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.