Evaluation

My thriller is called 'Tied' and the main storyline shows a girl leaving her friend to walk down the canal on her way home. Little does she know that she is not alone on this pathway. She is followed by an masked man and later grabbed and drugged. We see this as a flashback in our movie. This will seem as if these parts of the film are the victims memories and we see it from her perspective, hopefully making the audience sympathise with her more. What is happening in the present is shown in normal colour and the flashbacks are in black and white to show the time difference. This was possible by editing the colour of the clips that we wanted to be viewed as in the past. What is happening “now” is the victim is alone, in a dark room tied up to the ceiling by her hands, being held hostage for still an unknown reason. This gives reason for the name of our thriller “tied”. This has the connotations that she is not only tied up literally in this room, yet she is tied in the form of entrapment. She is in a situation that seems hard to escape from. After the victim’s flashbacks, we see her gaining consciousness and this is when the end of the thriller comes in. We used the lighting in the studio room to make it obvious to the audience what is happening as we can see the shadow of her being brutally murdered. By doing this, it allowed us to show the actions of the killer, without it looking unprofessional or unrealistic. This part of the thriller causes the mood to change and make it much more dramatic at this point. It is the climax and everything else that we have seen before leads up to this specific point. I think that the structure of our thriller made it look believable and cleverly done. Also, the reoccurance of the mask that the killer wears is a continuous theme throughout the whole thriller. This is an image that we wanted the audience to remember along with the rope which ties the hands.

I did alot of research before starting our project because thriller films are not my personal favourite genre of film. I wanted to get the main idea of what makes a certain film a thriller. The definition of a thriller is: Noun. a book, film, or play depicting crime, mystery, or espionage in an atmosphere of excitement and suspense. This helped me get the idea that we should convey some mystery and suspence, in a form of entertainment for the audiencce.

The conventions of thriller films that we tried to use in our media product are a storyline that is scary and the scenario that one of the characters is in a bad situation, or at risk because of someone. We did not want to move too far away from this convention because looking at other thrillers; I found that this idea never failed to get the audience engaged. My thriller film is set in two locations, a canal side, surrounded by daunting trees in a quiet, possibly deserted area. The second is a dark room, which leaves the audience guessing about its specific location. I hoped that it would look dangerous enough to make the audience think that the character would be unsafe there. Thrillers are often more in depth than what our plot gives off, so this may seem like it is challenging the typical thriller idea. As it is only a short film, I did not think that the storyline should have been too overpowering so hopefully this idea paid off.

My media product is focusing on the younger generation, teenagers at around 16-18 years old, so I think that a 15 certificate would fit it perfectly. This is because the character that is at risk is a young girl and I think that possibly anyone under this age would find thriller films abit too disturbing. This is suggesting that this particular age group of people need to be more careful in dangerous areas, and that as the “killer” is a boy, there is also a -divide between males and females too. This is suggesting young girls are more likely to be in danger. Although these connotations may not necessarily be the opinions of everyone, it is just one representation of a social group, sending the audience unpleasant ideas, allowing them to find the film thrilling.

The media institution that might distribute my media product would probably be a small independent UK release, because I think this is the audience that it would appeal to, British people of all ages. This is because thrillers are more attractive when you are watching them in the cinema because the darkness and silence dramatises what you are going to see on the screen. We got the chance to watch the film in the cinema, and the audience that were watching were the sort of audience that my film is targeted at.
This was very helpful in making the decisions about media institutions because we got first hand feedback on the film. It was perceived in a good way and the audience seemed to react to it well so I was pleased with this. I also learnt that my film definitely works best in the cinema environment and this is the decision I would make for it. I do not think that it would work well going straight to DVD or even on the internet, the cinema surroundings would definitely show off our film as we hope for it to look. I think that it would be successful as an independent UK release, because thriller films are not shown too often, so there would not be competition that is hard to handle. In addition, I think that there may be a niche in the market for this kind of film, because there are not many thrillers that are featuring younger people. So I definitely think that it would attract the right audience and be successful in the cinema.

Concerning the marketing side of it, I think that using the genre would definitely attract people to it because the target audience would already have made their minds up about what sort of films they would be interested in seeing, so thriller fans would be drawn to ours if the specific genre was made clear. I think that it would be most successful if we were to advertise in cinemas with a trailer of the film, highlighting the main points to convince the public to come see it. This would be important because I think it is necessary to advertise somewhere that you want your media product to be viewed. I would preferably want the film to be advertised on TV too and billboards too, because this ensures a wide range of people hearing about the film and remembering it if they are seeing it in different places, at home, in the cinema, on the side of buses, etc. These types of advertising have been proven successful and I know from experience that these specific marketing techniques make the film easy to remember, as I find these the most informing yet also the most inviting.

