Q7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the process from it to the full product?

I feel as if i have developed a lot of skills since our preliminary task, not only in technologies like blogger or sites like prezi, but my teamwork skills. I did not take GCSE media for my options in year 9 or 10 and so  was unfamiliar with imovie or the macs. I also joined A-level media later than all my other classmates and so had a lot of catching up to do. As I’ve never taken this subject before I was unsure on what different types of shots there were, types of sound or what Mise-En-Scene even meant. Throughout the course of the project I gained more knowledge from the teacher and my group. The more work we did, the more my skills and knowledge improved. My organisation skills have improved too in order to get my work done on time and bring everything that was needed when we filmed like the camera with batteries, an SD card, a tripod and more.

I have had good experience with Photoshop from doing GCSE graphics for two years and having practice at home. I have definitely improved my Photoshop skills with the thriller opening scene task when i had to design our company's ident. I designed a lot of different versions and discovered the bevel and emboss options where you can contour and add texture to your work. This makes your work stand out and look more realistic, giving it a professional feel to it.

Our prelim went well for it being our first task to be given in A-level media. The feedback from our teacher and classmates were good and informative. We used a wide variety of shots that had good continuity, following Cameron walk in and out of the room smoothly.

The bad feedback we got was not following the 180 degree rule as well as we should have. When we saw this, we looked back at our prelim to look for where it was we went wrong so we understood for later tasks so we didn’t do it again. Since the prelim I have learned how to use Imovie and what features work best. When editing our prelim we had to watch some YouTube tutorials on how to do certain things we weren’t sure of like trimming the clip. After watching these videos and practising I know how to trim clips and move them about, how to delete clips and more. In our recent task we had to use use music in our work by adding a soundtrack onto itunes and then importing to imovie. We had no idea how to do this and had to once again use others YouTube tutorials and help from the teacher.
Continuity is where multiple shots fit together well and flow smoothly with no jump-cuts. It has to make sense and every shot needs to follow the previous shot well in order for it to look real.

This is an example of where we used good continuity in our preliminary task. We used 5 shots showing Cameron walk to the door and open it. Each shot follows one another well and there are no jump cuts. We have used two tracking shots, following Cameron as he walks to the door. We then zoomed in a used a closeup of him pushing the door handle. Although we have used different types of shots we have still managed to make it look realistic and flow well.

Continuity is key if you want your product to make sense, this helped us in our thriller to make sure the audience knew what was happening and they didn't get confused.

When we get given a task, we usually sit together and discuss some ideas between our group. Our first edit for our thriller opening scene was very slow paced and poorly edited. This is because we didn’t work together and plan our ideas well. We realised this and so for the second edit we sorted ourselves out and ended up putting together a really good opening scene like we are all happy with. A way we planned our shots for both the preliminary task and opening titles task was creating a storyboard and shot list. These were handy to follow so we knew we got the right shots.

All in all I think our thriller opening ended up being a success. It linked well to our chosen sub genres and used different conventions of the thriller genre.

In editing we made sure we used quick, fast pace clips to keep it eye catching to the audience. In Between each clip we used a fade to white transition but changed the to 0.2 seconds in order to create a flashback effect. The soundtrack we used was unique and worked well with the opening titles. If we had more time I would have liked to do something extra with the sound, we edited it so it went with the video however it could of been good to add some diegetic sounds at the start like leaves crunching. However we did try this and it did not sound right, being too unrealistic.

Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

This is the camera we used to film our opening titles, it is a Nikon D5500 and has a lot of advantages when it comes to filming. The first is the rotating screen, it has an advantage for filming low angles where you just tilt the screen back.

The other advantage is the quality of the camera being a 24.2 megapixel camera and shooting film in HD.

The manual focus is a huge advantage allowing us to focus on certain areas and change during filming. To get good shots you’ll need to have a stable hands, we used a tripod to get the smoothest shots especially for the tracking ones we used.

This camera has a lot of different settings on it to use for filming and photos. However we decided it would be best to use the automatic setting, circled in red on the picture to the right. By using this setting, it allowed the camera itself to adjust the iso, aperture and shutter speed to the perfect setting.

We thought about the composition a lot in our thriller opening, using a lot of the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds makes the shot look more interesting than having the main focus placed in the middle. By placing the objects to the side I am giving title room.

