Danny's Evaluation

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

Challenge
In our thriller one of the key conventions that we have challenged is the plot. We have done this by showing the fixation of the stalker and more so that the antagonist and protagonist are actually interacting in conversation. This is shown by the top picture on the right from our thriller, instead of just not talking to the antagonist the protagonist has been talking to him, this is shown previous to the picture in the thriller the antagonist says "are you ignoring me now" this insinuates they have been talking previous to this message and then she reply's saying "leave me alone" (as shown in the picture above) this shows the non-stereotypical behaviour of the protagonist. Whilst in the typical thrillers such as Sleeping With The Enemy the (bottom picture, right) the antagonist stalks his wife's every move without her knowing, also he doesn't tell her that he is stalking her therefore there is no contact between the two. In the clip he stalks her at a fair without her knowledge so this is the key difference between ours and Sleeping With The Enemy is the knowledge of the protagonist to whats going on.

The second convention that i have challenged is that of having the title at the end of the opening section instead of following the usual thriller schedule and having the title as a big impact opening. We decided to put our title at the very end to build the effects of tension and mystery. This was done by making the audience wait to know what they are actually watching so it makes them think until the title reveals the goings on in our opening. The musical score also very much helped because the music built up to make it even more effective. Whilst on the other hand the typical thing to do is have the title at the start. This is normally done by having a loud musical score that introduces the film straight away to the audience. This is exactly what happens in the example of The Sixth Sense. What happens here is this puts the audience into a fright and makes them nervous before watching any of the opening to the film



 Developed

In our thriller we aimed to develop the thriller convention of voyeurism. We aimed at developing it by bringing it into the modern day and changing it from the usual, taking pictures or following their victim. We have developed it to show the risks of social networks and how someone can know nearly everything about you, get pictures of you and know your whereabouts from the small space of a study and just using a laptop. We aimed to do this in our thriller by not showing the traditional shot of somebody holding a developed picture, for example in One Hour Photo. Then we developed it by bringing it into the digital age by using props such as laptops, tablets and smart phones. This showed how we have updated into the modern world to show the different ways of being voyeuristic. Another way we developed this was that of location. We showed this by our man not having to move from his location to gain any additional information due to new technology.






The second convention we think we developed during our thriller opening is that of the credits.For our credits we have applied affect that reveals our credits slowly which makes the effect of tension by making the audience wait to read what the titles say. Also our credits very much related to our thriller as we added a sound bridge of typing so that it linked to the technology aspect of our opening. Also we very much went into depth with by that the font is the same as to that of twitter, which is were he stalks his victim. Also the stalker types to stalk her so it goes along with the whole storyline of our film. Also our thriller credits where seperate so it added to the effect of mystery by hiding the antagonist. For example the credits in The Talented Mr Ripley the credits are superimposed and they partially hide his face the credits so they develop the character's characteristics  by showing he is a very hidden character. The font used in that opening is off the 1950 age which also relates to the film.





Used
The first convention that we used is the thriller sub-genre crime. This thriller convention is used frequently due to them overlapping quite a lot in thrillers. Some thrillers are based just around the crime and discovering the antagonist. But crime thrillers are much more intense and the audience are much more on edge and they get the audience to think the whole way through. Our crime aspect was that of stalking. The key way we did this was that of the pestering of messages from the antagonist to the protagonist to all of her different devices. Messages of constant "hello xx" are shown to the audience to show that he is non stop bothering her. They are shown on different devices also to show he is coming at her from loads of different angles. We used binary opposition to show the extent of the crime thriller. We showed it by having the two characters seperate and having a massive contrast in light and in props and location. The lack of lighting showed who the antagonist was and what crime he was committing.
A thriller that used this effectively would be that of se7en which has all the stereotypical aspects of a thriller for example a crime and a detective for example.This shot shows an early clip in the opening once the crime had been commited. It opens like this so that it gives the audience a judgement as to what the film is going to entail.

The second convention that we used was binary opposition. This is when two things are the complete opposite to one an other. this is used the whole way through our thriller opening. To show the complete difference and contrast between the antagonist and protagonist. In the first shot the antagonist is in his study we showed that he was an antagonist by the dark lighting and hiding his identity. Whilst in the second shot its the protagonist in her bright room, doing classic stereotypical teenage girl things with normal teenage girl props like fashion magazines. we used this convention to show that there is something going on between the two characters and to show some of their characteristics.

Another thriller that does this is The Da Vinci Code. It uses binary opposition when the lighting is all dark around the antagonists face hiding his identity showing that he is the antagonist. the protagonist has a bright spotlight on him clearly showing him showing that he is the protagonist






















2.
How does your media product represent particular social groups ?

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

The answer to this question is to be found on our Wikispaces page linked below.

http://nfgsmedia.wikispaces.com/Followed

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

The type of person that would watch our film is somebody who is young around 15-25 and very sociable. The person goes out quite often with friends going to the cinema and socialising in local bars, clubs and resteraunts. Also our audience likes going to the cinema with their family also. This person is probably in university or college and they feel like they can relate to our film this is why we made our film as up to date as possible. The person who would go and watch our film would also be very trendy and fashionable, she/he shops in popular high street shops like topshop or river island.

