Extras

Thriller Evaluation

My media product uses, develops and challenge forms and conventions of real media products in various ways. A way in which my product does this is through effects such as slow motions. For instance, during the murder scene we used slow motion in order to create a heavily tensed moments which would increase the audience’s heart rate. There are different movies, which influenced us into creating our sequence similar in particular, ‘My bloody valentine’ that is a newly released movie. We were inspired by the idea of Valentine’s Day as it was around the time in which we were beginning to film therefore; we thought it would be a good idea to have our sequence based on Valentines Day. However, we challenged ‘My bloody valentine’ by instead of making a horror thriller like the one they did, we decided to turn it into a simple romance thriller, which is different to the movie released. This meant that our media product challenged the horror theme of ‘My bloody valentine’ as ours is not a horror based thriller.

As well as effects, our media product also uses different type of camerawork to develop our understanding of real media products. An example of this is our match cuts during the murder scene where the murderer is following the character. We showed the character being followed from different angles such as from the back, which then, pans to the murderer and focuses on them until we show the character being followed from the back again. There are also many different camera shots when the murderer is at the cemetery picking off rose petals. For instance, there were over the shoulder shots of the character throwing petals on the grave as well as, medium shots from the side showing the same action.

The sounds we used for our media product develops the forms of real media products. This is because we used slow, strings based music at the beginning of our sequence to create a calm and peaceful yet somewhat mysterious atmosphere. The sound gradually softens and you hear less of it when the murderer is following the couple up the escalator. The sound quietens slowly as it reveals the murderer following the victim. There are minor sound effects of knife slashing, in the background to show the victim being stabbed where the music is muted therefore this builds up the tension. With the slow motion of the murderer stabbing the character to the camera, there are just continuous heartbeat sounds to again, increase the audience’s heart rate.

Editing of our media product develops the conventions of real media products through the order of our clips in the sequence. For instance, it is very straightforward to understand how the day goes on as the order of our clips are chronological. There were not many effects that we wanted to use for our sequence apart from slow motion and fade. Even though we planned to, we never decided to make our thriller partly a flashback as we were running out of time and it would have been slightly too complicated. Similar to real media products, ours shows chronologically the murderer following the victim, killing them and then ending up at their grave.

Mise en scene was a key feature used in our sequence to develop forms of real media products. An example of this was our symbolic rose used in our sequence to represent valentine’s day and love. Hate was shown at the end when the rose is broken in half by the murderer. The snow also helped our thriller look rather scary as it reflects a cold-hearted feeling that the audience could feel towards the murderer. It also shows that it could have been another day possibly in the future, way after the murder.


Our media product represents particular social groups such as teenagers in London. This is because the main character who is the murder is a teenager holding a knife to stab the victim. This is a media panic in Britain and their contemporary ideas of a teenager holding knives are increasing therefore, we decided to base our thriller on these ideas. The age of the people who would watch our thriller would be 15 and over. This is because our thriller is rather violent and is about on sexual jealousy, which would not be suitable for a lower age. The audience may mainly be girls as they are more into romantic movies than boys are however, boys may want to watch it as it involves violent scenes. In addition, the idea of a female protagonist having a female murderer as well as a female victim is rather unusual in a normal thriller. This meant that we challenged the forms of real media products.


The kind of media institution that might distribute our media product would probably be British film release. In addition, Warp might distribute our media product, as they are interested in producing unique and different styles to other films as they focus on people with interesting tastes. This is because right at the beginning of our thriller, there is an establishing shot of ‘The Angel’ in the N1 centre which is significant to a London location therefore, it would be recognised straight away as the footage of the angel wings captured is quite famous. Also, our film has a teenager stabbing a victim with a knife which is a stereotypical judgement of urbanised culture in London about teenagers On the other hand, this could be a Hollywood Blockbuster as the quality of our thriller isn’t cheap and there are other similar Hollywood romance thrillers such as mentioned earlier, ‘My bloody valentine’. ‘London to Brighton’ is also a film, which influenced us as it was realistic and grimey, set in a British location that was cheap. We took on board their idea of realism and twisted it to our own idea by using female teenagers as main characters similar to ‘London to Brighton’ where females are the victims. As well as British films, Hollywood films also have a mixed culture where there is no specific type of race or religion of characters within certain films. Our thriller would not be suitable for just YouTube or through MySpace. This is because, the films shown on the internet are mainly of poor quality and not carefully planned like ours is.