When we were out filming we had to take into consideration the weather, the time and the public. If it was raining we could not go out and film as we didn’t want any scenes in the rain. We also didn’t want to get any of the equipment wet and risk it breaking. Before we planned going out we would look at the weather forecast to see when was a suitable time to film. We also needed to get good shots in daylight so we could edit them later if we needed to and they’d still be good quality. If we filmed later on in the day, the quality would have decreased a lot making it more grainy. We had to take this into account and so got up early to film.

When we were filming we had to take into consideration the public when doing stunts, especially when we did the hanging scene. This can distress people and cause panic towards the public, this is why we filmed in a place where there weren’t many people.

Techniques used with this camera
Manual focusing was the number one technique we used during filming, keeping the foreground focused or even changing focus whilst recording.

Q5. How did you attract/ address your audience?

Typography

We used a simplistic typography inspired from the TV show 'The walking dead'. As you can see, The walking dead's intro also includes simplistic typography instead of the typical horror type fonts.

However we listened to the target audience by setting up a poll in which members of the public could vote for their favourite typography.

These were the results of our typography (after finding fonts from DaFont.com and Imovie).

It was key we did this poll to interact more with our audience, allowing us to find what others opinions are on the font.

The one voted most popular was the top font which we continued to use in our thriller opening. We were seriously considering the second font however, after looking at the poll results we decided that it was 'too horror' for our liking and stuck with the audiences opinion.

Focusing

Using different focuses in some of our shots (dragging it into focus and back out manually) allowed us to show our camera skills, letting the audience aware of our technology skills.

This is a GIF from one part of our opening scene, showing a close up shot of a gas mask which is swinging from a tree branch. In this clip we also changed from out of focus to focus towards the end of the scene. This is an effective way to bring attention to our opening scene, adding variety and uniqueness.

We have done the same with a previous clip however we have changed the camera to manual so it stays focused on the foreground. This looks good because when Ollie walks past, it focus’ on his shoes until he gets to the background and he goes blurry. By the time his whole body is in the shot, he is completely unfocused. This creates tension and mystery to the sequence, therefore intriguing the audience and making them want to watch on.

Flashbacks

We made sure we included the use of flashbacks in our thriller to make it more fast paced and therefore eye catching to the audience.

Costume

Our main character, the killer; has been made to wear black clothing and a gas mask as a unique way to disguise his identity from the victim and the audience. This will help to attract our targeted audience because in our Vox Pop, George says that he likes “Mysterious and intense characters such as the Joker from The Dark Knight.” this suggests that adding a character like Jack with hidden features is vital because this helps to give him a mysterious appeal and further intrigues the viewers of our sequence. Furthermore, the character ‘The Joker’ uses the face paints to hide his identity and similarly; our character wears a gas mask for the same reason. Therefore, further increasing his mysterious nature.

I asked a the question ‘what do you think of our final opening sequence?’ to people similar to our target audience via Facebook after showing them our thriller piece. We got multiple responses that I have screenshotted to show what people liked about it and what we could improve.

From looking at these i can see our target audience enjoyed our performance and the use of our camera work and editing.

Q4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

We found the BBFC website came in handy for our research into why films were rated as they were. The BBFC stands for ‘British board of film classification’ which decides what rating a film or TV show should get depending on several factors.

After doing some research on this website, we decided to make our thriller a 15. Below are the guidelines for a 15 rated film, taken from the BBFC website.

Threat

There may be strong threat and horror. A sustained focus on sadistic or sexual threat is unlikely to be acceptable.

Violence

Violence may be strong but should not dwell on the infliction of pain or injury. The strongest gory images are unlikely to be acceptable. Strong sadistic violence is also unlikely to be acceptable. There may be detailed verbal references to sexual violence but the depiction of sexual violence must be discreet and justified by context.

Imitable behaviour

Dangerous behaviour (for example, hanging, suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on detail which could be copied. Whether the depiction of easily accessible weapons is acceptable will depend on factors such as realism, context and setting.

We follow the guidelines of the violence section well. We use strong violence, for example the scene where the victim gets hit with a shovel, however it is not ‘dwelling on the infliction of pain or injury’. We have used no gory scenes either with no blood at all and there is also no use of sexual violence.

