1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our Thriller opening thriller conventions as its main method of getting it's point across. One of our most important conventions was to create the feeling of being watched; the idea the entire way through the opening is that Emily is watching Liam as he delivers his pizza. We use many different methods to get this across, for instance we use the obvious ideas of shots from her point of view towards him. We also believed that there were subtle ideas which worked well to build up tension towards the end, for instance we used a fleeting glance for when Liam first sees Emily. This was actually done by accident as on the first take as Emily didn't get out of the way of the camera fast enough, but the way her dress flew behind her worked really well in terms of colour comparison to the other room and adding mystery because you only see a fleeting glimpse. This shot relates to the idea that Liam is being watched which is a further convention of a thriller. The idea of water or running water are included through the panning shot of the swimming pool which adds tension to the scene. The idea of there being a big house with only one person living in it works really well. This has been used time and again in thrillers (mainly sub-genres such as horror films), of course it is far more subtle than usual as the large house is obviously seen but it is only a small part of the story as it is only referenced in the storyline rather than the fact there is a large house being a main plot point, but it is clear that the father lives on his own.
Our characters are stereotypical, for instance the pizza delivery boy who investigates which character is in the pool house. The father whose daughter's death still remains in the forefront of his mind, and lastly the girl who follows Liam (Pizza delivery boy) is the small ghostly and frightening supposedly dead girl. These follow the conventions of characters as in this segment Liam follows the role of the detective character as he investigates the person supposedly in the pool house. The father in this situation could be the 'victim' as he is the only one who has no idea what's going on in contrast to Liam, who has at least been told he has to deliver a pizza and has a purpose at the house. Of course Emily can be considered the 'psycho' but she also plays the part of the 'Red Herring' as she leads Liam towards the pool house away from his original task. It is important to remember though that during the length of the film the character's roles in the story can change, for instance if we were to produce a whole feature length film then it would become apparent that although in the opening the main character appears to be Liam, as the story progresses it becomes clear that the main character is in fact the father. Liam is simply the helpless victim, but Emily's role stays the same.
Our camera work throughout adds mystery by using certain aspects of the location we had and twisting them to our advantage, for instance the large house that we were able to use, we used a low angle shot in order to shroud the house in mist, this gave a great 'spooky' effect which works well with the idea of 'fear of the unknown'. We incorporated flashbacks of Emily before she died to give an idea of how happy she was but we also incorporated her playing with leaves into the flashbacks which as we filmed in autumn could have worked well with ideas of trees dying and their time passing which works also as symbol for what may be soon to come with her.One of the shots we are most proud of is the shot from Emily's perspective, which when we played it back, was framed well and the grass meeting the gravel alongside the edge of the window frame are parallel which space the shot out evenly, also the way Liam walks across past the edge of the window out of site is a way or representing how Liam may vanish or disappear later on in the story. Quite a large part of our film is that Liam has seen the girl and is trying to find out if he just imagined her or not, this is challenging thriller conventions in a way because with most thrillers the idea is that the victim has no idea that they are being watched or followed but straight from the beginning we could see that Liam saw the girl and went over to investigate. We chose this because we didn't want him to appear helpless or at a loss when he saw Emily, we wanted the audience to think of him as a strong and brave character rather than what you get with other thriller genre films which use the first death at the beginning of the film (It is important to note that if we were to make this a full length film Liam would have been killed later on.) to show the killer and how they act or kill people, bu t by making the Pizza boy a strong character we have in fact made the 'psycho' character seem a lot tougher as well, which (although maybe subconsciously) ups the opinion of the character the audience has.
One of the main conventions thriller films have is that the main character is usually a strong male with a girl/woman playing the helpless and weak victim. We decided to challenge this and therefore flip it on it's head and make our victims in this case both male with the girl (who appears to be playing the strong character) being the character who controls them and is in power. There recently has been a spike in films which have strong females as the leads. They of course have been there before but recently with the release of films such as the “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” series, The Debt and The Iron Lady.
2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Each of the main characters represent their own individual social group. Liam is 17 and working as a pizza delivery boy and was created to be so conventional that it is almost unusual in itself. In himself Liam represents no social group specifically, unless we were to greatly generalise and put him in the ‘teenage male’ category. None of his behaviours in the film stand out in any way or make you think about his actions or feelings. This idea could be referenced to the film ‘Idiocracy’ in which a main part of the plot line and the character himself is that he is ‘the most average man of the planet’. This also helps as he is very average he shows no behaviours which we could really like or dislike or agree or disagree with.
So if we were to move further on in our plot we would see that Liam dies in a later scene, and as he shows no prominent or specific behavioural traits we do not relate or engage with him as a character, some would agree this is wrong and we always must relate but in fact this, I feel, slows down the pace of the story if minor plot points such as Liam’s death are focused on. So if we were to continue feeling sad for Liam for a prolonged period of time after his death, we would be subtracting from other important areas of the plot that may be continuing on afterwards. Putting all of this aside we would still have made Liam an average character for one very important reason, this is that as he has literally no personality to relate to. This highlights how extraordinarily ‘un-average’ Emily is as a character.