The audience for our media product would mainly have to be young adults. It could be for people in Britain who want to find out about how the urban culture in Britain has developed such as ideas of teenagers holding knives. Similarly, our thriller involves teenagers as the main characters especially the murderer who is a teenage girl carrying a knife and not afraid to use it for her own purpose. People who are in relationships themselves or feel jealous about others in a relationship may want to watch our media product as they could relate themselves to the main character for example, knowing how the main character feels about being jealous of another girl having the man of her dreams. People would want to watch it as it is based on realism and it has a new and unique storyline involving two females as murderer and victim. Some people may want to watch it as it is quite gory involving violent murder scenes such as the murder scene in our opening where the murderer slashes the victim.

We would attract/address our audience in different ways. For instance, we could attract them by having characters that look appealing to the audience’s eyes. The characters may be attractive which could encourage the audience to watch it. We could also market our thriller through the genre, as it is kind of a psychological romance thriller. The genre appears interesting to people so they may want to watch it to find out more about this particular genre and how it fits to our thriller. We would advertise our film through a trailer as there could be many dramatic scenes that could be edited into a trailer, which would make it appealing and interesting to watch. Possibly, we could advertise it on an internet campaign as many people are using internet nowadays and it could catch their attention. However, advertising our film in places as if McDonalds would not be a bad idea as our film is pretty much aimed at young adults therefore, it would be more likely that they would eat in McDonalds and see our advertisement and be attracted by it.

I learnt many things about technologies from the process of constructing this product. For example, the practical experience of filming was very new to me because I have never done anything like this before. This gave me a taste of what it would be like actually working in media and actually creating a film yourself. I felt like I was actually a real actor and director at one point! I learnt a lot about camera such as different shots like long shots, medium shots and close ups and how to shoot them. I also learnt able different angles of shots. I also learnt that by using close ups, it enables the audience to view the character’s facial expressions in order to recognise their feelings and thoughts. This helped me analyse other films that I watch at home or in cinemas. Using final cut pro was also new to me because it looked so difficult at the beginning and I thought I would never understand it. Finally, the more I had a go at using it the more I enjoyed it and got the hang of editing our video. We were taught how to use final cut pro by playing around with a clip from a film, which we had to cut different clips and put it together in order to make sense. The first time I did it, I could not make the editing to look clean, instead it looked a bit rough and it did not really make much sense. However, the more I practiced in editing it the better I got at it and I made sure I used the skills I picked up for our thriller opening sequence editing. The blogging enabled me to reflect on what I did each day and how everything went during the film making process and it allowed me to plan for what we would do different next time if we had made a mistake. When we released our video on our blog, we knew that other people who made their own video would be watching ours and comparing it. This allowed us to receive feedback from them as they would come up to us and tell us our film was good or bad.

Looking back at my preliminary task, I feel that I have learnt a lot in the progression from it to the full product. This is because the ‘match cut’ exercise we done allowed us to see many mistakes that we have made during the process. For instance, we saw that while we were shooting, we left a lot of headspace for our actor, which made the camerawork appear quite low. This meant that, before we edit our actual media product next time, we would make sure that the headspace is not how it was in our preliminary task. The storyboarding and planning allowed us to carefully set out what we needed to do and make it perfect, as we are aware of what we are doing in each step. The full product compared to our preliminary task showed a massive improvement through quality and standards of the film. This is because our full product actually looked like a real movie whereas the preliminary task looked much lower in quality.

Thriller Evaluation

When we made our started our media project we worked our idea around current influences. I worked in a group of four. We all contributed to ideas and built our storyline around each of ideas we contributed. Our film is called . “Love Me, Love Me Not”, Hamsa Aden came up with the idea of the story line and we all worked around it. Some ideas of our film came from the movie “My Bloody Valentine” which was successful at the time we started our project.
“My Bloody Valentine had gained a lot media and public attention, maybe because of it’s mixed genre, which is why we thought this would be a good film to focus on working along. After hearing about the film we thought we could apply the same elements to our film by focusing on love as well as still keeping our film in the thriller genre. We used connotations of e.g. love, danger and blood to convey meaning. In our film we used a red rose as a connotation of passion. In the film our protagonist (Fouzia Abbasi) destroys the rose at the end of the film showing our audience that in the film love is killed compared to our protagonist murdering the victim (Qiu Ling Lam).

