Produce the opening sequence of a new thriller including titles aimed at 15 or 18 certificate audience (approximately two minutes in duration).
For the process of planning, filming and editing, I worked in a group with Tuesday Povey, Tom Newton and Josh Gemmell.
In what ways does your thriller opening use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real thriller openings?
Our thriller uses a lot of codes and conventions similar to those in real media products, such as the transformed city. This is where a setting in a film is transformed into being something that it is normally not. Our film is set in a house, which is generally a safe area, but has been transformed into a place of danger. We decided to use this as it is a popular convention of a thriller film. We also used the question and answer model, as our thriller left our audience asking questions such as “why did the girl get killed?” and “who is he?”. This convention was used because the intention of our opening was to make our audience want to watch the rest of our film. Other codes and conventions we used were; partial vision and concealment and protraction- These both are popular thriller conventions and during our audience research, a majority of people who filled in our questionnaire (see section four of blog) said that they would like to see partial vision in our opening. Partial vision allows the viewer to only see so much, as not too give away too much information to them. This draws them into the film and challenges them by making them ask questions and guess what is happening..
A lot of the camera angles in our thriller were close-ups. The use of close-ups helped us to conceal information from the audience. Our use of panning shots introduced the audience to the surroundings. Both panning shots and close-ups are used a lot in thriller films. We decided not to use an exotic feature in our opening as we found it difficult to find an “exotic” item or an actor that would be suitable for our storyline. I think our thriller opening was successful, as most people who answered our audience feedback questionnaire (see section eleven) said that they enjoyed it, and I thought that we used the right features to show that our product was a thriller film. However, I think that we could have spent more time on music, making it fit our film more, and more sound effects, such as breathing could have been used to make our storyline clearer. Overall, I think the narrative structure of our product was quite easy to follow, as we made our storyline straight to the point. We decided to follow conventions and have a male killer in our thriller- we came to this conclusion because most people voted for a male killer and a female main character in our audience research questionnaire.
I thought that one of the most important aspects of our thriller film was the music, as this helped set the scene a lot, as it turned our setting of a normal house into a scarier place.
How does your thriller sequence represent particular social groups?
In my media product, we communicated the every day life and attitude of a teenage girl a lot, as this was our main character. Right at the beginning, we see our character washing dishes in the kitchen- a chore that many teenagers are asked to do. We also portrayed the attitude of a teenager when our character answers the phone for the second time, as she gets annoyed when nobody speaks back to her. We decided to have a teenager as our main character as most people voted for a female teenaged girl in our questionnaire. We also thought this would be good as females are typically seen as more vulnerable than males, and this would make our character look more helpless compared to our villain.
When deciding who our actors were going to be, we decided we wanted people who had experience in acting, so we chose people who have been involved in acting in school/ college, etc.
What kind of media institution might distribute your thriller and why?
I think that it would be possible to digitally distribute our film in a mainstream cinema. I would like to see it viewed in a cinema because I our film would be good for attracting our target audience to watch our film as I think the story line would catch their attention. However, I don’t think our opening looks professional enough to be distributed in a cinema, due to some poor filming and effects. I also think our media piece would be a good use as an example of a media product for other media students studying at high school or college.
Who would be the audience for your thriller?
The target audience for our thriller film was sixteen year olds, as the majority of people who answered our questionnaire were sixteen. Because of this, our film classification was 15. We also decided to make a 15 as we are too young to watch BBFC classified 18 films, so we couldn’t produce a film that we wouldn’t be allowed to watch. To make our film suitable for our audience, we decided not to show use of a weapon or any other direct examples of violence in our opening, or sexual references. Even though our film is mainly directed at teenagers, I think it could appeal to adults as well, as I think our storyline could be suited to quite a wide age range.
How did you attract/address your audience?
