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

As we got more practise I got better with the JVC my shots were much more accurate.

5. How did you address your audience?

Aspects of opening which appealed to audience :

Location - Opening was shot in a well known area which is quite recognisable to the aimed audience

Storyline - This happens in reality with people from the target age group so they'll be able to relate 

social networking sites used to promote our opening 

We occasionally posted images of our work and received likes from other Instagram and Twitter users of the target age

Summary of Comments Given for Rough Cut:

- "It's funny but long !" 

- " Cut down some shots"

- " Is this really psychological ?! "

Summary of Comments Given for Final: 

-  " The opening was overall good and really funny,  titles could have been a better font which fits in with the film alot more!" 

-  "I really enjoyed the opening some bits were really funny I couldn't stop laughing when Alan paused at the stairs it was really effective made me slightly curious and intrigued so yeah I think that worked really well!"

- '"OMG that was really funny I really liked the opening, you should have made titles bigger but other than that I really enjoyed it! And I would love to see the rest of the film. This was hilarious OMG it made me laugh so much !"

Question 1

Question 2

Representation is the act of representing or the state of being represented. The main social group that we have represented in our Thriller is young people, of ages 16 onwards and also, male and females.At the beginning of our thriller the characters aren't seen in a negative light but as it progresses and by the end we see the intentions of the male character the non diagetic sound changes and we see that he may be a bad character and at the end we are assured he is the 'bad guy' in this thriller.

Young people are stereotypically represented as troublesome, in gangs, ignorant, wild, unintelligent etc and the main characters in thrillers are usually older as they have experienced more in life and will be able to figure out some of the complex ideas in the film. Girls are usually presented as sweet, naive, innocent, fun whereas Boys are sporty and tough, bully's, always playing video games.

In our thriller the main character is a young adult male student  had a troubled past and as a result he has developed mental issues which he isnt aware of as he feels he's normal. In our thriller opening, there are no signs that the characters are good or bad, at the beginning. They are just two young normal people who are meeting to go out on a date. Although, when Joyce starts asking questions you get kinda suspicious of Alan, you begin to see that Alan might be the bad guy. Joyce fits the stereotype of young girls as she was naive enough to meet someone she met online alone at their house, without asking more questions. There have been many news stories and documentary's about online stalkers, people who have manipulated people online, and. Alan doesn't really fit the usual stereotype of teenage boys, he is a lot more mature, wearing a suit and isn't doing the usual stuff that teenage boys do, in this opening, as he is a bit weirder. In this thriller girls are presented in a much more positive light than. Alan the male character is presented in the stereotypical way but more dangerous, so thus presented in a negative way.

Question 3

Presentation1 from Dionne Anomaly Fordjour

Question 4

Thrillers

Statistics show that the most popular age bracket for thrillers is 16-24 which would be appropriate as they usually involve complicated plots which may not be understandable or appealing to a younger audience as they'll find it harder to work out what is going on and issues being addressed in the film they may not have had much experience in so it'll seem alien to them. This is also why I think that the age rating for majority of thrillers is 15 or above. The thriller genre has many sub-genres and this can dictate their target audience for example 'Black Swan' would attract more women because its dance aspect but the Bourne. movies will be more appealing to men as most action thrillers are.

Psychological Thriller

This is our chosen thriller sub genre and the reason we chose it was because we found that

the thrillers we enjoyed the most, as a group, were psychological thrillers. I suspect the audience for psychological thrillers will be an older audience as they force you to conceptualise, to deduce, to get confused, all the while taking you to a place not only frightening, but close to real life and as said before younger audience will find it harder to grasp than older audiences. Although, our target audience is younger the usual psychological thriller age profile.

Box Plot

Our Target Audience was ages 16-25 and we chose these age group as we thought our plot would be more relatable. In our thriller we explore the negative side to social networking as the characters in our thriller met on a social networking site, and the main character uses social networking sites to lure girls in, to kill them. Also, research showed the age profile using social networking sites is our target audience group more, specifically from ages 15-30. Below and on the right, are graphs about the age profile of social network use and also the average time spent. It shows that our target audience us it the most and spend the most time on it.

Question 1

Conventions of a film opening is what is what is supposed to be in a opening a a film. 

