplessness, we would shoot a high angled shot, this creating the desired feelings through the shots themselves. We used some of these high angled shots of the mother throughout our sequence, as we wanted to create a helpless vulnerable view of her. We also constructed some shots that used different angles to create a sense of enigma and disorientation for example the shot of the intruder walking up the stairs. A typical way to make the viewer feel uncomfortable and uneasy is to do a right to left pan, this happens because its unnatural to us as English because we are used to reading from left to tight. Some other techniques we decided to exercise were to have very distinct hand held shots and POV shots of the intruder; this enhances the voyeuristic style. As soon as people feel like someone is watching them secretly we become very paranoid, so this works well to create tension. We used this style for most shots of the intruder.
Lastly, creating anxiety in the post-production stage was the hardest as you can totally change the meaning of something through the style of editing and the type of shots you place next to each other. The meaning becomes contextualised by it’s positioning in its relation to either key filmic elements, which helps to anchor down its meaning significance and potential interpretation. During editing, another technique we used was the scene of delay to create discomfort for the viewer. In our thriller sequence cross cutting and cut aways were used to show the second storyline of the intruder entering the house, slowly introducing him ready for the climax in the middle of the sequence. The quick speed of these cuts makes you question what and who it is and therefore increases tension. A factor that also helped with this is providing the audience with privilege audience knowledge (the bomb under the table technique) and showing them through the quick cross cutting the intruder entering, meanwhile the mother and child are totally unaware of anything being wrong, so this makes the atmosphere during the build up to the climax very tense.
I feel that the main weaknesses in our product is down to the narrative being to drawn out and not enough focus being placed on the ambience and more focus needed to be turned to the isolation of the child and the oblivious vulnerability of the mother, due to this we did not put in enough little snapshots and quick cross cuts. My other main regret is that we lit the shots to brightly so the finished product isn't dark enough to give it the sinister feeling it needs. On a much smaller scale there are a few shots where you can very briefly see the corner of the red head lights/lighting stands, but it is very hard to notice so it is not a major issue.
On a more pleasant note, the main strengths are that it is generic in what it looks like and achieves, with full realism throughout. We fulfilled the unit brief, therefore the sequence is an overall a success, reaching out to the audience and providing them with an entertaining piece of film. A major strength of ours that was a massive contributer to our success was our organisation as a group during each of the stages of the project, making it much easier to accomplish. I am also pleased with the success of the technicalities we had learnt in class before hand and were able to put to practice during the making of our project.
Account Of The Editing Process and Difficulties Encountered
We had a very stressful beginning to our editing process. Due to a technical malfunction, our time code was broken in several places. This made it very difficult to digitise the whole tape all in one go. So to digitise our footage, we had to isolate each break in the time code and digitise each section individually. This was very frustrating as it took a long time to complete, and set us back time wise by about a week.
Once we had digitised all our footage, we went about turning the rushes from one long continues video file into individual shots from the storyboards, this process is called logging. We decided to split all the shots up into 4 main categories of the four different locations, bedroom, living room, stairways and outside, and put them in separate ‘bins’. For the shots that we taken many takes of we also had to select the best take for the sequence, this was often very hard to chose. To make it easier when selecting the material for the timeline we named each shot with the type of shot and timing, e.g. Medium shot, Over Shoulder, 5 Secs.
When we had logged each shot of our 1 hour and 10 minutes of footage, we went about bringing a selection of clips from the log bins down onto the timeline. We stuck to the basic structure of the storyboards but had to vary it when we wanted to include some of the extra shots we shot on the day of principle photography. Our first sequence that we put together included far too much footage and lasted 6 minutes, having done some basic continuity editing, and this lasted too long so we had to start making some hard decisions of deciding what material we would get rid of.
Something that helped in this step is having different shots on different lines of the timeline so that we could delete and move around shots freely, this was extra helpful when it came to laying down the sound. Firstly, we went through a large database of un-copyrighted music and sound effects. We were specifically looking for music that sounded innocently scary to tie in with the theme of the innocent child being stolen. Most of the music was very short clips, so to make the music last longer we had to copy and paste the clips and cut bits out so that it sounded like it all flowed together. We also had to mix the audio with the ambient sounds that we recorded during principle photography.
The penultimate stage of editing was to put the titles onto the sequence. We had a slight problem with this as there weren’t many shots long enough for some of the credits as we have quite a lot of fast cross cutting going on, which reflects the production style mirroring content. We had to make sure that all the credits were consistent and the same size and font so that they all looked coherent.
The final stage was the phase that makes the product look professional and properly polished. You have to watch it through very carefully making minute changes to the colour, lighting, final sound and visual cut and the overall grading of the sequence. This makes the whole thing run together in a seamless and smooth style that shows the well-finished postproduction stage of our sequence. The grading stage adds a filter over the top of the footage that gives it the impressive filmic look and enhances the style and typical aesthetics of Hollywood high production values. All this finishes the product off with a properly professional look.
Once we had digitised all our footage, we went about turning the rushes from one long continues video file into individual shots from the storyboards, this process is called logging. We decided to split all the shots up into 4 main categories of the four different locations, bedroom, living room, stairways and outside, and put them in separate ‘bins’. For the shots that we taken many takes of we also had to select the best take for the sequence, this was often very hard to chose. To make it easier when selecting the material for the timeline we named each shot with the type of shot and timing, e.g. Medium shot, Over Shoulder, 5 Secs.
When we had logged each shot of our 1 hour and 10 minutes of footage, we went about bringing a selection of clips from the log bins down onto the timeline. We stuck to the basic structure of the storyboards but had to vary it when we wanted to include some of the extra shots we shot on the day of principle photography. Our first sequence that we put together included far too much footage and lasted 6 minutes, having done some basic continuity editing, and this lasted too long so we had to start making some hard decisions of deciding what material we would get rid of.
Something that helped in this step is having different shots on different lines of the timeline so that we could delete and move around shots freely, this was extra helpful when it came to laying down the sound. Firstly, we went through a large database of un-copyrighted music and sound effects. We were specifically looking for music that sounded innocently scary to tie in with the theme of the innocent child being stolen. Most of the music was very short clips, so to make the music last longer we had to copy and paste the clips and cut bits out so that it sounded like it all flowed together. We also had to mix the audio with the ambient sounds that we recorded during principle photography.
The penultimate stage of editing was to put the titles onto the sequence. We had a slight problem with this as there weren’t many shots long enough for some of the credits as we have quite a lot of fast cross cutting going on, which reflects the production style mirroring content. We had to make sure that all the credits were consistent and the same size and font so that they all looked coherent.
The final stage was the phase that makes the product look professional and properly polished. You have to watch it through very carefully making minute changes to the colour, lighting, final sound and visual cut and the overall grading of the sequence. This makes the whole thing run together in a seamless and smooth style that shows the well-finished postproduction stage of our sequence. The grading stage adds a filter over the top of the footage that gives it the impressive filmic look and enhances the style and typical aesthetics of Hollywood high production values. All this finishes the product off with a properly professional look.
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