During the making of our film we really progressed in using techniques to match the conventions of a real thriller film. We understand certain films have conventions which they follow.
Most movies have an equilibrium which is disturbed and then by the end of the film the equilibrium is restored. We challenged normal conventions by creating a new equilibrium. In the beginning Hamsa and Qiu Ling play the happy couple but then the equilibrium is ruined by Fouzia, who murders Qui Ling. Since the story is from Fouzia’s (our protagonist’s) point of view it makes this an alternate/new equilibrium.
At the beginning of the film we used an establishing shot to try and match the one in ‘The Shining’ and also ’28 Days Later’. In The both films an establishing shot is used to introduce the place the film is taking place. Our opening shot is of the Angel wings in Islington. We decided to use this as our establishing scene as the wings are commonly associated we The Angel in Islington.

During the making of our media product we challenged usual conventions of real media products by using a variety of non-diegetic sounds. We used sound effects more than conventional movies which often focus on natural sounds. We used the sound effects to challenge the conventions of real films but at the same time try to imitate them.

The people we used in our film are young. We portrayed our actors as being middle class rather than paying a larger focus on a particular social class. We tried not to focus on much on social groups. As our actors were all young and dressed accordingly to people our age, it made it easy for us to relate this film to our age group. In our movie our main character, the protagonist is female. This can be related with sexuality, as often villains and criminals are often portrayed as being male so this way our film is also challenging conventional methods of film. This gives an interesting twist to our film as some aspects of it are out of the norm yet the film still follows normal conventions of film making.




We could work with a company such as WARP Films or Working Title as they work with low budget films to create successful blockbusters. I think our media product would be distributed in the UK only, rather than being distributed world wide as but this would depend purely on the break-through our film has on the British film industry. If our film is profitable in the UK it could be re-released in the USA. I think our film would be distributed on DVD for a short amount of time but this would solely depend on whether it made it worldwide. A channel such as Film4 focuses on British, art-house or independent films rather than international hits and blockbusters which is why the films success would affect its distribution so much.

The audience for our product would be our fellow peers as they fit our target audience. As our product is aimed at people in their late teens our product would be ideal to those around us.
And this would also fit well to the genre of our product as it contains violence, so it would have to be aimed at people in their late teens and over.
I thinks the main audience for this product will be young as they would able to identify with the main character in having liked someone but being unable to tell them how they feel.

We would use a wide range of marketing techniques to attract the audience. We would attract our audience by advertising where our target audience is most likely to notice. We would use the internet to create good publicity for our film by maybe adding preview pages and special trailers to social networking sites. By adding a preview clip to sites such as Facebook or Myspace, this will help us reach a wider audience. Since our movie is more art-house it would be good to keep a decent level of advertisement to keep interest and originality within the product.
Although we don’t have a strict target audience, so we would focus on making our advertisement appealing to young people. We would probably advertise our product magazines aimed at young people. We would also work with fast food chains such as McDonalds as young people enjoy fast food and often go there.

I have learnt a whole range of things during the construction of our product. At the beginning I found a bit unfamiliar using the video camera as I hadn’t used one before but after we were shown how to use them I familiarised myself with it.
I learnt the most in the edit suit as this was a technical aspect I was not yet used to as this was my first time using these programmes. We used Final Cut Pro, I established the main tools we used for our product such as the razor tool and cross fading and I adjusted myself with them. I also worked with other programmes such as Live type and Sound Track.

I think we achieved a great understanding of filming since our preliminary task. We have gotten better in all aspects of our project. We learnt a lot about planning and that we had to plan very thoroughly to get our media product to the level we expected it to be. With all the practice we had using certain programs we have also gained experience in how to use them. All are camera work improved due to the practice during our preliminary. Certain aspects of filming such as match-cuts we have learnt to use better since the beginning of this course.

Creating our Preliminary Storyboard

On the 3rd of December we worked in our arranged groups of four to come up with a storyboard. Our aim was to create a storyboard that insisted of someone reading a magazine in a thrilling way. This was a practical to help us towards our final thriller. From our previous introduction to the camera on the day we were well aware of how to use them. We all practised turning the cameras on and off and we were shown how to insert end remove the tape and how to use a tripod. We practised using the focus on the camera and also went over the basics of filming such as medium-shots, close-ups and tracking. After finishing our storyboard we went down to shoot our scenes in our decided location. We filmed all the different shots at least three times so that we could choose the best ones to use in our finished clip.

