1) Who Would be the audience for your media production?
The target audience for our media production would be 15-25 year olds. This is because of the nature of the film as it contains a mature theme to which some younger and older generations might find offensive or de-stressing. The films fast paced editing and story line would attract this audience mainly due to the young actors used and also many females of this age also either having children or planning on having children in the future meaning they could have some emotional connection towards the film. Through research we found that this age range are most likely to watch the thriller due to evidence that this is the highest ranked age group to watch a thriller movie.
I would compare our production to films such as Children Of Men and SEVEN, as they both consist of fast paced editing and quick dynamic themes. Also both being of the genre thriller which follows many of the same conventions as ours. We greatly researched both of these films opening in the beginning of our research and identified some similarities.
I think that some of the audience could relate to the film as gang culture provokes revenge throughout, this related to relevant real life situations in society with gangs and crime which many people of this age range may have become part of, have been involved it, know someone who has been or are afraid of this crime in their area.
The certificate of a 15 for our film allows the wanted target audience to view the film, judging this decision on certain scenes of violence and distress.
The certificate of a 15 for our film allows the wanted target audience to view the film, judging this decision on certain scenes of violence and distress.
2) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our thriller incorporates many generic conventions such as fast paced editing, suspense building music and the fact the final scenes are filmed at night time. Before we started filming we watched several different thrillers so we could research thriller conventions to use within our movie.
After watching “Jaws” there was a lot of suspense music to build up tension which we also included in our own media production, using a non-diegetic sound of suspense music to highlight the youths approaching her house. As Hannah walks away from her workplace we used a zoom in shot to show her walking away, also using a side profile and long distance establishing shot, this allowed a sense of her being followed to question the audience as to who was watching her. As Hannah is on the train we used a mid-shot to show her actions were relaxed as there was no apparent danger before switching to a phone call she has as we cut to two youths approaching her house showing everything is not what it seems. This is a usual convention thrillers follow as the plot doesn’t give too much away to the audience in the opening scenes.
There is usually an antagonist and protagonist within the convention of a thriller, basing our characters around these set personality traits to create a thriller plot. Having a contrast between good and evil allows a typical thriller film to be created as there is always a disaster situation such as unknown cases of murder or death ect.
3) How does it represent particular social groups?
Our Production,includes a group of teenagers,this social group is represented negatively,two young boys are portrayed as the stereotypical teenagers who are on the streets, throughout the opening their identity is hidden as they are wearing dark hoodies to cover themselves and their faces and show that they are of a threat to society, even now this problem is very open in society with it being faced worldwide, problems such as gun crime and gang culture. Gender is represented stereotypically because the boys are able to dominate the woman and kidnap her child despite their age. The Mother of the child is represented as the modern day woman, who works full time.
4) How did you attract/address your audience?
There were many aspects of our opening which attracted our audience including the use of younger actors compared to that of many other films with them ranging between sixteen to seventeen.
The film includes a scene which relates to current affairs of crime, with two hooded figures in which many ways many teenagers can fear in everyday life, this would affect more so a female audience. Another aspect which would attract them is the build up of tension throughout with the use of dark music and constant movement, keeping the film more energetic without the use of a complicated story line.
A point of view shot used when the two hooded teenagers are running allows us to see the tension involved in their everyday lives and how dangerous it is due to them having to run away. Another use of mid-shots as Hannah was filmed on the train presents how she’s like any other teenager, in which they can relate to.
The audience is most likely to relate themselves to the woman involved being the main character who loses her child, this is because herself she is a young mother who loses her child and many females within our audience and age range are likely to be parents too. This can allow the audience and opening scene much more emotion and genuine feelings towards it. Our film included many generic conventions of a thriller such as tensions building through the use of dark music and fast paced editing at some parts, all linking in to a constant build up of tensions.
5) Looking back at your preliminary, what do you feel that you have learnt?
From the preliminary we feel we have learnt the basic camera skills needed and how to edit and piece together a successful flow of an opening/movie. We learnt a lot about the conventions of different movie genres after a lot of research and planning into other movies. We learnt how to produce a working script and a storyboard to create a plot to easily follow for the filming we carried out. We were clear on what shots to used and it helped us gain a new understanding into a different range of techniques which we could later use in our main task, this helped the process to be a lot smoother. Our use of specific shots improved as we gained greater knowledge and understanding towards them.
Filming the preliminary helped us to gain confidence with the equipment and practice different shots and techniques which gave us chance to practice before the main task.
We used a wider variety of camera angles and shots in our opening sequence compared to our preliminary task, and this was due to the fact that when filming our opening sequence we wanted to create a better visual style and properly apply the genre conventions to do with a Thriller. Our preliminary camera work definitely gave us a great help onto our first stages of camera knowledge and definintly opened up many more opportunities and experimentations when it came to filming our opening sequence.
When it came to comparing the editing skills between our opening sequence and our preliminary task there was again a clear difference. When looking back at our preliminary task, we could see that we hadn't used as many of the editing tools as we had through our opening sequence.
When it came to characterisation between our preliminary and our opening sequence there was again a difference between the two. We took more time and detail into portraying our character in our opening sequence, making sure she was dressed like a stereotypical Young Adult and her make-up portrayed her state or mind. Whereas in our preliminary task we applied no character traits and left our actors in exactly what they were wearing that day. This was due to the fact that our media knowledge was not as vast as it was when making our opening sequence.
