Evaluation Questions.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Codes and conventions are the key things to enable a thriller to be very successful.Our final piece follows traditional thriller media products through the use of various camera shots and angles for example  POV (Point Of View) shots, high angle shots and extreme closeups. We made use of editing and flashbacks that are usually used in thrillers.

Our final product embodies and forms the technical conventions of low key lighting via special effects and various camera angles. 

                                                                

  Examples of low key lighting images from our final piece:-

Our product uses music with tension through out to get viewers on the edge of their seats. 

We used deceptive mind games to challenge the viewers minds onto who the real murderer was. We added this into our product because of the information that we gathered from one of our questionnaires which revealed that our target audience likes to solve things before they are revealed in a thriller, these are one of the major conventions that we developed into our final product. During the opening sequence we used many thriller conventions and typical opening sequence conventions.


Examples of various lighting in thrillers:-

Narrative Theory
Our media product supports the theory of Tzvetan Todorov 
in terms of narrative theory.
Todorov suggests that narratives start with a state of
equilibrium in which 'life' is normal and protagonists are happy, 
then this state of normality is then disrupted by fatality.
Our product has exactly this however the flashbacks used,
change the order of it, instead the establishing shot shows 
the evidence of fatal disruption and then goes on to show the 
state of equilibrium.


Levi Strauss examined how stories
unconsciously reflected the values, beliefs
and myths of cultures which is normally
reflected by binary oppositions which is a conflict
between two qualities of terms. Levi's theory doesn't 
really reflect our media product however it does have 
a small element of the term binary opposition as 'Love' forms into 'Hate' which turns into 'Murder'.






Vladimir Propp proposed that it was possible to 
classify characters into clearly defined roles.
His theory does not reflect our plot as 
there are misleading characters in our media 
product.

•  One of our main narrative techniques were the use of our misleading characters. 
• A film which embodies this technique successfully is 'Obsessed' (directed by Steve Shill).

Misleading Character 1

Deceased characters boyfriend

Misleading Character 2

'The nobody'

  

Similar to the misleading character in 'Obsessed'

Misleading Character (Lisa - The office temp)

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

 Our media product represents young black youths in the UK (London), although our thriller opening was based around Obsession it was also about: Jealousy, relationships, conflict and murder. Realizing that our open thriller entailed all these things we linked it to the Murder of Shakilus Townsend, who was murdered by Samantha Joseph's ex boyfriend Danny McLean and his followers.
Below is a link to a newspaper article about the murder:- http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/04/shakilus-townsend-honeytrap-murder-sentence

Below is a link of 3 of the characters from our thriller opening and the murder victim Shakilus Townsend, Samantha Joseph who was the cause of his death and Danny McLean who murdered Shakilus:-

The top 3 from left to right have in the image above all have something in common which is that they all loved a person which caused conflict and jealousy and led to a murder. Below are the love interests of 'Love me' & Shakilus' murder.

CLASS/REGIONAL IDENTITY:
Our media product particularly represents income bracket status

 C-E (lower-class) which would come under students and the unemployed. Our characters were all students from the age of 16-17 and the location represents a place where unemployment is a vigilant problem.



A print screen from article about the unemployment problem in the UK.

Above are examples of the type of social class our media
product represents (Students & The unemployed).

GENDER:
• Both genders of our thriller opening are used equally, both male and female are used as suspects of murder.

MURDER SUSPECT NUMBER 1

MURDER SUSPECT NUMBER 2

Similar to Shakilus Townsend's murder:-

'Honeytrap' Murderer'

Murderer

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

Me and my group decided on an institution that is neither vertically or horizontally integrated. They are called 'Entertainment Film Distributors' who are a British distributor of independent films in the UK and Ireland for various production companies which is ideal for our product because it is culturally based in the UK London.  Entertainment have released and distributed films internationally however they are based in London, UK.