Media Thriller Evaluation

Over time the media has provided a set of generic codes such as camera work, mise-en-scene, sound, lighting etc but everything and everyone who either works in media or is associated with it manipulates these conventions, they may not change it completely but in one way or another they tweak it and develop it to suit the needs of their project. This is what we done in our project we were aware of the general codes and conventions within the media and specially thriller movies. For example; the colour red has many connotations such as love, passion but on the other hand it is very symbolic for danger and blood. We incorporated one main iconographic images into our project which was a red rose, it portrayed love so we twisted it and showed it being broken and ripped in half –this suited our title for the film which was ‘Love Me… Love Me Not’ we were able to play with this image in several ways, with typical petal picking of love me and love me not and the connotation of romance.

When looking over our finished project I realised that we didn’t really change the codes and conventions much, we just conformed to it. I think we done this unintentionally and we weren’t aware during the course of filming and editing whether we were breaking the conventions or not but in a way I think we did because if we didn’t, then our film could be somewhat boring and too standardised. One convention I think we stuck to was in our editing and filming. We applied the 180° rule and checked rigorously that we followed it.

I don’t think that our film represents any specific social group but there are only three characters in our project two of which are females we were young people, at the age of sixteen but I don’t think we were playing the part of young individuals but more so those of grown ups. As we do not represent any certain social group via age, gender, race or sexual orientation I think that we are very flexible and may attract a large cross section ranging in differences from class to age if we had created a whole film. However I think our film does challenge the usual, typical story lines as we have a female killer, the complete opposite to the standard so I think more people would be interested in our film because it isn’t predictable.

As our film complies to the medias set of generic codes and conventions it would be suitable for institutions to distribute our film I don’t not think however that it will be a big Hollywood film but that it would be successful for UK release as its initial idea for the film was inspired by the title of another that was out at the current time in cinemas, the film that inspired our group was called “My Bloody Valentine”. It had a horror element with a small twisted romance somewhere behind it, although we hadn’t watched the film we managed to come up with a story and shortened it to make our opening sequence instead of horror we also decided to used thriller elements combined with romance to create our finished piece of work. Eventually after UK release like many other films our film will be suitable to TV viewing. If we were distributing our film in the real media world then we like most film makers would like our film to be successful so we would have to have a unique selling point. To get our film to be a major success we would probably have to go through the big six companies such as Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox or Universal pictures this was we are able to break into American and the Hollywood scene which should and normally does, generate huge profits.

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1943308800/tt1179891 - My Bloody Valentine IMDB

As mentioned above I think that our film will be suitable for several audiences because it is flexible. However our film will probably attract a more younger, modern audience. Someone who is either single or in a relationship it doesn’t really matter, it should appeal to all of them. I think the film will be popular among the younger generations as they will be able to identify with the characters of the film, eg many females experience jealousy or have been in a situation where they are attracted to the opposite sex but encounter problems in trying to reveal their feelings. Also the characters are not ‘posh’ they are just normal people who the audience will be able to relate to. We would also attract our audience by advertising, I think mainly in magazines and internet campaigns as we are a young generation it is certain that potential customers and our desired audience will see our adverts and then pay to watch the film in cinemas.

Through our media project I picked up numerous skills and developed many that I already had for example; I was able to develop my communication skills and group work skills as this project required commitment from everyone and also patience so everyone in the group could have their say. A more hands on skill that I developed was how to use the camera and camera equipment, but the basics such as blogging came naturally as I use the internet regularly. However where I learnt the majority of skills was in the edit suite, using such programmes as final cut pro, live type and sound track it was the most challenging but also essential to the project making it what it is. The main and somewhat most challenging part of the project for me was the editing of the film because I had never used final cut pro before but over the course of the project I familiarised myself with the basic such as using in and out points, then gradually used more tools such as the razor and effects such as cross fades.

Looking back over this task and the preliminary task I see what we have achieved, how we progressed and how we furthered our knowledge. In the beginning we were very much amateurs with basic skills and still are but have grown confident in using equipments such as cameras, tripods and the more technical aspects such as everything on the macs from firefox to final cut pro. I have learnt from this experience that it is very difficult to make a short two minute video and that planning really is best also overall with filming and editing I think we would have been better off and not in such an anxious state I we stuck to the work instead of being relaxed and messing around. Our groups preliminary task was never actually completed as we were not committed and did not know how to use the equipment and didn’t really try. Our camera techniques compared to the newspaper project were must better e.g when we were in the graveyard, also we found that our footage was much more steady and saw that using a tripod made a real difference when filming.