Thriller Evaluation Question
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our thriller opening has some similar conventions to those of other thrillers. In the film “Taken”, an ex MI5 agent’s daughter is kidnapped and her whereabouts are unknown. In our thriller, a briefcase of an agent goes missing, but the contents of the briefcase are unknown, but the audience are shown that the content of the briefcase are important, and the convention of something or someone important going missing is used a lot in thrillers
We challenged this convention because rather than someone being kidnapped or someone going missing, we thought it be effective for a briefcase to go missing leading the audience the think “what is in that briefcase that is so important” which is similar in the sense that something is going missing, but different because the audience do not know exactly what it is that has gone missing and why it is of such high importance.
The sub-genre of our thriller is a mystery-thriller. This is shown because of the disappearance of a mysterious briefcase, which is mysterious because the audience do not know the content of the briefcase, making the sub-genre a mystery. This is done well because we made sure the briefcase was shown to play a main part in the thriller by zooming in slowly at the point where we last the it, showing that it has some significance to the plot of the thriller.
As mentioned before, the film “Taken” influenced our film greatly. The sub-genre of our thriller is a mystery, as is the sub-genre of Taken, which has a similar story-line except the fact a briefcase with important content goes missing rather than a person. Taken was a good influence on our film because it helped us to establish how to communicate to the audience what significance the briefcase has with the rest of the movie: in taken, the daughter that is kidnapped is highlighted at the beginning of the film, and the briefcase was highlighted at the beginning and towards the end of the opening sequence, showing the audience its relevance to the plot which is what Taken did.
2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our thriller represents different social group’s class, age, genders male and female and ethnicity black and white.
Jessica identity is not known in the opening of the thriller so she could be lower class or working class. We know she has a lower social class than Stephanie and Michael because of the way she dresses, with her Nike ‘hoodie’. Stephanie and Michael are seen as middle class because of the house they live in and Stephanie’s occupation, which is a business woman.
Genders are represented in a non stereotypical way. In our thriller woman are the more dominant gender. Majority of films especially thriller genre have men in a more dominant role. Stephanie is a business woman which is normally stereotyped as a male job. The only male character Michael is inferior to his wife Stephanie.
Ethnicity on the other hand is more stereotypical in our thriller. Stephanie is a business woman who is stereotyped as a white person’s job because they are stereotyped to have better jobs and higher position in society than other ethnicity groups. Jessica is dressed as a typical black ‘ghetto’ girl. She has her ‘hoodie’ up which is stereotypically what black people wear representing their thuggish ways.
Our thriller links to are target audience by showing how people stereotypical associate other people in day to day life.
3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Our thriller movie would be distributed by 'Magnum' which is a small independent British budget institution like BBC, ITV and Film4. Our thriller wouldn't be a big Hollywood blockbuster because the movie does not need a big production since there is not an action or horror movie which majority of the time have have big production. Our thriller would also be released on the internet so the film could be watched by a wider audience around the world.
The purpose of the release of the thriller is too show another dynamic of thriller film and to get the audience think more about the government and think about their day to day life.
Our visual style for our thriller is more drama thriller. It is set on a gloomy week day, it is raining. The beginning of the first couple of scenes is in Stephanie house. She first awakes from her room white is white like its pure and a big white and pink bed. Then we see short little clips of Stephanie getting her things during this we see Stephanie’s living room and kitchen walking through the hallway. We Stephanie front door. The rest of the scene takes place outside on the road it is a quiet road because all we see is cars parked and no one on the road.
4) Who would be the audience for your media product?
Our audience of are thriller appeals mainly to young male’s. We know are thriller would appeal to male’s as seen from the Pearl and Dean website. The young male in our picture is an example of someone who would probably watch are thriller. This is because male’s are more attractive to cars, violence and death than female’s. Our thriller has some scenes of violent nature e.g. when Jessica gets hit by a car, which is more what males like to watch and see in a movie.
Saw is another thriller which are thriller is similar to and also attracts mainly male’s.
age | gender | |||
4-6 | 0% | male | 67% | |
7-11 | 0% | female | 33% | |
12-14 | 0% | class | ||
15-24 | 42% | AB | 30% | |
25-34 | 22% | C1 | 29% | |
35-44 | 21% | C2 | 23% | |
45+ | 15% | DE | 18 | |
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
Before we wanted to attract our audience we needed to decide a suitable audience for our thriller, we thought that out audience will need to be similar to other thrillers, this is because we know that they have been successful so if we have a audience similar to others then it is more likely that ours will become successful. When we looked at the Pearl and Dean website we saw that males were more popular so we decided to include things in which males will like such as a car crash. We thought this would be a good idea because then we are more likely to attract a larger audience. we thought that attracting a younger generation would be better because there are a lot of young males who are interested in thrillers. e.g. Charlotte’s brother.
In our thriller the main part is the car crash this is would appeal to males because they are interested in dramatic scenes with action and this has included action. Before the car crash takes place it builds up so we know that something is going to happen, this creates lots of tension within the thriller which males prefer in films. The car crash will be suitable for everyone to see but it is more likely that all males from aged 12+ will want to watch it.
The way we used our camera shots will have a impact on who our audience because most of the shots are short and snappy so therefore it is more likely to attract men because they prefer shorter scenes so they don’t get distracted and find it more interesting.
We thought that it would be good to connect our main character (Stephanie) to the audience because we get to see her through her daily routine, also you get to see her in her bedroom which is a very private place so this helps us connect with her, also men are more sexually attractive to women so therefore it would increase the level of our audience within males. This will impact on our thriller because males are more likely to watch it, so it will attract other males to watch it.
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?
We have learnt how to use lots of different equipment and software from making our Thriller Opening. We learnt how to use a camera and how to film and then upload the information onto the Macs. There are several different strengths and weaknesses of using cameras and its equipment, and these are:
Strengths;
It is easy to capture the footage
It is fun, making the work easier to do
Good quality footage
We used a tripod which was a strength because it made filming steady and straight shots easy
Easy to download onto the Macs
Weaknesses;
One filming mistake meant the take had to be re-done
One problem was we had nobody to drive the car until Charlotte’s father kindly stepped in and offered to help our group
The tri-pod was often hard to move around and adjust
We didn’t have any issues or problems whilst filming apart from the fact we had no driver for a while, which was resolved when Charlotte’s dad said that he would drive the car for us which he did and we successfully managed to hide him from the camera.
We have learnt a lot about editing and how to be successfully effective when editing. Final Cut Pro is very easy to use and good for editing, and we enjoyed using it as it made editing our thriller opening and preliminary tasks a lot easier. We used blackout effects and fast motion to make our piece more effective, and this was successful. We learnt a lot about how to add sound clips and title sequences into our thriller by using software, and I found that overall Final Cut Pro was excellent and really easy to use, which made the production of our thriller opening a lot easier.
We used Garageband to create our soundtrack for out thriller and it was quite complicated to use. It was hard to work out how to make new music and edit the examples they gave, but in the end we managed to solve the problem and created a good soundtrack that fits in well with our thriller opening.
We feel that the final product is successful; this is because we have used lots of things to make our product good, e.g. good use of filming with different shots, lots of analysis of the product to show that we have clear evidence as to why we wanted our thriller to be in a certain way. So overall we are satisfied with the outcome.
