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.

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.

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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.

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.

Feedback From Teacher (Marisa)

This is a feedback from Marisa. She helped us a lot during our thriller and also Rebecca aswell but unfortunately we did not record a feedback from her. Their feedback was pretty much similar and it helped us improve our thriller from the draft to the final edit. Thank you for helping us improve.

Pitch Feedback

For our pitch me made a Prezi and we all did at least 1/2 slides each so that to would get finished quicker. Our actual pitch was quite disorganised only because we hadn't assigned who was going to do and read what, so the roles were jumbled and people got confused during the pitch, this led to some people in the group improvising and saying the wrong things but it all came together in the end.

We were given points to help us improve, here's what was said:

• Placing of the box
• Making it clear that they're going on a date
• Not reveal too much in the opening
• Needs to be made clearer what weapon will be used

I think that the feedback given was spot on, in terms on what we need to improve. Some of the points that were mentioned were not mentioned in our pitch or explained unclear so the feedback helped us to be able establish exactly what we need and what we are going to do to make our thriller good. The points that I think were most important were the placing of the box and making it clear that the two characters in the opening are going on a date. The placing of the box is very important as it is central to our plot and the beginning and the name of the thriller is Box Plot, if the box is not placed in a place where it isn't visible to the audience and a place where it's likely that Joyce may look to find it. Also, It needs to be evident that the characters are going on a date as we want to make it seem, normal and sweet and at the very beginning, there shouldn't be clues that Alan is planning to kill her. If it is't put across that they are going on a date, then the contrast will not be there.

Editing

Alan was our main editor but I assisted him at certain points in picking the right shots and sound.  I didn't actually do any editing but I helped out with suggestions of transitions and the shots that should be used and watching it after to see if anything needed changing or improving.

I was heavily involved in picking the sound, it took a bit of time to find as a lot of the sound did not match the atmosphere that were trying to create but we eventually we found one that fits and creates the romantic atmosphere for the beginning and Alan found the other piece of sound for the tension building and suspenseful scenes in the opening. I think Alan did a good job in the editing and without him the editing wouldn't have been as good. During the editing, me and the other members of the group were there, most of the time, to help him out.

Costume and Props

 Outfit for the female character was a white top maxi skirt. Initially the agreement was for the outfit be a plain white dress to portray her as the victim but for specific reasons the costume had to be changed. We find that were still able to portray what we wanted to with this outfit, the white contrasted with the male figure's costume of a black suit. White often suggests a sense of innocence and purity it was important that somehow it was wore on the female character. The leather accessory was not discussed though it didn't destroy the aim of the costume.

On prop used was the Ipod Touch this was essential because that when the box is found. It was a choice between a phone or this and we choose this because  the phone was more lightweight and fragile whereas the Ipod was protected by a case a made an effective sound.

Introduction to soundtrack

We have been introduced to soundtrack pro to use in our prelim and to use on our thriller opening. 

Soundtrack pro is a software that has lots of different sounds and instrumentals that can be used when making your own film or video. You can edit the sounds that soundtrack have to suit you. You can also add your own sound whether it is your own music or your own sound which is called foley sound. 

Foley sound is making your own noises. For example, if you have a scene where someone is closing the door but you cannot hear the closing of the door properly then you could do a recording of the door closing and add it to soundtrack pro to make sure it sounds the way you want it to sound and if you then wanted to, you could then add the soundtrack pro sounds and add them together to make the sound you want for your video. 

What we changed from the draft

We changed many things from the draft to our final thriller. We had to cut down a lot of time of the thriller so we all decided to not do the shots of Alan and Joyce going up the stairs as we have already seen it when Alan went downstairs. As a result to this, we decided to cut them to upstairs after the dialouge they had together. We also thought that the shot when Joyce was sitting down was a really bad shot so we retook it to improve it. We also reshot the outside shot as the last time we shotted it, it was really dark. So we all decided to meet early at Alans house so that we could have the perfect weather. We also reshot all the shots when Alan was looking towards the camera. At the end we decided to add a different scene of Alan picking up the box so it would look more mysterious and sinister.

Difficulty we had during editing

The difficulties that we had during editing was that 2 of the shots that we did which was really dark. We could not retake the shots as the deadline was the day after. We decided to try find other clips that would be lighter which we did not have so we had no other choices and added it into our thriller. The lighting also made our continuousity not match together which made the group really fed up but we could not do nothing about it. In future we now know to look back at the shots we done before actually going into the next shot. We also found out that, looking at the video on camera and on the mac is really different because when we saw the shot on the camera, it was not too dark and thought we could add it but when we saw it on the mac it was really dark and we could not see peoples faces which is really dissapointing.

Titles added in the opening

The titles that we did in this opening were:

• Production company
• Distribution Company
• Actors
• Casting Company
• Music composer
• Editor
• Movie title
• Costume designer
• Production designer
• Co-producers
• Executive producers
• Producers
• Story makers
• Screenplay
• Director

We decided to do an tradition way of a title sequence as this is the main title sequence we all studied most. We changed the position of the movie title as we wanted to sync the movie title with the video we made.

Sound

We Looked at different types of sound that would match our opening in Sound Track Pro. The sound that we found was an acoustic sound so it would go with the romantic feel we wanted at the start of the film. We wanted a really scary sound at the end of the opening so it would look really frightening so we found a frightening sound but we liked 2 so we added both of them together which made a high tension sound which the whole group liked.

Last time Filming

After the Feed back we decided to bring the camera overnight so that we could improve on our thriller. During filming , we reshot all the shots that needed improvement which was 48 hours before the dead line.

Feedback From Student (Ami and Rimello)

The feed back we had from both of our class mates were pretty much similar. They told us to make the scenes much shorter as it kind of got boring if you keep seeing us walking. They also told us some of the shots was too dark and they could not see the faces of the actors. We asked for which types of sound we should add in and they both said we should add in a romantic sound at the start and at the very end of the thriller a horrific sound as it gives more tension.

Filming & Directing

My role in the group was mainly directing and filming. I didn't find these roles too difficult. Although there were some points

The directing role came quite naturally to me and the people in my group were easy to direct. Filming proved difficult at certain points as there were some places where the space was too small to film in and the tripod did not fit so the shot took longer to get. Sometimes the actors lost concentration or forgot lines and that also meant that some shots took longer to film as we had to redo them . Another thing that was a problem was lighting. Some shots were good but because of the lighting they had to be re done.

Overall, I liked the roles I had in the group especially filming as I gained greater understanding of the functions of the camera and how to use the camera efficiently. I never really had a chance to use the camera beforehand. If I had a choice I would do the same roles again as I really enjoyed them and if I did any other role, I think I wouldn't have done a good enough job.