Here is a list of the conventions of a thriller opening: 

• Film opening to give insight to the characters, location and narrative
• Provide teaser to the story
• Special/sound effects
• The sound is scary, atmospheric, eerie, builds tension 
• The opening should have titles (title sequence) 
• There can sometimes be dialogue which could also provide teasers. 
• Producers identification (production company/producer)
• Sense of mood 

Conventions of a title sequence is listing of the actors, production company, distribution companies, the title and many more. Here is a list of how the titles should go: 

• IDENT
• Production companies 
• Distribution companies 
• Well known actors 
• Movie title
• More actors 
• Music composer 
• Casting company 
• Costume designers
• Film editor 
• Production designers 
• D.O.P
• Executive producers 
• Other names added depending on the movie genre 
• Director

Evaluation - Question 5

What aspects of your opening appeal to the target audience?

 The aspects of our opening that most appeal with our target audience is the narrative. The reason for this is because the narrative is about teenagers who meet each other online and are going out on a date. Our target audience is ages 16-29 and which is same age group as the characters so we think that it will be relatable to the audience. Also what we're addressing in our thriller is typical of our age group (social networking, dating sites, dating) of that age group

How did the rough cut feedback help you to improve your film in order to better appeal to the intended audience?

The rough cut feedback really helped as it allowed us to see what our audience thinks of our idea and our product. We got a few points of constructive criticism which helped us a lot and helped us to improve when it came to getting to our final product. We took all their points on board as they were our target audience and they were the people we wanted to appeal to. I think the advise they gave really helped and overall it meant that our thriller was better and the feedback we got from other people was better.

How have you reached your audience?

Our film was screened at screen on the green. It is not a popular, and well known cinema, as it is quite small and only certain films are shown there. Many students went to view our film, and majority of the feedback was positive. We couldn't show it in large cinemas as our film was low budget, and this is also the reason why we wouldn't be able to let it out on DVD  I think if we had more time, we could've utilised more social media outlets such as facebook and twitter as we would've reached our audience more, and more people would know about it.

Interview with actor

Evaluation - Question 6

Evaulation - Question 7

Preliminary Match Cut Exercise

Pre-Production

Storyboard

Me talking about planning and production

Post Production


As before with the planning and filming we had a very limited time to edit the prelim, although it was short so it was quicker to edit and add titles. We wasn't too careful when it came to the font of the titles and the actual title of this as we did it very quickly and didn't spend too much time trying to figure out what type of font and a good title. It was vital that we included, a match cut, shot reverse shot and 180 degree rule which we did but when we watched some of the clips back we saw that we had bad lighting in the room we was using and some of the framing of the shots were bad.

, 

Thriller Film

Storyboard

It is evident that there is a difference between this storyboard and our prelim storyboard, this one is obviously longer. we spent quite a bit of time as a group thinking about where we was going to film and how it was going to being our story across. We also spent alot of time developing our idea, and we had about 3 versions of the one idea, as we changed it to make it better.

In terms of production we spent a lot of time filming as we made alot of mistakes and this was mainly because of poor planning and organisation skills. We started of good but we started to waste a lot of time and things got messy. Lighting was a big issue as we were filming inside and because we filmed at different times each day it differed slightly, we initially thought this wouldn't have been a problem but it turned out to be. We decided to solve this by using dedo lights but it didn't help much as we ended up not using those shots.

Alan was our main editor but I was there assisting him at the beginning and helping out with the sound. It took a lot longer to edit as we had a lot of shots to look  through and pick the right shots also. Alan did a good job editing and we used a lot of match cuts and we used the 180 degree rule. Although there was one shot which was framed badly and there was nothing much we could do about that. The titles were easy to add but we had a little challenge of using the same font as the font we used for the film title wasn't available for the titles so they differed slightly

What have you learnt across both productions?

I have learnt that I have to be much more organised and plan ahead some that time could be used more efficiently and able to produce better quality results. Learning how to use all the different equipment and software was a beneficial and helped us to be able to product a good final product.

Question 1

Forms and Conventions of Film Openings

In this video it shows all the conventions and Forms in our thriller opening and explains what we did and why we did it.