We thought the age rating of 15 was appropriate for our thriller and didn’t go against anything in our narrative.  The 15 guidelines in a 15 allow strong violence and swearing with moderate threat, however with no extreme detail and gore. This works perfectly for our thriller as it would have contained violence, swearing, threat and horror. Our clip of the victim being hung therefore fits the guidelines as it contains no gore or blood. We also liked the idea of the age rating being a 15 as it's a similar age group to us. This allows us to input our own opinions and ideas as well as the public to give us feedback.

Our thriller is aimed towards both genders. We feel both boys and girls like thrillers and have no reason to segregate them based on their sex. Although they may be different genders they may have the same interests and only sticking to one gender would look good on the company and would decrease the views we would get.

Audience Profile

Age: 15 years

Gender: Male (in this example)

Film preferences and interests: Our typical audience would enjoy thrillers and tension built films. Due to their age they would be sociable going onto social websites, like Facebook or Instagram which they could find new thriller movie trailers and share them with friends.

Films and TV shows: The typical audience for our thriller would enjoy horror genres and so would watch TV shows like American Horror story. They’d also be into the violence and so would watch action TV shows or movies that also relate to law and crime. Therefore a TV they would consider watching is limitless.

For our research into our target audience, we looked at other thriller movies like fight club and Harry potter on the BBFC website to see what kind of rating it got and why. We also created a vox pop video where we went around the school asking people who are 15 a series of questions about what sort of sub genres they liked, what conventions make a good thriller and what thriller films they liked. We researched the films that people had said and researched them on the BBFC website too, finding what aspects of the film are good and why thy are rated the way they are. Doing the vox pop video helped to tell us what sort of things our target audience find works in a thriller and what thriller sub genre to use.

Q3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

For our ident we got inspiration from the company paramount with the use of mountains. Our logo is a very simplistic and modern design, with not much colour used. We have used a shiny grey colour for the text and logo which can relate to a knives metal blade hence helping it to ‘secretly’ link to the thriller genre.

Our name links to our logo of mountains linking to Mount. Everest. We wanted a name that was unique and not just all 4 of our names combined together.

When designing our logo I made sure the image we used wasn’t copyrighted by putting a filter on the google image search engine (As seen below).

These are the different stages of our ident we created using Photoshop. As you can see our very first design our name was called mountain range. We decide to change this simply because we weren’t 100% sure about it and so we asked friends and the public which one they preferred more, Eververse or Mountain Range (the majority said Eververse).

We went through some colour changes too, from blue to red finally to silver. I originally went for the colour light blue simply because i liked the colour, however now looking back at it I feel it doesn’t look professional enough. We then went to the red colour to link with our thriller genre and sub genres, although we then again thought it didn’t look quite professional.

What changed dramatically in the first two designs were the fonts. Found on Dafont.com, we tried to find a fancy design first to imitate Paramount's typography however we felt this didn't look good and we were relying too much on paramount’s ideas and so needed to change it. We then came to the conclusion that the title needed to be bolder and in capitals. The second design is all about linking to the thriller genre as much as possible and so we went with a more horror font, we still didn’t think this look professional enough for what we were trying to achieve.

The third design and on wards we finally found a bold font we liked that allowed it to look professional, neat and tidy.

A production company’s main role is to help create a film by giving financial support, helping with scheduling, scripting, casting and more. They help to see the film through from an idea to a final piece. The production company however are also in control of anything that goes wrong too, like property damage or actors being hurt.

Q2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

POWTOON PRESENTATION WILL NOT WORK.

This character is the killer played by Jack Redman. We used a male actor for the killer as they’re typically seen as the stronger gender and would be seen more intimidating than what a female would be.

We found many ways to hide the killer’s identity. One way was having him wear a gas mask, this helped to link our thriller to the psycho sub genre by making him look more psychotic. We wanted the killer to have a unique look that not others had yet still wanted him to wear a cliché mask. After doing research into killers we found a lot wore creepy masks but none specifically a gas mask.

