Liam Nolan - Evaluation Question 7

Liam Nolan - Evaluation Question 6

Liam Nolan - Evaluation Question 5

Liam Nolan - Evaluation Question 4

4) Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our target audience for this is 15-35 year olds. Despite the cast being entirely male in our thriller opening, our audiences crosses both genders. In the profile pictures above, we have both genders represented, but also different races as well. The reasoning behind this is to show that despite the fact that the cast of our film is white, that is not to stop all races and nationalities from watching our film. After all, there are criminals from all cultures and backgrounds involved in crime and gangsterism. 

Based on the information evident in their profiles, these particular members would take interest in our thriller opening because of their relaxed approach to academic and professional life. They would find it intriguing to sit down and watch their younger counterparts take part in a mischievous operation to kill an innocent man. It would make great viewing for a Friday evening after work and college. 

The age certificate of our film is '12' which is slightly below the start of our age range which is 15. The reasoning behind this is because very little violence is used, but still enough to qualify for a 12 and not a 12A.

The ways in which we have targeted our audience are through the use of the 4 technical codes (Mise en Scene, Camerawork, Editing and Sound). In terms of Mise en Scene, the way in which each character is dressed is casual but informal, typical of the younger generation's fashion tastes. The darker than usual lighting is reflective of the dark underworld from which these mischievous youngsters have evolved.

The camera work also gives the audience an idea of the way the target audience dress and act (e.g the close up low to high shot of the teenage boy walking with his hands in his pockets). The editing and sound are not the most effective in targeting our audience, as they are in some ways the 'invisible arts' of film making; processes known only to those within the industry and almost insusceptible to anyone else. 

Liam Nolan - Evaluation Question 3

3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

A suitable distribution company for our thriller would be 'Vertigo Films', a British film distribution company based in London, which has been responsible for other successful films such as 'Monsters' (Edwards, 2010), Bronson (Refn, 2008), and 'StreetDance 3D' (Pasquini, 2010).

Our thriller is a UK Independent film, whereas our comparative film, 'The Sixth Sense', is a Hollywood Blockbuster. Therefore, the face that 'Vertigo Films' is a UK Independent production and distribution company, means that our thriller would be best suited to them. The budget for our film would be much smaller than that of a Hollywood Blockbuster. Major hollywood studios have distribution offices in different parts of the world, whereas a UK Independent company such as 'Vertigo Films' is based in UK and operates from London.

Our production company name comprises the area in which our thriller opening was recorded (Bath Road, Hounslow). This is exemplified by the 4 photos we took which are evident in the logo; our school, the local station, the local church and road sign. This is a unique and original design, and the role of our production company is to promote film making in the West London area. 

The role of a production company is to promote and show the film in the best way possible; they require the cooperation of the distributor along with that of the exhibitor in order to this. Distribution is often referred to as the 'piggy in the middle' of the film industry, as producers tend not to have long term  economical links with distributors, who likewise have no formal connections with exhibitors.

Real film openings which we can compare our thriller to are the aforementioned 'Sixth Sense'.

The sequence in which events happen and the use of the flashback are also similar to our opening.The distributor of this film is 'Buena Vista Pictures', which is owned by the American 'Walt Disney' company. The difference between our film and 'The Sixth Sense' is that our chosen distribution company operates from London, whereas 'Walt Disney' operates on a large scale from the US.

Personally, I do not feel that our thriller opening is likely to be undertaken by one of the major US studios, because the verisimilitude of our opening has an urbanised 'British' feel. Hence why I think it is more likely to be undertaken by a UK Independent distributor/producer, such as 'Vertigo Films'.

Our opening would be distributed via the Internet, not necessarily on the big screen. However, I do feel that an opening such as ours would work well as a support film to the other major films at a film festival, as it could gain some critical acclaim.

In terms of Marketing, we would use as many communication mediums as possible. Because it is an independently made thriller opening, it would therefore require as much marketing and publication as possible. We would set up social networking pages, on Facebook and Twitter, to project the film to a wider audience. We would create an official website, where fans could purchase official merchandise. The internet is an effective medium of communication in creating a new fan-base. We would create an official trailer to be published on our website and also the social networking sites.

Posters could be created digitally for people to download, but not physically, as this opening is not necessarily a Blockbuster film. Interviews with the cast via the radio and digital recording devices could be posted on YouTube for the world to see.

In terms of where the money would come from for a film such as ours, it would depend mostly on organised fundraisers, which would be staged at a specific venue with live entertainment and auctions, and also the selling of merchandise. Online fundraising initiatives would also be effective as an extra source of income.

Liam Nolan - Evaluation Question 2

Liam Nolan - Evaluation Question 1

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real products?



