1)In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge the forms a conventions of real media products?

Our task was to write, film, edit and produce a two minute opening scene to a thriller. We choose to carry out research to find out what people wanted to see and what the traditional conventions of a thriller were. An opening sequence must set the audience up ready for the rest of the film, if the beginning doesn’t appeal to our target audience then we may lose a lot of your target audience we are aiming to meet. Our opening sequence sticks to many of the conventions and I believe that it achieves the aims an opening is meant to do. The story is built around a girl who lost her twin when she was younger. Our aim was to make the two minutes leave the audiences questioning what was happening and I believe this helps to create suspense and a certain enigma.

I don’t think our film pushes or challenges the conventions of the thriller film, although when we started researching I did want to experiment with the types of story lines we could have used within our chosen sub genre. This is because conventions set by the media industry and are developed over a number of years because they work for that specific genre. We decided to follow the conventions that have already been set to make our film as successful as other films in the same genre when it comes to the advertising campaign. As we have stuck closely and followed conventions, our film does allow the sub genre (thriller-horror) to be portrayed and I think the audience understood the film as we got a lot of positive feedback.

For example, the narration I feel adds to the horror effect and helps to build the character around her story and emotions and also is an important part of the story to help the audience understand what is happening.

Our format and style of presentation again is conforming to preset conventions of thriller/horror films. All the locations are realistic and we are proud of the final piece we made and feel we have created a true thriller/horror film. For example, we tried to make the music fit as gently over the film as we could, this way the music plays smoothly over the sequence making it seem more realistic and the music does not sound artificial.

We had all our characters wear clothing and have the correct props that would be stereotypically used to represent that social group, for example, the young girl with a teddy and the doctor in a white lab coat and clipboard.

I believe our film has been greatly influenced by ‘paranormal activity’, I remember watching the film and using it to help build and add to my own ideas of how I wanted our film to be advertised and produced.

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

Our main aim in the film was to portray the girl in the sequence as the same person the audience see in her memory. We had to overcome some hurdles to allow the storyline to come across correctly to our target audience. The younger girl represents the main protagonist as her younger self. It represents the stages in the girls’ life and how she dealt with the loss of her twin sister. So as Emily is put to sleep by the doctor she remembers her life when she was younger. The young girl is represented very stereotypical for her age, she has the pink bedroom and story tail bed. Also the use of a white dress on the girl follows the stereotypes. We used a traditional stereotype of a doctor- older man, very respectable and I think this portrays a very realistic doctor of middle class background.

We decided to follow the codes of a thriller film and this meant we did not get much of a chance to highlight much differentiation between social groups. We tried to portray the younger girl to be living in a very traditional house, with a pink room with ribbons on her bed and pink curtains to show her lifestyle and how she is just a normal girl that has had a hard life growing up without her twin sister. We wanted the audience to realise that she was once a happy child and in many people’s opinions ‘perfect’ until she lost her sister. We were restricted from portraying ethnicity and sexuality as we had a small budget and we were the only actors that we could use.
We used some ideas from the film ‘the ring’ such as using a girl with her hair down over her face which we then transferred to our film.

Link is a photo of the girl from ‘the ring’.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/thering-girl.jpg

We tried to use the best locations possible, we wrote to the doctor’s surgery to book a time slot in the medical room so we could film our opening shots with the girl being put to sleep by the doctor. Our representation of men was very powerful in this scene; the male doctor had control over the venerable girl. When she is put to sleep she sees flashes of her life and it shows the audience how alone she is. Our other location is the park, a place that Emily (our main character) had spent many happy memories with her sister Rose, before Rose died. We used the young girl the sitting on a swing alone in the rain as this added to the feeling of her being all alone in the big world. We also filmed some of the shots in a young childs bedroom, this was Emily’s room that she used to share with Rose, she has had to grown up alone in this room thinking of her sister allot which is the image we tried to portray.

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

The film is definitely more plot based, with the film resting on its emotion and build of character rather than big action scenes, or scenes with big explosions. And the audience may very well be required to think and focus on the characters to flow the story line.
We have not created a Hollywood style film for a worldwide audience due to the budget and small scale of production we have worked with. However I feel our ambition and creativity would have been high enough to meet the standards of the some films with millions of pounds of funding. Our story line may not attract the Hollywood style investment as it is not a family movie, and does not have the typical ‘happy ending’ but I believe it would work well with the television viewing and we could reach a wide audience with channel4.
We feel that as an independent film company, we will be funded through either private investment or the British film industry. I think the BFI and Channel4 have helped fund some very successful films including the British made film ‘Slumdog millionaire’ and ‘kick ass’ which have all tried to target wide audiences.

4) who would be the audience for your media product?

Choosing who our target audience has been interesting as we decided to get feedback on who would want to see it through a questionnaire. We wanted to make the target audience as wide as possible and so we sampled a range of people (different ages and an equal number of females and males). We found that people between 15-19 were most interested by the plot and enjoyed thriller films. Because of the target audience that the film appealed to we decided to rate the film a 15, even though many of the films in this genre are rated 18.