Question 2

Representation are ways which how the media portrays a particular group and over exaggerates about them. For example young youths are shown as people that wreck things and are immature. The group that we are targeting  are young people from ages 16 - 30 year olds. We decided this was our target audience as when we researched,we thought that people from 15 - 30 year olds mostly go on online dating websites and start to date.

The main social group we are targeting in our thriller are young people as the characters in our film are young adults. Young people are represented as people that are really immature, bullies , in gangs and stupid. They are usually presented as the "evil" people and that they ruin a lot of things whereas girls are represented as smart, good and innocent.

Our representation is presented in a really similar way where Joyce is a really innocent and sweet person which helps the audience understand that she is going to be targeted but also at the start Alan is also presented as a smart person until after the title which changes the audiences views about the Alan. Our characters are young people that are trying to find love over online dating. As we can see Alan is wearing a suit which makes him look a little older which shows to Joyce he is mature but she does not really know his age. This makes the audiences be aware of going into unknown peoples houses and  shows danger of online dating and be aware of people that they meet. This is represented as a negative representation that we tried to put through of teenagers.

Question 2

The meaning of media representation is how media categories people into certain groups making it easier to recognise. For example one category could be teenagers or disability.
The social group that our thriller is targeted to is male and female aged 15-25 who love socialising with other people and they would go on dating sites.

Our representation fits the typical representation of teenagers as it targets males who want to get women but can also be very evil and that is how our actor Alan and females who are looking for love without any knowledge and can be very vulnerable which fits our other actress, Joyce.

As you can see, Joyce is wearing a top, long skirt, jacket with her bag and phone and this would be the look of a normal, average teenage girl who is about to go on a date. As for Alan, he is wear a shirt with a tie and a suit trousers which also a normal teenage boy would wear when going on a date

Question 3

Question 3

Presentation1 from alanv3

Question 4

In most psychological thrillers, Box Plot is aimed at mostly from ages 15 - 30 because younger people would not really understand the story much and it might be way to horrific for them whereas older people would have more of an understanding and would understand the story which would give them more of a thrill. Our Sub-Genre is psychological thriller, this is also one of the main reasons why we made the movie from 15+ as younger people would be to frightened to watch the thriller.

Another reason Box Plot is targeted to young adults is because it contains interests of what a teenager would do such as, love, dating and more. By doing this it makes teenagers be aware of what they are doing and to make them safe. By doing this, it makes the audience think that they could be the next people for this to happen and make them even more scared.

We had many great feedback from our students and they loved how the music went well with the thriller such as "It was really good" and "I love effect of the music at the end". This shows that the audience were interested in our thriller and was really effective towards them at the end of the opening. We gathered most of our feedback at the independent cinema and overall, our feedback was mostly positive from people with the age of 15 - 17 which was our target audience.

From talking to many other people who watched Box Plot, I found out that females were mostly interested and scared of the movie as it was a woman who was being targeted in the actual movie whereas males said they only liked the action when she gets knocked out and found it like a comedy. Since our Sub-Genre is a Psychological thriller, it is originally supposed to target males more than females but as a female is being targeted, females gets more frightened and more aware. Also since the female in the thriller is aged 16, It would get people from around her age even more frightened which is why are target audience of the film is from 15 - 30 as we realized that that is the age where most people date and go on online dating websites.

Question 4

Thriller films are targeted to both male and female between the ages of 16-24. This age is the main target even though there are some thrillers that have been made which were targeted to a younger people. The target audience is aimed at this age range because some of the storyline's are quiet hard to understand, it may contain senses that some viewers may find disturbing, would contain a lot of swearwords, sexual senses and a lot of violence.

In psychological thrillers, the target audience is male and female from the age of 18 upwards and this is because some of them contain a lot of violence, swearwords, sexual senses and some psychological issues could disturb younger viewers. Another reason why it is targeted to is area is because older audiences would understand it better.


Box Plot's target audience is male and female from the age of 15 upwards and this because our psychological thriller does not contain and swearwords and sexual context and the violence is mild. Also, our psychological thriller is easy to understand. The reason why we chose this target audience is because the plot of the thriller would be relatable to a lot of people therefore it would make them feel as if it was their own story being shown but just in a scarier way.

Question 5

Our target audience for our thriller is from 15 - 30 years old which we decided as a group as it is the age where most people go on dates and do online dating with unknown people which makes them aware of what is happening.