I have learnt a massive amount about technologies from the process of constructing our thriller, because I have experienced all the different sides of making a media product. My knowledge on how to do filming effectively has been widened and it has helped me to realise how to film things cleverly, so that this transfers onto the screen. By this I mean the different shots, from establishing to close ups, I have realised that the filming process, if completed properly, allows everything else to run smoothly. Moreover, using Final Cut pro has become much easier now and working out all of the things that are difficult in this editing process builds your confidence to edit effectively.Adding the soundtrack using Soundtrack Pro was harder than I expected it to be, yet all of the time and effort that we put into making the soundtrack definitely added a lot to our film, dramatising specific parts and creating suspense at others. It has definitely been a huge learning experience for me. All of the production that we did on the internet was really rewarding. Also, the blogging process noted our progress and kept everything in order, so we knew where we was up to and what we had left to complete. This proved to me, organisation is key. Being able to release the film on Vimeo means that the audience for our product has been widened and it felt good to have the final product somewhere that can be accessed easily. I also found it helpful that we could get feedback from the people that have watched our film on Vimeo, so this allowed me to learn even more once everything had been completed, so it became apparent that improvements could always be made.

Looking back at the preliminary task, I feel that I have progressed a lot since then and the final product shows this. The ‘match cut’ exercise did help us to widen our ideas but showed us what not to do as well.

We knew that the quality of shots that we filmed was very important, and after the preliminary task, I watched it and noted what was good about it and bad about it, in order to improve our next media product. When storyboarding our thriller film, we knew that it had to be very clear and detailed to make the filming process run a lot smoother. Before we went out to film, we made sure that this was completed in as much detail as possible because I do not think that it would have worked as well if we were just making it up as we went along.

Finally, each step in the production process of the film has been rewarding yet very hard work. I think that all of the planning made the production a lot easier to handle. I definitely think that our group did our film to the best of our ability and put a lot into it. I am happy with the final product and think that it has enough conventions in it to be a good thriller film.

Completing 'Tied'

On Friday 27th February, our group met up at lunch before our lesson to make a start on the finishing touches of our thriller film. We needed to add our soundtrack which took longer than we expected it to so we're lucky we decided to meet before the lesson started. We put together our soundtrack that included music that would set the intended atmosphere of our thriller film and also sound effects such as heavy breathing and a heartbeat to match our clips.

Also, we had to do some last minute recording of a scream because we were not happy with the ones that were available to us on the programme. We went into the girls toilets where it was quiet and used the camera to catch the sound of Karess screaming as if she was in pain, to add more realism to what is going on in our film. This worked out really well and we was happy that it fitted with our filming. Also, it made us feel more independant about finalising our film because we did more complex things on the soundtrack programme and I think that we all felt happy with it.

When we finally saved our soundtrack and watched our whole 2minutes with the music, etc, I was really happy with the outcome and I felt really relieved to have finished it before the deadline. I felt like we really put lots of time and effort into completing our editing so when we finally could confirm that we had finished, I was very happy and glad that all our work seemed to have paid off and Mary was impressed with the final piece. I'm also looking forward to seeing the rest of the groups films because everyone has worked really hard on

Editing stages

Todays lesson, Tuesday 24th February, we continued our thriller film editing because although in workshop on the half term we made alot of progress, there was still a fair amount to do. We finished adding our credits and making a few minor adjustments to our shots that needed little things done to them. Todays lesson taught me how to make text look much more interesting, by using another program on the computer then importing it into our editing program to make the title of our film stand out from the rest of the text that is shown before. This will hopefully make people remember the name of our film and end it dramatically. We learnt how to make our thrillers look a little bit more professional by doing this which I think is a good point for our film.

Our group are meeting up Friday lunch time to get on with the last bits of our editing before our lesson. We still need to add our music and we dont think that Friday afternoon in our lesson, that will allow us to do this in the short time we have. We cant risk not finishing our editing on Fridays lesson because the deadline is at 3pm on Friday. I think that when it is finished our film 'Tied' will look very impressive and I'm looking forward to seeing the final product.

