MEDIA THRILLER OPENING EVALUATION

Charlie Aldridge

In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?In the process of making our thriller we decided to include and incorporate some of the generic conventions for the thriller genre. The location we chose shows the characters in a rural and urban area because of the high level of cars and houses, because of the large number of cars and properties this may connote high levels of crime in the area. This then develops later in the film when we see the antagonist try to break into a car on the side of the road promoting a risk of crime in the area. This element develops further on in the scene when the owner of the car chases the antagonist up the road. This links the video into the action sub-genre of the thriller genre. Our chase scene was edited to contain many fast and short shots, which is a generic code of the sub-genre. The main title at the end of the short film includes a black background that is again a generic convention of the thriller genre. Our main title was the words ‘Cold Chase’, on a 3d layer moving around on screen as if being chased. We also included slow suspenseful music to add suspense to the film that is another generic convention of the thriller genre.

Stop frame screen shots showing the title of the movie on the 3D layer.

Screen shot showing the setting of our opening with the cars and houses included

HOW DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT REPRESENT PARTICULAR SOCIAL GROUPS?Our media product represents two main social groups, we have used a teenage actor to represent a criminal and we also used anther teenager in his late teens to represent the car owner who could be seen as someone in their early twenty’s as they look older. We decided to use a teenage actor as they receive a lot of negative press in the media about being the worst generation and being very unruly and the audience would associate with the characters bad behaviour because of the uk press. The two main characters first meet when the car owner leaves his home and sees the criminal trying to break into his car, the scene show both of the characters points of views at the time. By showing one of the characters trying to steal the car it represent the social group of ‘criminals’. The other character is represented as a good citizen as he is the character who has done nothing wrong but the meaning of him chasing the criminal is to catch him and interrogate or hurt the criminal to try to find out why he was trying to steal his property. This could also be linked to the ‘criminal’ social group as he wants to inflict pain and suffering on the other character. The audience can deduce this from the scene as he has prevented the robbery but he still wishes to chase and confront the antagonist. This reinforces the classification the films genre.

The image below is from an advert against car break ins and it represent the villain as a young male wearing a hoody. The hoody is represented in the media as the clothing of criminals or those performing anti-social activities. We decided to use a hooded coat in our film to dress our antagonist to keep with modern media conventions.

You can see from the screen shots the hood hanging from the back of the character.

These are screen shots taken from the production illustrating the two

different points of views

We used an all male cast, which represents gender in a very stereotypical way; it shows that males are more athletic than females and more socially important. It also denotes the female gender’s tendency to steal property or commit a criminal offence. This gives the male gender a bad image as it states that males commit crime in general and it is males who link themselves to violence. We decided to use a white male as our antagonist instead of a black male to go against the stereotypical characters in the media. Black males are generally cast as the negative characters in media texts so we decided to ‘go against the grain’ and cast a white male. Class doesn’t feature much in our thriller, the characters are dressed well and there isn’t much difference in their general appearance. We showed that they were both middle class both wearing jeans and black coats. The antagonist stealing the car may suggest that he is of a lower class than the car owner as he can afford to buy the car whereas the antagonist can only steal cars. We also show the car owner leaving his home that again reinforces that he is of a higher class over the antagonist. What Kind Of Media Institution Might Distribute your media

Product and Why?I believe that our thriller would not be endorsed or produced by a major worldwide film production company. The opening of our thriller shows a number of reasons why. We chose to set our thriller in a small town in Buckinghamshire located in the southeast of England. If it was to be made by one of the big film production companies then it would have been set in a more built up city. After watching films like ‘Rock ‘n’ Rolla’ that include train tracks, the police and big, muscular henchmen that chase the characters in the main chase scene. Our film doesn’t include any of the elements of the list above, which is one of the reasons why our film wouldn’t be suitable for the industry. Also our chase scene only lasts just over a minute whereas the scenes in big budget films last up to or more than ten minutes. The scene was also filmed over many different days and at different energy levels so the pace of the running changes throughout. One element, which we felt was similar to the films from professional production companies, was the pace of the editing in the chase scene in the opening. We thought that the shot were held for adequate amounts of time to give the audience the chance to see the action, but wasn’t held for too long to slow the pace of the extract.