Editing:

Our thriller incorporates the generic conventions of film opening. The name of the production company is at the beginning (top row left), with the title following afterwards (top row centre). Another way in which our thriller incorporates generic conventions is through the use of music which suits the genre. This is sustained throughout, as no speech is communicated between any of the actors. Continuity editing is also used to develop the logical order of the sequence. Our action is not interspersed by separate titles, but instead incorporates the titles with the action scene itself.

Our use of conventions gives some sort of indication as to what thriller films have influenced our opening. For example, the opening to 'The Sixth Sense' has had a measurable influence on our opening, especially with the use of titles/credits at the beginning followed by flashbacks of the past. The use of the white cinematic styled text on a black background influenced our layout/design for the credits (see above), and although the flashback scene in 'The Sixth Sense' does not follow immediately after the opening credits (see right), it still had considerable influence over the structure for a thriller opening.

Character:

Our thriller challenges these conventions to a large extent, in that there is more than one character established in the opening sequence, but this also develops another generic convention; establishing to the audience who is involved. The differences between the characters is established; the way in which each character walks exemplifies this; one walks suspiciously (played by Callum Gordon), whilst the other one (played by Cameron Matthews see below), walks innocently.

Mise en Scene:

The setting is established (in a shopping centre car park - top row right). Another generic convention that is challenged is that conversations do not prevail at all throughout the opening.  The dark clothes used by all actors also emphasise the dark characterisation of the opening.
















Lighting:

The conventions used indicate the sub-genre of this thriller opening, which is horror. This is exemplified by the use of lighting, which is darker because of the interior setting of the car park (see above). This light is natural, because of the walls blocking out the daylight that prevails outside, meaning only shades of light fade through.


Camera Angles, Shots and Movement:

Through the use of camera shots, angles and movement, our thriller opening successfully presents the setting and characters to the audience. The long distance shot (above), enables the audience to see the size of the car park, as well as establishing one of the main characters and also the producer through editing. The close-up shot of the victim being suffocated places both the victim and perpetrator in the centre of the frame, as both are positioned in line with one another.

Thomas Gilbert - Evaluation Question 7

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

First of all, when we came to do out preliminary task, we only had one double lesson to plan, film and edit which came to a total time of 1 hour 50 minutes. This is a very short time to perfect the product that we made so it has many flaws. Also, at the time of making the prelim, we had very little knowledge of the film world and what makes a good film. I will now look through both products and see what improvements we made from beginning to our final cut.

At the very start of making our prelim and the actual film opening, we had to discuss with our groups to come up with a good idea. For the prelim, there were certain requirements the film had to meet, these included dialog and some different camera shots like close ups, so our ideas were limited. Also we only had about 5-10 minutes to come up with this idea because we didn't have much time. On the other hand, we had about a whole weekend to think of separate ideas and then discuss to our group. Not only this, we also had to tell our idea to the class to see how an actual audience would react and to get some feedback to maybe improve our idea. Some class feedback helped and changed the shape of our film.

Then for the prelim, we went right into filming after this stage but for our thriller opening we didn't film for another 2-3 months. This is because we had so much other stuff to do that will also help us for making our film. For example, we researched other thriller opening to see how and why they are effective using the many thriller conventions. We then had to learn these are try to include them in our film. Also the use of lighting, camera angles and in general how to use the camera better. From all the research that we did, i learnt that a lot more goes into the stage before making the film than i previously thought. One of the most important things we did was making the storyboard for our film, this is key as it planned out the whole film so we had a better understanding of how it would look and when it comes to filming we would already know what shots we need. All these things mentioned above were not done for the making of our prelim and that made the thriller opening a better final product.

While filming the prelim, we made many mistakes and it looked very sloppy, but we didn't have the time to go back and change them so we had to deal with it. Here are some example of were we went wrong while filming:

In the bottom right, you can see our camera bag and some other equipment in the shot that we should have moved away.

In this shot, we can see two peoples reflections in the mirror which shows they are behind me

But in the next shot, there is no one behind me...

In this shot you can clearly see that there is a tripod set up in the background, this is sloppy camera work and just quite simply bad positioning. 

As i am walking away, you can see another group trying to film in the background, what makes this worse is that, i was just there a couple seconds ago in the video and they were not there.

Those are the mistakes you can see visually, but we also made a mistake with the sound. This is because we filmed this while there was a PE class next door so the noise was very loud and it was sometimes hard to hear. Also in the first shot of me walking it was very light outside but when i walked past the pillar it want very dark so lighting was a problem and there was too much of a contrast. We fixed all of these problems in our final thriller opening as we had so much time to perfect it and took our time when recording. Also if we done a bad shot we went back to redo it. 