I knew that our film would appeal to our target audience as our main character was a teenager, and people around the ages of fifteen and sixteen would be able to relate to her every day life. Also, many teenagers today are interested in films containing action and interesting story lines. I think our film is appropriate for our target audience, as it matches our classification because we haven’t contained direct violence or sexual references. We have also followed our audience research results to create the thriller film that they asked for, for example, most people said that we should set our film in a rural area, so we chose to film our opening in a house. We also spent time brainstorming ideas for our plot, as thirty-one out of forty people said that the plot is what they like best about a thriller film. One thing that we did not include in our thriller despite questionnaire results, however, is violence. Many people asked for violence, but we did not include this in our opening due to our classification. I think my thriller was successful with our audience, as it was supposed to build up tension and leave them asking questions, and according to our audience feedback, it did. However, they said that the thing we could have improved most was our effects. I agree with this as we did not spend as much time as we could have on effects so I think they were badly placed.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
During the process of filming, I have learnt a lot about the technologies used, such as the camera and the editing software. I also learned the importance of following the storyboard and arranging the shots effectively. At first, we didn’t film with a very wide variety of shots, as they were mainly mid shots, so we arranged another day to film so that we had a wider variety, including extreme close-ups, close-ups and panning shots. For each day of filming, we had to make sure each of our actors were wearing the same clothes as the previous day, as well as making sure that the rooms we were using were set out the same to avoid continuity problems.
The lighting when filming outside was dark, as we filmed in the evening. This made it difficult to see the actor who was standing outside. We decided that this created a good effect, as it hides things from the audience more, creating concealment and protraction and partial vision, so we agreed not to change the lighting. Our final film, although it still held the same storyline, differed a lot from the original plan on the storyboard. The storyboard we created didn’t have a wide range of shots on it, so we had to alter our plan slightly to change this.
We encountered a few technical problems whilst we were filming, such as reflections of crew and equipment in the windows and problems with the phone ringing. However, we noticed these problems as they occurred and managed to fix them. We also accidentally filmed over a section of our tape when we went back to filming after we’d started logging our film. Luckily, we noticed this before we captured our tape so we were able to film the erased shots again. A problem we faced when we were editing was a jump cut. We didn’t notice the error when we were capturing our tape, so we had to use a dissolve to hide the bad transition between the two shots.
We had quite a difficult time finding music to use for our film as it had to be royalty free. We eventually came across music by Kevin McLeod online which is free of charge that we thought suited our film quite well, so we downloaded it and used it for our film. We also couldn’t find breathing sound effects which were suitable for our thriller, so we didn’t include these in our finished film.
We could have avoided this by recording the sounds ourselves.
There was a shot which was filmed from the stairs which I had to film numerous times, as it was difficult to film with the tri-pod on the staircase, as it was to film with a steady hand. However, we eventually managed get a decent shot. The special effects we used for our production were ghosting, to create a slow motion effect, and we gave the extreme-close-up of the phone a red tint to signify danger. We decided to have our credits flashing on in random areas of the screen to surprise our audience, and then have them fading slowly away.
At first, I found using the Premiere software difficult and confusing, as I had never used an editing software as advanced as that previously, but as I experimented, I gradually got used to it.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
I feel that I have improved a huge amount since the preliminary task. When I first began Media, I had no idea about the different shots used, and I was quite amateur when using the camera and editing software. Now I feel that I am quite experienced, and know the names of a wide variety of shots. I also feel I am stronger at analysing films.
For our preliminary task, we had to film a scene where somebody walks across a room, takes a seat and has a conversation with another person. Doing this task, I learned about different shots, such as panning to follow somebody walking across a room. I also learnt about editing to create shot-reverse- shot in a conversation, and not to go past a 180 degree boundary whilst filming as it would be confusing to the audience. All of this came in handy when we were working on our real project.
I think our media film fitted the brief quite well. However, I don’t feel that we spent enough time on effects and music, and think that if we did, our product could have improved by a vast amount. I do, on the other hand, think that it is overall a successful thriller opening which uses the codes and conventions of a real thriller movie. We took care when considering things such as the 180 degree rule and made sure that we did not break this by paying careful attention when planning and drawing out our storyboard. I think our film could have compared well to a professional film if we’d have taken more care with the music and the shots, such as the jump cut, as I think the quality of our shots and editing are quite efficient. If we had chance to improve our thriller, I would definitely go out and film a few shots again, to make sure that there are no jumps and that we have a more advanced range of shots, as well as recording our own sound effects so that it wasn’t so difficult for us to find them online.
However, I am quite pleased with the overall outcome of our production.
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