Mediaaaa

Evaluation‘Exposed’

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

From the preliminary task, I have learnt that to set the scene it the most important thing in order for your film to be successful. if you do not have the correct mise en scene then the things that take place in your film don’t seem as effective. In our preliminary task, we didn’t think or plan out our environment and what would be in the background of our scenes, and you can see that the shots and acting in the scene doesn’t fit as result of this. I learnt from this that for our thriller project we had to plan every small detail to ensure that we could get the best results from it and so that it looked believable and real. If the audience do not think that your story is believable from the start, then they are not going to enjoy watching the film and not rate it very well.

As well as this, I also learnt that we had to approach the film as if we were the audience, and whether we would find it interesting. This was hard for me as I felt sometimes I was being too self indulgent by wanting to do things that I would like to see, but had to think about the target audience and what they would expect to be watching.

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

• The film distribution would distribute the product, and we would try and aim our thriller to American distribution companies. This is because American distribution companies have the most money and influence over the film industry. For example, Universal studios has distributed many famous films, and through advertisement have gained popularity within the film industry both sides of the Atlantic. DVD's are also important in the distributing stage of our film.

• So the main reason that I would want Universal or an American company to distribute our film is that people would want to go and see it because it is under the Universal ‘name’, and because of the reputation that is has people would want to go and see the company’s new product. In addition, more profit would be taken from the film as a result of people seeing the film, and the advertisement to promote it to the target audience of teens. On the next slide is an example of where the Universal logo would appear at the beginning of our film.

Universal studios logo that would appear at the beginning of our film.

This screen would appear at the very beginning of our opening, this allows the company’s name to be recognised by the audience (promotes Universal) and also puts their name/brand onto our product.

Then the film would begin with the opening titles, setting up the theme and introduces the start of the film.

Just like on the previous slide, the film would begin to start and draw the audience into the film. Our music would be playing right from the beginning when the Universal logo page is shown, setting the atmosphere for the later film.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

• The audience for our media product are teenagers aged from around 15-18 years of age. Here is an example of some of the people that would be watching our opening of a thriller. As you can see they are around the age of 16/17, and are wearing ‘normal clothing’ to fit into society. However I do think that mostly boys will be interested in our opening as thriller films appeal more to that gender. We set out film as being a 15 (only able for people over the years of 15 to watch) due to the nature of the film and storyline.

• The boys pictured in this picture are students and are most likely to be the audience for our thriller opening. The uniforms and school environment means that we can determine they are students.

• We tried to target our short opening to this age group as I felt that they would understand the plot more, and could relate to it due to the nature of the film, as society is not seen as safe as it was and teenagers are more venerable due to this.

How did you attract your audience?

• We tried to create a thriller opening full of suspense and something that would draw the audience in, and something that they would be interested in. Having the Enigma code in our opening allows us not to give too much away, so leaves the audience guessing on what is going to happen, but they still have some sort of idea of the theme of the film.

• As well as this, this plot of someone being watched and photographed has been used in many other films and has been effective. We used this storyline as a rough idea as we knew that it would work well and our target audience would be interested in it.

• This photo could be used to represent our opening of a thriller, and this is the image that most people think of when being ‘watched.

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

• Our film uses traditional thriller conventions of flashing between a black screen with white titles on in-between snippets of our film. We got this idea from the thriller film of ‘Seven’, which also uses this convention.

This is the opening title sequence of Se7en. As you can see the title flicker between flashes of the scenes. This is what we used for ours as we thought it looked effective and would draw our audience in.

This is our opening title sequence which is similar to Se7en’s.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our media product represents the female groups of the younger age groups (teenagers) due to the nature of the film and storyline. Females are more likely to be able to relate to the film and position of being watched.

The person that is watching the women is played by a male, which is the normal stereotype in society of people carrying out crimes. The victim is a teenage girl who is in danger, which causes vulnerability and empathy with a teenage audience.

The typical stereotypical teenage girl that would feel affected by our film and made to feel like it could happen to her.

What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

• Through the course of making our 2 minute thriller film I have learnt a lot about the types of editing equipment and camera equipment. For example, how to use the editing software which took me a while to understand, but got there in the end. Once I had learnt how to make new titles and edit them, I played around with them to try and create the desired effect of water being put through the text, which I think I did well. It was luck that I found that editing technique through my experimenting.

I feel that by experimenting with this software I have a better idea of how to use it in the future to create the desired effect that I am after to fit a certain genre theme.