EVALUATION
Question 1- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Media thrillers consist of many conventions which allow the audience to understand that what there watching is a thriller. In our sequence, we tried to include as many conventions as possible through the use of mise en scene, sound, editing, camera work and cinematography.
So what is a thriller? A thriller is a suspenseful story or play which includes fast paced and frequent action and usually involves conflict between a hero and villain.
The first convention of media thrillers we explored was the concept of opposition. Opposition is the way in which a protagonist (the hero or villan) will typically oppose an antagonist (the villain). For example in a typical thriller such as batman, batman opposes the joker; a classic case of hero against villain. In our thriller opening there is no direct contact between the protagonist and antagonist character. In the opening 2 mins of our thriller wew see the protagonist to be scared and small using high angles and the antagonist (villan) is seen with low angles making him big and daunting. But towards the end of the actaul thriller the angles start to switch. Because we only filmed the opening to a thriller I feel it was difficult to establish these types of characters to the audience, this is why we used the different angles to present there roles to the audience.
Another convention of a media thriller that we explored is something going wrong. This is a device used by the narrative to raise questions in the minds of the viewer. At the end of our opening the protagonist runs up the top of a buildeing resulting in him being stuck, this makes the audience want to know what he is going to do because of the mistake of him getting him self trapped. This audience may ask question to whwhat the antagonist is going to do as we do not know why the is chasing the protagonist. There is also a link between the chase coming to an end and also the protagonists life coming to an end.
The sound in our sequence starts with the protagonist heavily breathing while moving in bed. This sound is suddenly broken by the soundtrack used for the chase. We did this to make sure the audience are on the edge of there seat and ready for anything to happen. Our sound clip used to parallel our shots were a long piece of music, with a big break with drops. We matched the sound as we found it appropriate to the shots used, as they were parallel in time. This effect brings suspense, especially during the build up and process of him, as he steps out the house to the moment he is on the edge of the building. The use of sound in this sequence helps the viewer find the answer they are looking for as it helps them realise when tension is at its greatest point.
Question 2- How does your media product represent particular social groups
Question 3- what kind of mediia institution might distribute your media product and why?
To distribute our film we would want to contact a British distributing company such as Dazzle short film label, we would do this because they specialise in short films and undertake smaller budget projects. However they don’t specialise in thrillers so finding a distributor who does would also be beneficial and give us more of a chance to get a distributor. Another distributor we would contact is ‘Metrodome distribution’ who specializes in quality independent work. Realistically a big company like ‘Pathe’ wouldn’t distribute our film unless our product had that wow factor.
Question 4- Who would be the audience of your media project?
The audience for our product would probably be male dominated as it’s a thriller genre which males are more likely to be interested in. This is because they would enjoy that element of fear and mystery our film presents. The age of our audience would probably range from 15- 24 as a source (www.mediamatters.co.uk) shows that these ages are most likely to choose thrillers over anything else. Real suspense thriller films that our target audience has enjoyed include ‘Se7en’, ‘pulp fiction’, ‘the godfather’ and ‘joyride’.
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Our film is certificated 15, as most thrillers are either 15 or 18 due to the amount of detail that is used and possibly the violence. Our target audience are people who enjoy a film with a twist and get a thrill from the suspense and don’t mind the physiological theme. It would be mainly a male based audience as the main character would be easily related to the audience.
question 7- Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
In our preliminary task, it was our first chance to use all the technical equipment and actually put something together. We learnt a lot from this task as it gave us things we could improve for our main task such as; working as a team, time management and how important certain techniques were. We got loads of helpful feedback from our class and this then gave us a rough guide into what we needed to be aware of in our main task. We had comments on our focus, so we made sure everything was in focus in the real thing. We also had many positive comments such as our editing, so we made sure we built on these strengths.
In conclusion I felt we learnt a lot from our preliminary task and we able to develop these findings and improve them in our main product. The weak points were made right and we learnt from our mistakes.