Emily is two different characters , in that when we see the old footage of her alive she is happy and carefree, but when we see the present day footage we can see she is sad and no longer a true representation of her formal self. And in this way she represents two different sides of one social group; children. So the first portrayal of the happy and carefree child Emily is a more traditional form of social group portrayal, a Disney character if you will, where although children go through periods of adversity, they are on the whole happy and cheerful. Films such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Sound of Music and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off typify this character portrayal. Later in the thriller we see Emily as a changed character; her demeanour becomes more sombre and serious. This side of childhood would be represented in films like Hesher, It’s a Wonderful Life and A Series of Unfortunate Events. So the social group represented by Emily is that of children and it is portrayed to show both sides of life, so while the characterisation of her life and ‘death’ is fictional and unrealistic her portrayal of modern childhood is accurate in its complexity of emotion.
Our final character is Ed the father of the ‘dead’ girl who answers the door to find that someone has ordered a pizza to be delivered to his house. We can immediately tell by the setting that he is a potential AB social classification and his dress furthermore supports this view. By setting we refer to the size of the property and its location obviously set in its own substantial grounds, suggesting the family that once lived there all together either inherited or made substantial amounts of money. This social grouping represents a very small percentage of the population, however most of us will know or come into contact with someone in this group. Often in films they can be caricatured, or characters to be envied. However, in our film we have chosen to keep this character very low-key allowing the setting and the story of his daughter to have prominence.
So in conclusion our three characters represent three different social groups, with a wide range of genders and ages enabling the story to have a richer content and a wider audience which allows more people to empathise with the characters as the film develops.
3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
When we look at the ideas of our thriller film we think that in general although it does have it’s own original plot, it does have general ideas and themes behind it that would apply to many films. For instance the use of small children being the ‘scary’ lead antagonist in films has been used for decades going straight from The Omen series, The Orphan, to the modern day Insidious. These films all have something in common, which is that they all are your average ‘multiplex’ movie. For instance an obvious example of a film they have chosen to screen in the re-make of The Thing which is far more recent. I believe that if we were to carry on making this movie then we would aim for it to be in that category. This is because generally (but with exceptions) films do better in this area of cinema at the box office than Art House films or other genres do. So I think that our plot is interesting and new enough for people to want to see it and for the large cinema companies such as ODEON, Cineworld and Vue to want to screen it. Yet is simplistic enough for it to warrant being in a multiplex theatre rather than at an art house venue, which stereotypically, more complicated films do, one example of one of the films which I believe could belong to and do well in the Art House genre Is the first Paranormal Activity film which due to its low budget yet high success could have appealed to that type of audience.
Also the next obvious choice is straight-to-DVD. This is mainly because looking at other similar themes and movie ideas, the horror genre (Which is a huge sub-genre of media, and a huge part of the thriller set) has really had a re-boost in the past few years with far more movies coming out in this time, for instance the Paranormal Activity series has been hugely successful. From personal experience, and visiting other people’s houses I can see that almost every family has at least one of these ‘New’ horror movies, these include such films as, Drag Me To Hell, Let the Right One In, and obviously the SAW franchise. I know this is purely speculation and in no way a form of real research but I think it’s a sign of our buying habits in films and everything else, which supports the view that it should be a multiplex production.
4) Who would be the audience for your media product?
I think that to get to our audience we first have to define what our specific genre of thriller we have developed; in our case a psychological thriller, as obviously different types appeal to different people; what may appeal to a teenager may not appeal to a 40 year old mother with children. All our rough edit questionnaires focused entirely on the films themselves and not on how the audience felt about genre but I have done some previous independent research in relation to another thriller movie which covers the questions we need to answer. In this research I found that overall the older generation prefers to have a much more substantial storyline and less violence whereas the younger generation has a higher appetite for violence and horror in general. I’ll explain why I think this might be.
In terms of audience preference my feeling is that the older generation, either one generation or older may have had a range of life-experiences ranging from difficult and uncomfortable to devastating and destroying and therefore may not find it entertaining to re-live those emotions in an escapist setting at the cinema. Younger people however in general may be seeking more emotional and frightening experiences to make them feel more alive – they may find it more enjoyable. My generation has not had to live through a world war or a depression and deal with the likely outcomes of close family death or loss of your home on a day to day basis. Although we have more stress around exams and finding a job after College at the moment this still leaves plenty of space for escapist entertainment. My generation has seen the rise of a whole movement of zombie books and movies such as the Walking Dead series which has been transferred into several types of media; we are less likely to have experienced death at first-hand and are therefore fascinated with it. Furthermore in my previous research I found that people in general favour psychological thrillers over any other sub-genre type. This has been apparent throughout film history with films ranging from Fight Club to Shutter Island, films which are eleven years apart but still have one thing in common which makes them hugely successful; a twist. I think people love the idea of not knowing what’s happening in film (as opposed to in real life) and being able to just sit back and relax letting others take control, as film is such a strong form of escapism. I see my thriller as a psychological thriller because of the girl’s father’s battle with himself throughout the movie. This leads me to argue that it will appeal to a wide range of audiences but particularly the older generation because of the complexity of the plot and the intrigue but without an overload of obvious violence.