Rock N Rolla DVD cover

Who would be the audience for your media product?For our thriller to be effective in the genre and subgenre there needs to be a degree of violence in the following scenes after the chase. This will attract our target audience, teenagers. The characters in the film are also teenagers so the audience will feel as though they can connect with the characters and their emotions if they were to find themselves in that scenario. The product would also attract most male audiences as the gender often prefers watching film that includes both action and violence. Our film could to relate to the Die Hard franchise as they are also in the action thriller genre and heavily include violent scenes of gun battle or hand to hand combat. This has proven to be very popular male teenager audiences. The Die Hard films vary from 15 certificates to 18 certificates and they contain violence and bad language. Our film only promotes violence and contains no bad language so I think the film should be a certificate 12+.

The four DVD covers from the Die Hard series of movies

How did you attract/address your audience?The opening scene would be the most inviting and appealing to the target audience. The chase involves both parts of the subgenre, with the scene starting as a thriller with suspenseful music adding to the atmosphere and then the feeling of the scene changes quickly to the action genre with the chase developing quickly. The shots of the robber beginning to investigate the car and beginning to try and break into the car start to draw the audience in. The audience start to wonder if the car owner will come out and see the robber at the car, always adding suspense. We chose to often use P.O.V sots to try to purposefully draw the audience in to the situation as both the robber and the car owner, to see both perspectives. This again creates suspense for the audience.

What Have You Learnt About Technologies From the Process of Constructing This Project?Whilst creating the product I used new technologies and also renewed my knowledge of some technologies that I had learnt to use before. I had used the main video editing software, Adobe’s Premier Pro, in another subject at school. I knew many of the basic features that would enable me to create a smooth and well put together piece of film. I also found some new techniques that enabled me to create a effective and professional looking opening, this included learning how to change the speed and duration of some of the clips in the video. I learnt to do these new techniques from online tutorial sites like Tutorialized and I also asked fellow pupils if I had trouble with any aspect of the creation of the video.

I also used Adobe’s After Effects to create some of the more professional looking features of the video. I incorporated 3D stages which move and transform the image onscreen in the final main title at the end of the opening. I also included some ‘lightball` movement effects into my production studio title which reinforced the professional look we went for in our video. In creating these elements of the video I had to again consult felloe pupils and look at tutorial websites for advice. For the problems I had in After Effects I used a website called Video Co-pilot which specialize in the After Effects programme.

We also found some problems with the equipment we needed to use in creating the film and shooting the footage. We found that often the cameras were not charged so we had to sometimes rush our filming to try and capture as much footage as we could before the cameras would run out of battery. We often had no time to charge the cameras as we would film straight after school so there would be no where or no time for us to charge the equipment.

Looking Back at Your Preliminary Task, What do you feel you Have Learnt in the Progression From it to the Full Product?When we came to film the preliminary task we had very little knowledge of the cameras and equipment we came to use, it also helped in learning and relearning Premier Pro. This meant that by the time we came to creating and completing our final project we were skilled in the use of using the hardware and software. The pre production research into other thriller films helped greatly as we knew what our film had to look like before we made it. I felt that the Animatic helped too as it was the first stage of our film, it gave us an idea of run times and how long each shot needed to be for us to create an effective thriller. We had to change the setting and location time for filming as the first location made the film too dark and ruined all of our footage. We tried using torches and streetlamps down the alley ways to illuminate the actors but this was still ineffective so we changed the time of filming.

This shot is taken from our attempts at filming on the dark. The shot shows one of the torches illuminating a wall down the alleyways. We included the shots to try and show the movement of running in the darkness.

This is another shot taken from our filming in the dark, the shot shows the two characters running down the dark alley holding the torches, these are the white balls of light in the shot.

Our preliminary task involved us including a ‘Shot- Reverse-Shot’ technique in the final cut. The shot reverse shot uses three point of view shots in quick succession showing the faces of the characters or actors. This helped us to master the point of view shot when we later came to use it in our final thriller opening cut.

These 3 shots are taken from our preliminary task showing the shot reverse shot technique.

Our preliminary task also helped to us to practice other media filming techniques like panning. In the preliminary task we used and tried a pan for the first time and the result was quite ineffective, the shots were jumpy and looked like stop motion. In our final thriller opening we included a pan once again but didn’t repeat our mistakes in the preliminary task. The pan was smooth and to a high quality so was much more effective on our final video.

It also helped us to improve our framing in the final video. The framing of the subject in the preliminary task was poor and the pan was too slow so framed the character to the right; whereas in the final thriller opening the actor is framed more centrally as our pan was at a more accurate pace and kept the subject in the center of the frame.