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.