5) How did you attract/address your audience?
We found at the storyboard stage that because the plot we had settled on had a cliffhanger ending to the opening. However for them to get to the ending and enjoy it we had to draw them in by gaining their attention right from the start. We used a range of ways to do this; we start with the young girl as a child in ‘old’ footage with a date 9 years back, we then open with the present day which made people want to know why the girl was of relevance. We engaged the audience through our setting; a big house shrouded in mist which gave the feeling of wondering who lived there and what might happen. The mist was designed to give a feeling of mystery and all of these elements were designed to get the audience wondering what was going in and how the little girl related to the other scenes. We also maintained this by cutting in shots of the girl throughout the opening. During this process we edited the shots in a way which meant we replaced part of Liam’s footage with Emily’s therefore creating the feeling that you had shut your eyes for a moment to think about something else and when you re-opened them real time had passed and you may have missed some of Liam’s actions, therefore making it seem less like a film and less like real life.
How we shot the film also contributed as when it came to Liam we used many different variations of close proximity shots in order to create the illusion of being with him and therefore the audience was drawn in and could feel part of the action rather than a bystander.
We felt all of the audience (and we thought this was a broad audience of all ages) could relate to the at least one aspect of one of the characters. Emily is shown first and could either be a younger sister, a peer or a daughter or grand-daughter, then Liam would be related to by teenagers his age especially if they do a delivery job or paper round and then Ed would be related to by the older age group.
All our feedback suggested that the cliffhanger had worked effectively, they had been drawn in from the beginning so our techniques were successful here – most said they would continue watching it.
6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
In the past I have used video cameras and many different types of editing suite through personal use and interest, work experience and through studying this course last year when I began to develop a strong interest in the subject. In order to improve my grades I am re-taking the coursework element and so last year’s learning experience provided me with a large majority of the skills that are necessary to perform well in this task. However it has also been an opportunity to sharpen my skills and learn some new ones.
My previous experience meant that I was able to help our group avoid many of the mistakes I had made in the first year like letting batteries run down and losing our work. We were able to plan when and where to film and what equipment was therefore needed and what state of preparedness it needed to be in. This meant we went from filming to first edit within one week whereas with my first group it took us about four weeks to get to the same stage. I identified we needed a tripod and camera and made sure we could book it out at the time necessary and complete all the forms. I worked out how to get it home on my bike and on to location the next morning.
From last year’s experience I learned that it was important to be happy with every shot on location and it only takes a few minutes to re-do them then but once you have moved to editing you can’t return to the shot to try and do it again. So I was keen to get the group to get it as right as we could.
When it came to editing I remembered to just use iMovie solely as although Final Cut is good and more advanced none of the changes we could have made by using it would have been worth losing the simplicity of iMovie and familiarising ourselves with the new suite. But when we used iMovie we advanced from my learning of last year by experimenting with a different variety of filters and white balance, contrast and colour saturation.
Sound editing was a large part of our thriller opening. Jack had composed his own sound track to our thriller which is something I have never seen before. This incurred challenging but rewarding tasks of matching up events in the visual to events from the audio to make sure that they worked in harmony with each other to create the right effects in the film.
7) Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
Obviously it's hard to answer this question as the amount you can learn after doing it once already is large but the amount you can learn over again is much smaller in comparison. All we can do is re-use what we have learnt from the previous years.
Similar to the last question the previous year’s preliminary task and Thriller Opening had educated me on several techniques which helped me this year. For instance last year we focussed heavily on, what to be fair, was a less than ‘Scorsese-like’ masterpiece. So this year I remembered to keep it simple and in our preliminary task my main goal was to try and get the team to use as many different camera shots and angles as possible. This meant that we would be prepared to use as many different shots as possible as obviously we would have done it all before.
Costumes: we found that the best way to portray a pizza delivery boy of Liam's age, which is also our age, was for him to wear his own every day clothes as he is playing himself and could well be doing a similar part-time job. He wore track suit bottoms which would be typical for someone doing this type of job - comfortable but not overly smart. He wore a green hooded top which again was representative of someone from an average background earning money in his spare time but could also be worn by someone doing this job full-time too. A pair of Jack Wills jeans would have been wrong for this character for example.
Costumes: Emily wore a red dress/petticoat-style outfit indicating her age as a young girl. She wore her hair tied back in a pony tail, again to give a feel of a young girl and to hide her more modern hairstyle of someone older. On her feet she wore flat black shoes again contributing to the sense of age.