Overall i feel the preliminary helped us gain a large amount of knowledge and understanding which greatly and positively impacted out final production/main task result.
Throughout the whole process of creating out opening screen up till the editing of it, technology has played a massive role in our overall results and construction.
RESEARCH-Before planning or even constructing our media product we made great use of the internet for our research about our chosen genre and film research. We Used youtube and other online websites to watch a variety of different thriller opening and compare them so we could gain the wanted knowledge on what our thriller should involve, gaining knowledge on the codes and conventions that should be used throughout.
FILMING- For our filming task we used HD Video cameras which saved our work onto memory cards. A memory card ensured a more clearer picture of our filming and a better way of filming our media product.
EDITING- We used many editing techniques including Final Cut pro and Garage band for our music.
USING THE INTERNET- We then learnt how to use blogger and created our blog to post all out research, construction and evaluation, to display our work, sharing our work on the
While producing our media product we have learnt a lot about technology these include using and creating add-ons/extras for our film through final cut pro, garage band and digital cameras. Through these programmes we were able to learn how to edit our film and create out own music so to not use music under copyright laws. At first we found using Final cut pro to be a challenge because we never had any previous experience in using the programme before but overtime we became more confident and found the software easier to use. We were able to develop our skills with mac computers, using garage band we were able to produce the music ourselves, we exported the file as an mp3 into itunes to incoperate it into our film.
We used a wider variety of camera angles and shots in our opening sequence compared to our preliminary task, and this was due to the fact that when filming our opening sequence we wanted to create a better visual style and properly apply the genre conventions to do with a Thriller. Our preliminary camera work definitely gave us a great help onto our first stages of camera knowledge and definintly opened up many more opportunities and experimentations when it came to filming our opening sequence.
When it came to comparing the editing skills between our opening sequence and our preliminary task there was again a clear difference. When looking back at our preliminary task, we could see that we hadn't used as many of the editing tools as we had through our opening sequence.
When it came to characterisation between our preliminary and our opening sequence there was again a difference between the two. We took more time and detail into portraying our character in our opening sequence, making sure she was dressed like a stereotypical Young Adult and her make-up portrayed her state or mind. Whereas in our preliminary task we applied no character traits and left our actors in exactly what they were wearing that day. This was due to the fact that our media knowledge was not as vast as it was when making our opening sequence.
Overall i feel the preliminary helped us gain a large amount of knowledge and understanding which greatly and positively impacted out final production/main task result.
6)What have you learnt about technology through producing your media product?
Throughout the whole process of creating out opening screen up till the editing of it, technology has played a massive role in our overall results and construction.
FILMING- For our filming task we used HD Video cameras which saved our work onto memory cards. A memory card ensured a more clearer picture of our filming and a better way of filming our media product.
EDITING- We used many editing techniques including Final Cut pro and Garage band for our music.
USING THE INTERNET- We then learnt how to use blogger and created our blog to post all out research, construction and evaluation, to display our work, sharing our work on the
While producing our media product we have learnt a lot about technology these include using and creating add-ons/extras for our film through final cut pro, garage band and digital cameras. Through these programmes we were able to learn how to edit our film and create out own music so to not use music under copyright laws. At first we found using Final cut pro to be a challenge because we never had any previous experience in using the programme before but overtime we became more confident and found the software easier to use. We were able to develop our skills with mac computers, using garage band we were able to produce the music ourselves, we exported the file as an mp3 into itunes to incoperate it into our film.
We found using the digital cameras easy to use, they were simple to carry around and we each had a chance to film a part of our production, we had to work out how to use our camera to gain the shots that we chose in our storyboard. When we was filming up London we did face some problems,for example our actress Hannah wasn’t able to come back and carry on filiming, so our film had to be cut shorter than first wanted.
7) What kind of media institution might distribute your product and why?
As our film is low budget and follows similar story lines to "Taken" and "Gone baby gone" we feel that Film4 would best represent our film. There are many institutions which could support low budget movies but we believe this type of media institution will gain us better recognition as it already has a large audience of followers for many other movies such as "Slumdog Millionaire", this was a very successful film and gained a large amount of audience recognition and high status. The types of films they show normally include many films with a certificate of fifteen which greatly relates to out movie.
Using this type of institution may rely on more marketing due to them not have the facilities of radio stations or news programmes to gain recognition so will rely more on word of mouth.
We Will market through the use of web 2.0 on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. This is because our target age group for our movie are the main users of such internet interactive sites which will allow us to gain more recognition from them in this way.
Pie Chart to show usualy Facebook age group
7) What kind of media institution might distribute your product and why?
As our film is low budget and follows similar story lines to "Taken" and "Gone baby gone" we feel that Film4 would best represent our film. There are many institutions which could support low budget movies but we believe this type of media institution will gain us better recognition as it already has a large audience of followers for many other movies such as "Slumdog Millionaire", this was a very successful film and gained a large amount of audience recognition and high status. The types of films they show normally include many films with a certificate of fifteen which greatly relates to out movie.
Using this type of institution may rely on more marketing due to them not have the facilities of radio stations or news programmes to gain recognition so will rely more on word of mouth.
We Will market through the use of web 2.0 on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. This is because our target age group for our movie are the main users of such internet interactive sites which will allow us to gain more recognition from them in this way.
Pie Chart to show usualy Facebook age group