We chose as a group to certificate our thriller film #Followed as a 15 we did this because some parts of the film may be seemed as disturbing. Also making it a 15 we believed we could add content that would make it more of a thriller, then what you could do with certifying it a 12


5.
How did you attract/address your audience ?

6.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product ?

Due to our thriller all being based around technology we were always using technology or filming technology being used because of #Followed being based around twitter. I am normally capable of using most technologies. With the technologies that we used i was already able to use twitter, apple macs and youtube. On the other hand i had never used the likes of blogger, prezi or final cut express or had the experience of using a video camera and tripod.

Twitter

This was one of the key pieces of technology that we used. This is because our whole thriller opening #Followed, is based around twitter. So we had to create twitter pages for each of the antagonist and protagonist, we then had to film at the correct times of arrival of messages and we had to make sure the noise of the message was easy for the camera to pick up and that it was clear. This was then where some problems occured, we had problems of messages not sending, noises not being loud enough and the filming not being timed correctly. I was fully capable of using twitter i was best at this technology then any other due to being an avid twitter user and knowing how to use each different section from tweets to direct messages.

Blogger

Another piece of software that we used was blogger. I had encountered blogger before when going on the internet so i knew what it was and what it was used for. But i had never had my own blog before and posted before. On the other hand I didnt find it very hard to get to grips with logging in and posting. As a group we were able to modify it so that its appearance was just how we wanted it to look. I feel the features of Blogger assisted and benefited our group to a great extent and assisted us to construct a successful account of our progress and actions for the planning and producing of our Thriller Opening. The ease of publishing work, uploading photos and the ability to embed videos promptly was important for us as a group to show things such as why we did things in our thriller, and analysing other thrillers. It was also very easy to show who did each post with tags and the topics of each post with titles. The text could be changed also with the themes all of this added to make our blogs look good and proffessional.

Camera/tripod

This was one of the hardest things that our group came up against whilst filming #Followed. No-one with the group had any previous experience in filming or using a video camera or tripod and this is where we found some difficulties. First of all, with the camera we didn't realise how key the standard of filming was to the final piece. Due to this we filmed in standard definition instead of high definition and because of this we had to re-film our whole thriller opening. On the other hand our problems with the tripod occured when docking the camera onto our first tripod it was wonky, therefore, we had to film some of the shots again. Another reason why the tripod was an issue was the legs had to be level to make sure the shot was straight. As you can see in the shot on the right, the camera is docked and level this shot was taken once we had realised what we had done wrong from the first time of filming and fixed it.

Final cut express

This was the editing software we chose to use to make the thriller opening for our film #Followed. Again no-one in our group had used this software before. This time before we actually made our thriller opening we practiced with the software when making our preliminary video. What we learnt from this was how key the transitions would be between each shot to make sure the opening looked clean. Once we finished our preliminary we found it much easier to use the basics of the software, for example uploading the videos into the software off the camera to putting them into position and cutting them. The things we struggled with the most was syncing the music with the credits and then getting the music to fit correctly with the video. But the more I used this software the more I felt I knew what I had to do to make the video work and look how I wanted, and I knew what we needed to do to change the certain things that needed changing. I think I would use this software again if making a video clip or different media clip.

Wikispaces

What we used wikispaces for was to create a page for our thriller opening #Followed. Previous to being told to use the website i had never heard of it. As a group we found it very easy to add pictures text and links to our page and it was very easy to use the site in general. I think we were able to use this site well due to all our previous work with the website Blogger.

Apple iMac

We used all these software's on Apple iMacs i found this quite easy due to me having an iMac at home. So my work pace was quite quick when navigating the internet and getting from software to software due to knowing shortcut keys on the keyboard. The keyboard is different to other computers on the iMac and because of this it does not have a # key which was key to our group due to our thriller film being called #Followed but my previous knowledge of Macs helped our group get around that issue quickly. The best thing about the Macs are that they could use the software final cut express with ease and this is what we edited our thriller on. Also they have iTunes which we used for the music used in our opening



 Prezi

Our group decided to include a variety of different programmes and technology to add to our Blog posts to make them more interesting; one of these programmes was an internet website, Prezi. Prezi is used as personal online slideshow creator, which virtually creates your slideshow in any way you want. I'm not very good at using this software because i havn't had any previous experience of it before we started using it in posts on our Blogger blogs. It was very helpful to use for our group because it let us show different ways of posting onto our blogs. For example i have used this software to answer my second 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?

From the preliminary i believe as a group we have learnt how to use the camera correctly depending on the scene and shot. Also we have seen the clear difference in standard definition and high definition, we made the mistake when filming so had to re-film our opening. This is our first attempt:

 and here is the much clearer HD version:

We also have identified the importance of mise en scene in giving a character a background and telling the audience about the character for example the props, lighting, clothing and location are all very important.