While filming the prelim we used many shot types but we didn't use them very well. As you can see in the picture, during the dialog we used shot reverse shot which is ok but the lighting is very bad as its too bright. Half of Liam's face is white and due to him being quite far away from the camera its harder to hear him also. The 180 degree rule was also broken slightly when me and Liam were talking as it cut back to a front angle. At the time we didn't know we did this and we probably should have done the shot reverse shot from the other side of our faces as it would have worked better and it wouldn't be as light.

In our thriller opening we broke the 180 degree rule very effectively as it gives the audience a clearer picture of the characters surrounding. This is a vast improvement from the prelim as the in that the 180 degree rule had no effect and it was hardly noticeable unlike this one.

We also included the characters point of view in one shot so we could try to put the audience in his shoes so they experience it more.

Finally, the editing process, for the prelim we only had about 40-30 minutes editing depending on how fast we finished filming and this was quite short but we got the job done. Arguably the editing was a bit sloppy and the transition behind the pillar wasn't very good but at that point i was remotely new to Final Cut Pro and didn't know how to use it very well. When the editing for our final product came around i was a lot more familiar with the software learnt quite a few techniques. This enabled me to get the flashback looking effect and the continuity editing was very well done. We had 1-2 weeks to complete the editing so i was able to go back and add things if i had forgotten them or to make it better. 

In the end i felt a lot more confident with the equipment and i think it led to us making a better final product. This is because we were able to use them to their full potential really show the thriller genre through our 2 minute opening. We have came a long way as a group and i can see how much our skills have progressed over these past months.

 

Thomas Gilbert - Evaluation Question 6

Thomas Gilbert - Evaluation Question 5

Thomas Gilbert - Evaluation Question 4

                  Maze Runner Box Office Statistics:

Budget: $34,000,000

Opening Weekend: $32,512,804

Domestic Gross (USA): $102,427,862

Foreign Gross: $238,322,778

Worldwide (all time) Gross: $340,750,640

Thomas Gilbert - Evaluation Question 3

Thomas Gilbert - Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Both of the characters in our film that we see walking around the car park are aged 16-17. This would aim the film at particular social groups that are older teenagers maybe just finishing school or in sixth form/college.  They might be having a stressful life at school because of all the work or possibly exams. This is who this film is aimed at as maybe they can feel for the characters more because they are similar age to them and they lived similar lives until this tragic event occurred.  



Example of social groups:

Chloe Grace Moretz stars in the film 'Equalizer' and she is currently 18 years old, this is a similar age range of our actors and when filming she was only 17. But despite her age, she played someone a lot older in the film as women tend to do so more than men. They dress her and make her look older than what she is just for the part in the film, but for our film we did not need to do this as their ages and how old they are in the film works perfectly fine. When someone like Chloe is in a film, it opens the film up to a larger audience, especially younger people because she is one of the only young people in the film. This is why our film is aimed at this certain age range as it appeals to them more than it does to older people.

Cameron on the other hand which is our actor for this character shown on the right is a male and plays his age rather than a fake one. This doesn't have much affect but what is does is it allows Cameron as an actor to have more freedom and do what he naturally does because technically he is playing himself. We also let Cameron wear his normal clothes so he just looks like a normal teenager. One similarity between Chloe and Cameron in their roles in these two films is that they seem to be taken advantage of, maybe because of their age and that they cant do much to stop it. For example, in 'Equalizer'  Chloe plays a prostitute that works for this Russian business that doesn't treat her well, and it gets so bad to the point where they beat her up. In our film 'Anniversary Killer' Cameron is targeted as one of the victims of the killer but we don't know quite what happened to him, all we know is that it cant be good.

The last character in our film was the killer and he was played by me, i am 17 but because in the film, I am wearing a mask you would never be able to tell who it is and how old the person is unless you look up the actor. For the audience, they have no idea of how old the character in the film is and what he looks like so it keeps it a mystery which the audience will only find out if they watch the whole film. As you can see in our opening, all the characters were male and white, they were all male because we thought it best suited our film and we had 3 male actors at the ready so it was a lot easier to get together. Also the representations of a male as the antagonist and the villain support the conventions of a thriller as the male gender do dominate thriller films, normally you will see females as the victims. The ethnicity seems to be not noticed as much in thriller films as it is kind of a blind side, but you mainly see white male actors. For example in 'Maze runner' the main 3 actors are all white. However the film 'Equalizer' this challenges the stereotype as the main character is black. 

Thomas Gilbert - Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation Q.1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real products?

Q.1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real products?