I believe that we made the correct choice with giving the film a 15 rating because there is no link to violence, alcohol/drugs, or sexual behaviour in our film. Our film is based on the build up of the character and her life, she tells the story through her experiences and we believe this is suitable for 15+. We also feel that we appeal to the 15+ age as the main girl is 16. So appealing to girls over 15 will be a lot easier as they can relate to the character.
5) How did you attract/address your particular audience?

We have encouraged identification with the main character through the narrative dialogue over the sequence. This way the audience can understand how she feels. We learnt the she doesn’t want to be in the doctor’s surgery and so the audience do not want her there either, so they take her side and want her to be ok.

we included flash backs in our film, I think they help explain her life, and create tension in our opening sequence. This way the audience can start to understand her character better and create a an interest in the main protagonist (Emily). The flashbacks of her life are shown while she is being drugged in the hospital, I think the way we have filmed these flashbacks for our sequence has followed the conventions of a thrill and so this will help our film to attract an audience already interested in thriller/horror films.

They question themselves about how they would feel if they were in the characters situation, this is what we wanted so the audience can identify with her. We aimed to create this audience positioning to make more of the characters emotions and feelings show though in the film. We believe this will help to make a successful product and I think it follows the codes of thrillers even though it is not a common technique in thrillers as it creates tensions and suspense which are very important in thrillers.

In the interviews and questionnaires we found that people wanted a realistic plot and very realistic acting making it as real life as possible. We used ‘Hollyoaks’ the teen soap opera to help us portray the character well. Last year one of their story lines dealt with a young boy suffering from schizophrenia.

-“Newt was unaware of his schizophrenia, until Lauren watched a video of Newt vandalising a wall, which he told her was Eli. Newt was taken to hospital and diagnosed with the mental illness. Eli was revealed to be a hallucination”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_%22Newt%22_Newton
date: 12.04.2010)

Our film is also built around the girl who believes she can still see her sister and so we were able to get some interesting information from the way Hollyoaks represented newt.

We made questionnaire to help get help on choosing certain parts and adjusting our ideas to help it meet the target audience. The feedback we got from people shows 95% of people are interested in the film and would watch it if it came out in the real cinema.

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

When shooting our first shots, we made more of an effort to visit the set before, think about the types of angles we needed and we practiced filming some rehearsal shots in the park. This way we knew what looked good and if it would suit our film.

The cannon XM2 was very easy to use, very flexible and we were able to film 99% of the shots we wanted, it was easy to set up and it was small and light which ment we could try a variety of different angles and types of shots in small rooms.

However we did have some problems with the tripod and how it held the camera. We struggled to get the best angles with the camera on the tripod, and so we resorted in some shots to be filmed with myself holding the camera steady in position.

This meant we had to discard some of the piece we filmed. Altogether I am pleased with all the shots we collected and we managed to create a good two minute piece in my opinion I think we could have produced a better film if we had more time to film and get a wider variety of locations.

After research into some of the best films ever released it was hard to keep our ideas realistic. We had such high ambitions and if we had the proper production company, the time, the money and the contacts we feel our ideas could have been more developed and we would have produced a higher quality of film. For example we wanted to film fire covering the little girl in her bedroom, however we had to think realistically and decided candles in a circle around her is the closest we will get. We tried our hardest to be creative in all of the shots. We wanted to use two girls swimming together on the swings and for one to disappear. After we filmed this scene we realised that the effects we needed were not available to us we had to rethink how we could show the same thing but without this effect.

We used a programme called ‘final cut pro’ to edit our film, I found it very helpful when it came to adding in and cutting away parts of the film. We were able to get through most of the editing smoothly, having only small amounts of help. We did have some problems in making the flash backs look professional, but after a few tips we decided black and white flash backs would work well to help the audience see they are not in the same time as the main sequence. We used ‘after effects’ to add text over our film, and to add the production name. We found that this gave us a wider variety of effects to use and was very simple to import into ‘final cut pro’. We were also able to edit in sounds such as rain and music which helped to add a realistic feel to the film and I thought this made it look and sounds very professional. I was most pleased with the narration that we were able to add over the top, this was not part of our initial idea but as a group decided it would really make the charater come alive.

7) Looking back on your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

We learnt a lot from our preliminary activity, when we first shot the sequence we had some continuity problems and the edits didn’t match up so we decided to shot the scene again. Once we re-shot we were pleased with the footage we had saved. Once the five minutes of film had been edited down to one minute thirty seconds we were pleased with our final piece and the music we used to help add emotion and feeling to the scene. We learnt a lot, filming the different shots which helped us allot when we start filming the final production.
I definitely feel that we used a greater variety of shots in the final piece as compared to the preliminary exercise. I feel every time we were given the camera we got better at turning our ideas into reality on film and making the time we had most efficient with capturing all the shots and angles we needed.

To conclude, I feel we made a good two minute opening scene. If I was given the chance to do our piece again I think I would have created better characters through the acting which would have helped us to relate the film to our target audience better. I would have made the story line more dramatic and brought it to life more. The improvement our group made from the preliminary exercise to the final piece was so big and I was impressed with how well we filmed and how all our ideas came together, I feel that if we were given another chance we could make even more improvement and make our project to a higher standard and could even meet a wider audience. I am now confident with the skills we have learnt in both production and post-production of our project.

Francesca Boote