As a group we decided to make the sound of the thriller really loud and tense as we found out the more high beat the sound is, the more you get adrenaline as we found out from all of our experiences on thrillers. The mise en scene for this is mostly from he's and her costumes which gives out that they are both getting ready to go out on a date which shows us that they are both in formal wear. By having formal wear, this reveals to the audience straight away that they are dating and are going somewhere formally.


The location of the opening is towards the mans house which makes the audience worry about what is going to happen to the woman as it is an unknown place. By doing this , it attracts all the females as they would get worried about themselves if they go into another persons house.

We reached our audience through a cinemas screening where the whole of the AS media students all came together. Our target audiences were from ages between 15-30 which most of the people in AS are 16  and 17 years old. This helped us a lot as they were our target audience.

These are some feedback we had from them:

 

 

 

 

Question 6

Question 5

This is the feedback after our thriller was viewed in the cinema by everyone who is in AS and does media.

The response that I got for the official video compared to the rough cut was really good. We took all advice/help that was given to us and used them and therefore, our thriller was a success and we got a really good response from the audience while watching the thriller.

While improving the rough cut, it was mentioned that it was unclear who the target audience was and also, the type of thriller it was meant to be but when the final cut was made and viewed, people could clearly tell who the target audience was. The only thing that we could not do was to pass off our thriller as a psychological thriller. Instead, it came across as a comedy thriller.

The way that people were able to view our thriller was through the cinema on the 25th March 2013 and that was the only way and day you could view our thriller

Question 7

While we was doing prelim project, it was much easier to edit and much faster as it was not as long and complex of our thriller. In our prelim, we had 3 main rules such as having match cuts , shot reverse shots and 180 degree rules. We filmed our prelim according to all these rules which was difficult to do as it was our first time actually learning about these rules but as time went by we got used to it and it was actually really simple to do but sometimes gets confusing as we forget which positions we are in. In our prelim, our match cuts was not really as smooth and did not flow much. During the time making the prelim, we did not add any interesting music on as we did not know how to add it onto the video which made it really dull and boring. We made sure we had different types of shots such as long shots , medium shots , point of view and over the shoulders.


Our final project, i believe that we took in everything that we had in our prelim video and improved it by a lot in the thriller. We took all our skills from our prelim video and tried to follow the skills towards our thriller which enhanced it more. By knowing these skills already, filming our footages was much easier and straight forward considering we learnt most of the skills we needed in our prelim video.While we were filming our thriller, we made sure that we always followed the 180 degree rule as we thought it was really important in filming whereas in the prelim, we forgot sometimes which made us lose a lot of time while we was filming.




While we was planning our storyboard we had much more ideas and
confidence while we was planning our final project whereas in the prelim, we had to keep changing scenes. In our thriller, we followed our storyboard throughout while we was filming but changed a fews things to improve our thriller and make it stand out a bit more as we thought our old ideas was not as good. Before changing any of our storyboards,  we always talk as a group first and talk about the pros and cons about changing it before just in case there would be a problem with it. As our thriller was much longer than our prelim, we added more scenes and shots.


During the prelim we did not know much about camera angles and shots. We had to learn but using the JVC camera to get used to it and understand how to actually use it. Our shots on the prelim was not as bad as it looks but we had to retake many shots which wasted a lot of time and it seemed like we were behind in time. While we were doing the prelim we learnt about the rule of thirds, 180 degree rule and all types of camera shots and angles. We were really struggling as only 2 members knew how to use the camera and had to teach the other 2 members which was really helpful and that improved our teamwork skills.



Our camera work improved a lot as we went along. At the start of the thriller, our camera work was still a little off, so while we was filming our progression on camera work came along really well. We shared the camera around so everyone could use it to understand the camera angles and shots. During the prelim video, we did not know much about the camera so we just randomly did shots where sometimes the top of the head is not there but as we filmed more, we started to know about the rule of thirds and other  rules that we needed to improve our camera work. Also during our prelim , we did not use much movements such as tilt and pan whereas in our thriller we used all sorts of types of shots. As a result we had much better shots and angles than our prelim video and we a varies of shots which enhanced our video more.