The second way to hide his identity was to have him wearing all black clothing, this disguises his personality and shows no emotion. We also did research on the colour black and found what it symbolises in colour psychology ‘The colour black relates to the hidden, the secretive and the unknown, and as a result it creates an air of mystery. It keeps things bottled up inside, hidden from the world.’  All in all this makes him look more intimidating and mysterious linking to the sub genre . Wearing black and covering his face not only gives away no emotion but it also removes his human aspect. His mask is purposely a light grey, contrasting with the black clothing to bring more attention to the mask hence emphasising his psychotic nature.

Our killer carries a noose around with him as a weapon or way to fake suicides. A noose signifies death and danger, suggesting to the audience he has it with the intention to cause harm and death. He also carries around a shovel with him which in one scene he uses to hit the victim round the head with as he sneaks up from behind. He then later uses the shovel to bury the victim's body, the use of the shovel is used for death telling the audience he has bad intentions.

How our killer deals with the bodies tells us he isn't doing these killings for fame, more for the fun of it. He goes through the effort of either making their deaths look like suicides or buries them, showing he doesn't want others to know it was a homicide.

The spot where the antagonist kills his victims is done in the woods. We filmed it in this area and made sure no people in the shot other than the victim. This tells the audience not many people go into that area and gives a sense of isolation. It gives the effect of the victim being stranded with no-one to help them.

When filming we used natural daylight however when it came to editing we darkened the clips making it look more eere. We did due to the day we filmed being quite sunny, this would loose the dark mood we were going for. By dimming the clips it makes it look colder and foreshadows something bad about to happen.

Another killer we can compare our killer to is Ghostface from scream.
Like our character, Ghostface wears dark clothing with a light coloured mask. This pulls more attention to his face, giving him a more psychotic look. He also wears all black which is good for stripping someones identity with the loss of colour and emotion; this gives a sense of mystery making the audience want to watch more.

Q1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

A thriller is one of the many Genres that are used in literature, TV and film. The thriller genre is typically associated with the building of suspense and tension (making the audience sit on the edge of their seats) and can let out feelings of excitement, anxiety, tension and uncertainty. Like others, the thriller genre has a tonne of sub genres including action, crime, disaster, Eco, forensic, legal,medical, mystery, political, psychological, religious, spy, supernatural and conspiracy.

For our thriller we have used three sub genres, psychological, mystery and horror. We decided to use these sub genres due to the results of our Vox pop video where we asked the public some questions about thrillers to help get ideas for our own. Most people said their favourite character in a thriller film is the villain, one person in particular said they enjoyed the psycho type of characters. We took this into consideration when planning and this influenced our decision of using the psychological sub-genre. The psychological sub-genre typically has a narrative focusing on the mental state of a character (usually the villain).

When we asked the question 'what are the good aspects of a thriller?' in the vox pop video, one particular person said the soundtrack needed to be 'intense' and it needed a good narrative so you'd never want to stop watching.

The conventions of a thriller are lighting, editing, camera angles, sound, narrative and mise-en-scene. We incorporated a lot of these into our thriller opening so it was identifiable of what genre it is.
The thriller genre use a lot of different camera angles purposely to show power, emotion, setting and more. The typical camera shots used in a thriller are extreme close ups, close ups, over the shoulder, point of view and high angle. For examples of these camera shots, I have used screenshots from the thriller film ‘Don’t breathe’.

The first shot you typically see in a thriller film is the establishing shot, showing the location for the film. It is usually panning and is taken from a bird's eye view. In the film don’t breathe the first shot shows a street in which the whole film is set.

This is a low angle shot showing the antagonist holding a gun. This has been done below eye level, looking up towards the character. These types of shots are used in thrillers to show power by making a certain character look bigger and stronger. The colour red has also been used to reflect the character's intention of danger.

This is a point of view shot from the basement of the house, tracking the footsteps coming from the floor above. These shots are used in tillers to show the audience what the character is seeing, or in this case hearing, which is good for building suspense.

This shot is a close up of one of the main characters in Don’t breathe. These shots are typically used in thrillers to show emotion or reactions.

This is a bird's eye view shot of the two protagonists. These shots are effective in thriller films for showing who the victims are by looking down on them, making them look small and weak. This contrasts with the low angle shot that makes them look big and powerful, this makes them look small and weak.

This over the shoulder shot has been used to establish what is going on. The audience can clearly see the man on the left pointing a gun towards the other man on the right. These shots are used in thrillers to frame what is happening in the shot.