Our thriller opening develops conventions of a real thriller in 6 main ways:

Characters:

Our main character challenges the stereotype of what a main character should portray in a thriller. In our film opening " Anniversary killer " the main character is very much the victim and is seen to be a average member of society, no different from you or i. However in many hollywood blockbuster  films we see that the main character almost plays the audience in the sense that he appears to be on the " good " side at the start, but as the film goes on we see that he tuns into the villain of the film, in films such as Skyfall (Mendes, 2012) we see that although the focus point is on Daniel Craig who plays James Bond the villain in the film "Silva" gets to know the audience very well and we get a better understanding of him without his game plan being given away. The other character that is seen in the flashback relates well to our target audience for the teen age range.

Music & Sound:

For our film opening " Anniversary Killer " we both conformed to traditional conventions of a thriller and went against conventions of a thriller opening. We didn't add any dialogue throughout the whole of the opening for many reasons, not only did it not fit into our thriller opening as a result we didn't want to force dialogue, moreover it would have been very hard to film in complete silence and still be able to hear what they were saying without the wind becoming too loud. In many thriller films there is dialogue as it lets the audience connect more with the characters and gain a better idea about them. Inside Man (Spike Lee,2006) we see the use of dialogue for a very strong affect, at the start we see him talking into the camera which as a audience gives us a insight into them as a character. Therefore as we didn't use any dialogue it allowed us to build more suspense through the use of our soundtrack that keeps you intrigued and interested which conforms to both the Uk independent films and the Hollywood blockbuster.

Camera shots & Angles:

In every film you watch there will be a huge variety of camera shots and angles to try and show different emotions and present different characters in certain ways. In our film we also used a range of different camera shots and angles. We felt that doing a close up would be more effective and add more suspense than just a full body shot, as it captures his facial expression and we gain more detail of how he feels through his initial reaction. If the camera shots are taken to a high level then you can get a feeling of going on a journey with the character. In Anniversary Killer we see the main character go on a path to his car through the car park.

Scenery:

I came up with the idea that we should pherpahs film in a car park because there is something about it that makes a car park a normal place but we could portray it to be a place of uncertainty which would add suspense. The first idea was that we filmed at night in the car park, however after audience feedback and some further thinking about if we should or shouldn't we decided not to because of the light being to much of a issue and we didn't want to ruin the film with it all being pitch black and not being able to see anything. There is a fine line between filming in the dark and adding a huge element on anticipation and adrenaline and then filming in complete darkness and being able to see nothing and then having nothing to edit. We didn't have any alternatives to filming in a car park however Tom and Liam really thought the idea would only compliment the thriller opening that we were going to produce later on down the line at the production stage.

Editing:
When it came to the editing stage Tom had already said that he wanted to take a lead role in this area, me and Liam were happy for him to do so as Tom had already used the editing software and although me and Liam were both comfortable with the software we felt Tom would be the best person out of the three of us. With Tom taking a leading role in the editing me and Liam still helped and gave our own opinion to try and improve our opening in any way possible. The editing process did not take as long as we thought because tom was very quick as was very familiar with what he was doing. We got audience feedback from the members of our class and from our teacher which also changed our editing process, it meant we had to go back and change some parts to make it look less like a trailer which meant we were only going to make our thriller opening better.

Lighting:

We only had one issue with lighting and that was we originally wanted to film in the car park at night. However with the advice of audience feedback and our teacher as she had previously seen groups try to film at night and it did not turn out well so this had a effect on our idea to film at night. In the end we didn't film at night as we didn't want to completely ruin our film opening. The final scene our of thriller opening where our main character is ready to drive off home before he gets attacked from behind, in this scene we pain close attention to our lighting as it was our most important scene in terms of our title " Anniversary Killer ", we wanted the light to be low so that you couldn't see the person in the back of the car when they put their hands round Cameron. Moreover we felt that if the lighting was low when he got in the car it would create a bit of suspicion as the lighting outside for the previous scene was normal day light. So in the 10 second gap between Cameron getting in the car and him being attacked from behind we hope that our audience might suspect something to always keep them thinking what will happen next?

Titles & Credits:
Our titles and credits are continuos and are throughout our film. We start with Vertigo films which is a UK independent Film company. They are known as both distribution and production company however we used them for our distribution company. After we have our production company which is Bath Road Productions. Following the title of our film Anniversary killer we have the smaller credits with less importance but still play a vital role in our film opening. These are actors names Cameron Matthews, Callum Gordon and the Names of Thomas Gilbert and Liam Nolan which are the producers and Directors of our film.

Our 9 Frames:
We selected 9 frames from our film opening and put them together, from looking at these 9 frames you should be able to get a good idea about what our film is about but it should still leave the audience wanting to know more and in theory should go to then watch the film.