After filming our footage we edited our video. In the prelim our editing was just standard for example we just added all the clips together and merged them together. We added only one transition which was fade in/out which was alright but a little dull and boring. At the start, everyone thought editing was really hard and difficult but we started to get used to it. I was our main editor and I have edited previous things before and used final cut pro in GCSE which really helped me along the way. I was not really a professional on using the program but still managed. The rest of the group had no idea of how to use the editing software so i had to teach all of them on how to do it which made them gain a new skill on editing. After watching the prelim video, i realised my editing skills were a bit stiff which i had to improve on to make it flow more.


When we edited our thriller, we knew all the basics of editing and knew how to use the program more. After filming, we had many clips so we did not want to make the mistake we did on the prelim so we decided half of us would separate the clips so it would be much easier and more flexible. While editing, I learnt different types of transitions and syncing everything together such as the sound and different types of clips.In our thriller our match cuts improved a lot by making more flowable and more in sync together. At the end my whole group knew how to use the software which was really useful instead of one person editing all the time. This made us have enough time to spend on blogging and editing.



During this project I have developed new skills such as leadership,communication,teamwork, editing and camera work and also most important of all meeting new people and making new friends. Also I have developed my skills in AS media even more. I did media studies in GCSE which was only the basics of media and knew about most of the shots already but in AS, I have learnt new things such as rule of thirds and 180 degree rules. I have also learnt how to use new softwares such as Final Cut Pro and Sound Cut Pro which could be useful in future for me. I really enjoyed working with my team and loved every single part of this project. However, we had a few problems with each other half way through the project which was solved real quick and everyone had their own difficulties. The things that I would have changed in our project would be the lighting where sometimes it was dark and light which was a big problem for us as we filmed in different times but anything else, I would not have changed. I really enjoyed my Experience and picked the correct group to work with as they were all focused into this project.

This is a picture of everyone having break at the location that we was in. We had really fun together and had laughs but when we had to get down to the work, everybody was actually focused onto doing the work. Some people did not know how to use cameras and how to edit but that got solved real quickly which really impressed me as they were all fast learners. I had great fun and made new friends in the end and it was a real privilege to work with this group.

Question 6

Question 7

Question 1

Conventions of a film opening is what is what is supposed to be in a opening a a film. 

Here is a list of the conventions of a thriller opening: 

• Film opening to give insight to the characters, location and narrative
• Provide teaser to the story
• Special/sound effects
• The sound is scary, atmospheric, eerie, builds tension 
• The opening should have titles (title sequence) 
• There can sometimes be dialogue which could also provide teasers. 
• Producers identification (production company/producer)
• Sense of mood 

Conventions of a title sequence is listing of the actors, production company, distribution companies, the title and many more. Here is a list of how the titles should go: 

• IDENT
• Production companies 
• Distribution companies 
• Well known actors 
• Movie title
• More actors 
• Music composer 
• Casting company 
• Costume designers
• Film editor 
• Production designers 
• D.O.P
• Executive producers 
• Other names added depending on the movie genre 
• Director

In our thriller we used most conventions above we also teased, when showing a shot of the female character lying on the floor and the male walking off slowly. This didn't give much away and left people slightly confused but wanting to know more 

2. How does your opening represent particular social groups ?

Teenage girl number 1

Teenage girl number 2

Media representation is  constructed media. It is how the media summaries a category of people making that category easier to recognize. The constructions are often made through stereotypes.  In films there are often two main representations of the teenage girl. Made up from every day stereo typing. 1. The academic female geek , with no social life and 2. The girl who highly rated by everyone has a social not always popular though has contrast characteristics to teenage girl 1. 

16- 25 male number 2

16 - 25 male number 1

1. Showing the teenage to slightly older male popular, sporty and wanted by females and 2. The male slightly introvert, bad dangerous and confused.

For our female character she has more characteristics  in common with teenage girl personality n.o. 2 , which is very into the online world, naive and lacking knowledge in things 

The male character combines the two personalities though he appear to be a sweet guy he also portrays sides of danger

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

Media from c_loridf

4. Who would be the audience for your product?

Question 7

Production Schedule's

We had a big problem on our Production Schedule as it was hand written and nobody had a scanner to scan it and when we took pictures it was blurry so we made a digital one to make things much easier and clearer.