We have chosen this institution because they distribute various types of genres from horror, romance, western, action and thrillers. They have distributed may thrillers over the years for example: 'Dungeon Dragon' (2000), 'American Psycho' (2000) & 'Freddy VS Jason' (2003). 

We chose 'Entertainment' because of them not being independent they may be more open to distributing amateur films.

4. Who would be the audience for your media

 product ?

When it came to defining audiences for our media product me and my group felt that in the income bracket category, C-E would be most appropriate, mainly because upper-class audiences probably would not be interested in the genre which would automatically make it less appealing to the categories A-B. We felt that the social context of our product would attract and relate more to the lives of the categories C-E as it was based on relationships between black youths and based in the Urban part of London. 

We also felt that people with self control and their own mindset would be the type of audience that we would attract to our product, because of our product not being mainstream and it not being normal to see a film in the cinema with black youths based around obsession, the audience with these traits would be reformers and succeeders in the 'Young and Rubicams' category. We'd also go about attracting enthusiatics because they are open to new things which would be the experiencers in the 'VAL' category.


5. How did you attract/address your audience ?
As a group we prepared, questionnaires, online surveys and campaigns via social networking.

From the data we gathered from the questionnaire, online survey and social networking campaigns we drew results such as the ones below:-

The results that we gathered gave us an insight on what types of target audiences would be appropriate for our media product. Our research was classed to a certain age which was 15-17 and only people in the UK took part as that was the specific location we were looking at.

Plot:- You cant always get what you want... Is this what caused the
vicious murder teenage of Georgia Duberry?

Characters:- Black teenage youths, stereotypical that on of the characters is a criminal.
Editing:- The edits are quite speedy and sharp to build a suspenseful atmosphere.
Mis En Scene:-  Location: North London, Enfield Middlesex. Lighting: Low key lighting through out. Costume: Girls:- Smart casual e.g. blouse and wedge heels.

Boys:- Dark to connote sadness and depression.

Dialogue:- We decided not to use dialogue to increase the suspense.

Camera Angle & Movement:- We used various types of camera angles: Extreme close ups, Mid shots, long shots.

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

Throughout this whole process I have learnt a lot about different technical elements which go into creating a product such as an opening for a thriller film. The camera equipment wasn't hard to get use to at all which meant that we could crack on with filming straight away. The part that I had learnt was most trickiest for me was the task of editing the final cut of our product, putting the clips together in the iMovie program wasn't the problem but adding the Ed Sheeran track 'Give Me Love' prove to be the trickiest task for me. However it did broaden my horizon of knowledge on how to use the mac and the iMovie program. I have learnt how to transfer files from a USB. I have also learnt how to add video effects and transition as well as speeding up and slowing down edits in between the clips to give the snappy and suspenseful effect that we needed in our final product. I have learnt how to expand and shorten certain clips in order to fit our maximum time limit of 2 minutes. My knowledge has definitely expanded on technologies such as the mac and the program iMovie. After the two days of editing my confidence has been boosted on how to use technologies like this, I definitely feel that I could edit something of iMovie again with a little more confidence. Overall from the process of constructing our media product I have learnt that it can take a long time to get something to a good standard, whether it being takes while filming our product or the time spent redoing things whilst editing our finished product.

One of the many takes that we had to do in our filming experience.

7. 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 our preliminary task I feel that my knowledge and the the rest of my groups knowledge has really been expanded. We have all learnt, myself in particular not using a lot of media technology beforehand how to now use the programs equipment correctly. From the rules set for the preliminary task such as the 180 degree rule our group has learnt how to create and use different camera shots to highlight different emotions and also hide the undiscovered murderer in our media product which allows the audience to keep guessing and highlight our convention of suspense. Overall I have definitely grown in confidence with using these programs and creating a specific media product. Considering on how minimalistic our equipment and props were, we had to take and use most of our knowledge from our preliminary task and entwine them into our final product in order to create a complex story line of jealousy, infatuation and obsession and make it real.

An image taken from the preliminary task.