AS Media Thriller Evaluation

By Mairead Burke

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

This poster for ‘Knowing’ shows a black background with white writing which has an orange aura surrounding it. The use of white on black is quite common in thrillers

This is the title for one of our production companies in our project. It is also white with a black background.

For our film we decided to include some of the generic conventions of the thriller genre.

- •We chose the location to be urban and rural as this is where you would find more cars and houses. Which is relevant to our film.

•We also chose to include a chase scene which is more classed as part of the action sub-genre of the thriller genre. The chase which was cut and edited to contain a mix of fast and short shots is a generic ode for the action sub-genre.

•For our sound we decided to go for some slow suspenseful music which would help us by adding more tension and suspense to our film and engaging the audience.

For our setting like said before on the previous slide was to be in a rural, urban setting. The conventions of the chase start to develop later in the opening.

At 0:34 we see that the robber has come and is trying to steal a car which tells the audience that a crime is about to take place and that there is a presence of crime. We then see this develop again when the car owner starts to chase the robber at 1:01.

To make our chase scene we had to do some research into them, so we all looked at chase scenes and I think that our chase scene is more linked to the James bond chase in ‘Casino Royale’ this is because of the shots used in the chase and the pace. In our chase scene we used the music to really encourage the pace of the film and I feel that it worked well with the action on screen. The use of a chase in our film establishes that our film is part of the sub-genre of action/crime thrillers. The use of the point of view shots in our chase scene also draw the reader in as it makes them feel like part of the chase.The chase at the beginning shows that Bond wants to get the bomb maker, who he is chasing. He ends up killing the bomb maker. This chase scene is fast paced and is common in action thrillers proving that our thriller beginning must be in the action thriller genre.

Both screenshots are from ‘Casino Royale’

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our media product represents social groups in a variety of ways. In our opening we have two young actors, one who would play a criminal and another who was older to play the car owner. We chose to use the older teen as the car owner as it would make it look more realistic. As a group we decided upon using teenage actors as it’s usually teenage and young people who get negative views from the press so we thought this would come across to the audience.

Gender is also represented in a stereotypical way in our thriller. This is because our cast is all male, we did think about having a girl criminal to invert the conventions however we decided not to as it’s males who are mostly associated with that sort of crime. We also chose to use white males in our film as the common and most of heard of car theft crimes are done by white males.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and

why?I don’t think that our thriller would be produced or distributed by a major film production company, I think it would probably be a better idea to pitch our product to a Television station such as channel four or five, If it was to go out on TV I think it would be after 9pm due to it’s certificate. Out of channel four and five at first I though Channel Four would be good but as I was recently watching channel five I think our product would be more suited there as some of the things Five air is either low budget or slightly older.I don’t think it would make a big hit if it were to be released by a major production company as everything we have put into our film is small compared to the other films, for instance the location is in England and I feel that for it to be a hit it might have to be set somewhere else in the world and then the chase to be made bigger and longer. However the editing which was done to our chase scene we felt as a group was similar to the bigger films was the pace of the editing.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

I believe that the audience for our media product would mostly be teenage males, I think this is because of the action and the story to the product. I believe it would only really be males who watch the film because stereotypically this is the sort of thing a male would watch. However I do believe that a portion of watchers will be female, If we look at James Bond we can see that the watchers are both male and female, but are predominantly male. In this modern world violence and crime levels are rising, due to this I think teenagers (which the film is aimed at) would prefer to see this as this is what excites them. If I were to give it a certificate I think I would give it a 12/12+

Looking at the survey i created on survey monkey it shows that 71.4% preferred to watch a 15 certificated film then any other.

I let the questionnaire doers choose as many as they liked this is why it says that there is nine people but really there is only 7 who have done the questionnaire

How did you attract/address your audience?

I Think our opening would be the most appealing part of our film as it gets the audience hooked. I think the chase scene is the most engaging part of the opening as it is where all the action starts and happens, by using P.O.V shots such as the one based in the car(0:34) we wanted the audience to start thinking what is he going to do? Will the owner find out?, which added that bit more suspense to it as the audience just didn’t know what was going to happen. The P.O.V shots in the chase scene I feel really did their job as the aim was to make the audience feel like they were part of the chase, as both the criminal and the victim. I think the shots created that bit more suspense for the audience as they might of felt like is he going to catch me or am I going to get away? Which really adds to whole film.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of

constructing this product?Before I went onto the media course I had previously done Digital art for GCSE, so I had a basic knowledge of some of the editing programmes. I had not how used Premiere Pro. I have learnt a huge amount from so little in the space of the course about editing and how to construct a video in Premiere Pro. The majority of the time we used Premiere so for me anyway I always found that I had learnt something by the end of the lesson. In the beginning I found it hard as I had to learn the tools and what they did, but I overcame them with practise and the help of my team mates Charlie and Steven. I also was given a website to go to by Charlie was Video Co-pilot (http://www.videocopilot.net/) which give online tutorials specialized for After effects. This helped me create my title. One thing I learnt is that Premiere Pro likes to crash so I learnt the hard way that you need to frequently save work!

We also did work with the cameras, As I like photography I thought I’d find this bit a bit easier, but I didn’t know how quite different it was, because of my prior knowledge with camera I soon got to grips with it. My hand has got a lot steadier and can now see a good shot from a bad one on a video camera. We as a group did find a few problems with the equipment when we needed to film; sometimes the cameras we got did not have any charge so we had to either rush our filming and capture as much as possible. We would have charged the equipment but most of our filming happened after school so we would’ve not been able to charge the battery’s for our filming session after school.

As a group we mostly used Charlie’s Laptop as our main editing space, and obviously this was not the best idea as Charlie was not always in, we realise that this was a mistake we chose to make as it was advised by our teachers too use the school computers as well in case Charlie not being in or work going missing, part way through though we did start to use the school computers which I think helped slightly to finish our product on time.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from

it to the full product?

I feel that I have learnt a lot from the preliminary task that we did, I think it’s because when we did our Preliminary task we didn’t have that much experience with the cameras or a lot of knowledge. I think for our final piece it worked out well, as we had, had lots of experience with the camera’s we had the knowledge of what we needed and what made a good and bad film. I think the knowledge part came mostly from the research that my group and I did, as that gave us all an Idea of what we could do and we could decide what we would like to create by seeing what others had done.

Another thing which I think helped us was our Animatic this is because it gave us an idea of how long our piece could be (or how short in our case) it also showed us how long we would need to hold a shot for.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQrk-JpR4tg&feature=channel <follow for animatic.

The location used in our preliminary task was bright and easy to film in, however when we were filming our final we found that the location at the time of day we were filming at was too dark and the film made no sense. We tried using Torches and streetlamps down the location which was the alley, but we still found it hard to illuminate the location and actors enough for us to get effective footage. So we then decided to change the idea and film and set it in the day time.

Too dark can only see the torch light

Day time meant for clearer picture therefore better for the audience and easier for them to understand