By looking at these camera shots in the film ‘don’t breathe’ it has helped us to understand which shots are effective and gave us inspiration for our own thriller to use.

This is an example of where we have used a typical thriller shot. To show what the character is doing and seeing, we have included a point of view shot. This informs the audience that the victim isn’t paying much attention to his surroundings and is completely oblivious to the killer.  

This is another example of how don’t breathe’s camera shots have inspired us in our own. We have used an over the shoulder shot however challenged ourselves by doing it the other way round, showing the front of the shoulder instead of the back. We did this to show a key part in our thriller where the victim gets knocked out by the killer. We needed this shot to clearly show this.

We have used the  convention of editing effectively, switching back and forth from different shots quickly with a white transition.  We did this to create a flashback scene; the  use of such a  quick and flashing scene allows us to  maintain the interest of the  audience.

This was a huge improvement from our first edit which  had  no fast pace clips or flashbacks.

First Edit

Final Edit

From these two examples it is easy to see, the final edit is more eye catching due to the flashes and fast pace. The first edit seems to drag on and become boring, being two clips placed together with no editing skills shown.

These scenes are from the thriller movie ‘Fight club’ are examples of flashbacks and where we got inspiration from. During these flashbacks they speed certain parts up and cut movements out allowing the audience to recognise it as a flashback and not in the present moment. It also gives the illusion of memory and not being able to remember certain bits and so in editing they have cut bits out. There are multiple small flashbacks in this scene which are shown just after the character has finished talking about that part in the past. The characters also don’t seem aware of these flashbacks and so suggests it is for the audience to remember and link back to previous scenes. There are no transitions used in between these clips to make it short and snappy, appearing quicker.

‘Fight club’ influenced us to use the flashbacks; another film we got inspiration from was The Walking Dead’s opening scene where it flashes between certain shots. We challenged ourselves by linking these two ideas together into our own opening scene.

Another idea we got from the walking dead was the typography, the simplistic look of it we liked; where the names are placed we liked also. They have positioned the focal object in the scene using the rule of thirds, leaving a blank space for the typography to be placed.

I have screen grabbed a clip from our opening scene and the walking dead’s one and compared these specific examples next to each other. You can see they are both similar in how the rule of thirds has been used. The picture frame has been moved slightly to the left so it is easy to read the typography.

Costume:

One way we stuck to the conventions of a typical thriller was using a gas mask as part of the killers costume to hide his identity. After doing some research I found no other killers in a thriller film wore a gas mask as a way to conceal their identity. The uniqueness and loss of identity the mask creates links to the sub genres of our thriller, mystery and psycho. This also allows the audience to easily identify which character is the villain.

To make the killer more psycho we had him wear all black, representing death and fear, reflecting intimidation towards the audience. This colour choice strips away any identity reflected in the style or colour the killer may usually wear.

Lighting:

For the lighting we have used natural daylight and only slightly dulled the colours when editing so shots from different days, where it had been sunnier, look like they were shot on the same day. This allowed us to keep  the continuity of the whole opening scene.

Props:

The two props we used were conventional for a thriller film in terms of weapons or ways of disposing the bodies. The first prop we used was the thick rope used for the hanging scene. In previous tried we had used a thinner rope instead of the one used for the final cut. We had to upgrade to a new rope due to the previous thin one looking unrealistic, like it would snap if weight was applied. The new one however looks stronger and helps with the realism.

The second prop we included was a shovel that the killer used to knock out the victim and bury him.

Sound:

For the sound we originally had the sound of leaves crunching for the first scene, however we decided to remove this as it didn’t sound right or match with the footsteps in our first clip. This made it look like the sound had just been added randomly without any thought into it and didn’t sound realistic. Therefore we changed it to the non copyrighted sound track we found, the whole way through overlapping a small amount of time with the ident clip.  

Composition:

We used the rule of thirds a lot in our opening scene to make the clips more visually appealing to the audience. Having a item slightly off centred makes the clip more interesting than it just placed straight in the middle (like photography)and can also give a sense of direction.

All the research I have done has came from recent and/ or successful thriller movies and shows. This allows us to get inspiration from recent films and older ones, comparing the difference in years and finding which aspects of the films went well and which have changed over time.