Filming our thriller- 'Tied'

Tuesday's lesson allowed us to begin filming our thriller film. We explained our story and plans for filming to Mary, and had to do a complete storyboard showing each shot that we were going to film, in order to be let out to go to our location. We already had a clear idea of everything that we wanted to do with our filming, so it was quite easy to create a detailed storyboard although it was quite time consuming. When this was done, and Mary was happy with our storyboard, we got all of the equipment we needed, which included the lighting kit that we were going to use so that our film didnt have a grainy colour to it due to the darkness we wanted to film our story in.
We went to our location which was a canal thats situated closeby to the college and got everything set up ready for filming. By the time the lesson was finished we had only done about half of our shots that we wanted. We found that it was much more time consuming than we expected. However, it wasnt a problem because we got all of the shots we wanted, and in all of the different ways we wanted to shoot it, in order to do our match cuts and prepare for filming.

I think that we were all happy with what we filmed and I can see alot that we can do, concerning the editing, to finish it up and make it look as realistic as possible. Lauren and Ufuk did a good job with the acting, and myself and Karess did lots of filming that we were happy with, and I think that it is going to look very professional. Tomorrow's lesson, if we are happy with all of the shots that we took, we will begin editing, which I think will be a very difficult process because we have lots that we want to do with it and plenty of ideas but I'm looking forward to seeing the final product.

Thriller Film Preparation- Pitch.

On Friday's lesson, we gathered all of our final ideas for our thriller film, showed eachother our ideas and used all of this to put our pitch together that we showed to 'a panel' and the rest of the class, in the second part of the lesson. We made a spider diagram which included all of our plans for filming and editing. This included the synopsis, camerawork, lighting, jobs for filming and many more. We also brought in a few probs that we are going to use, to give everyone an idea about what to expect from our film. This included the scary white mask that our 'killer' will be wearing, and a few candles to show how we will use lighting to create the mood that we will try to put across.

The title for our film is 'Tied' and this agrees with our plot for our thriller, which uses the main image of the victim being tied to a tree by her hands. Also, we liked this title because it also has the connotation that she is also tied up mentally, and she is entrappred in her situation. We thought this would be a very intruiging title for our film, and would allow us to do alot so that our filming could live up to this connotation too.

Dan gave us permission to do our filming, as our pitch was quite successful, and we will put all of our planning into good use when we start filming in Mary's lesson on Tuesday. We think that we have done enough planning to make sure that everything goes smoothly when we come to film, and we hope that our hard work shines through in our film.

Preliminary film (2)

This preliminary film task also allowed us to get more adventurous about our ideas for our Thriller film that we will be filming very soon. As we are going to be doing a pitch on our lesson on Friday 23rd, we can be confident that after this experience of filming and editing, our group will be able to carry out our film very professionally and put our ideas into action!

Preliminary Film

The lesson of 16th January, the group completed filming all that was needed for our preliminary match cut task. Using all of the shots that we had, Tuesday's lesson gave us the oppertunity to edit these shots which we did to the best of our ability in the time that we had. We made sure that each shot went smoothly together, and that we selected the shots that showed the various different camera angles that were filmed. Also, we wanted to make sure that the shots where dialogue was involved, were very clear and put the point of this practice film across. We thought that although it is a fairly simple film, it put enough across to the audience and told what was going on in a very effective way. We edited it so that it was believable, but also so that suspence could be added. This stage went very well and the group worked well together to make sure that the best was made out of the good filming that was done on Friday.

Everybody has definitely progressed in their skills, from the first to the sencond practise films as it seemed more natural to use a variety of different things in both the filming and editing work. Also, I think that it was much easier to edit the second film because we knew exactly how to use all of the programs in order to make the editing very effective. Also, I think that I have gained a much better understanding generally, about the productive side to media and everyone in our group definitely have grown in knowledge and skill.

To some extent, I do feel like we followed the conventions of real films but also challenging them too. By this I mean that although our film was only meant to be short, we used realistic looking props, good dialogue, a clear structure and a wide range of different camera shots- all of which you would expect from a real film. However, as we were limited as to what we could do with this preliminary film, we challenged the forms of real films because there were limits. However, we made the best out of what we had and I think it paid off. Our location was cleverly chosen because of the amount of light that we could have in that room, and the use of chairs and tables made our film look more realistic. This location allowed us to walk in and out of the scene and gave us a big enough space to shoot in.

I think that our practice film does allow us to make any comments about representation because the two characters in the film are of the opposite sex, so we had to think about how we were going to represent each person. We decided to use low angle shots to present the male character, stereotypically, as the superior, in order to make the audience aware that he is the one they should be more weary of. The girl, on the other hand, looked to be inferior because of the high angle shots she was mostly filmed at. This showed the different representations of gender and allowed us to use this to our advantage in our practice film.

After seeing the final product of this preliminary film, I think that our group did very well although we would have liked to have got the chance to add music and add a few more tweaks, concerning our editing. However, I think that it went very well and the actors and camera woman did a very good job.

preliminary Match Cut Task

Collateral