Finished Thriller - 'Embers'

Evaluation task 7 - Looking back at your prelimiary task, what do you feel you have learnt in progression from it to the full product?

Evaluation Task 6 - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing your product?

Link to our Thriller:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDJvlHB3C58

We have made some notes on our thriller, which discusses some of the technological knowledge which we gained during this process. There is also some additional info about what I have learned about camera technology featured in the Prezi for evaluation task 7.

Evaluation task 5 - How did you attract/address your audience?

What appeals to our target audience about our Thriller?

- Suspense

above all, the main convention of Thrillers is suspense. Suspense isn't so clear in our thriller, it can almost get lost in the action, however it is there. From feedback, people stated that the suspense comes from the uncertainty of what is happening, we are unsure why he has killed him, and also unsure how the sequence is being displayed.

- Actors

Seeing teenage actors can often be very interesting for a film. People like things that appeal to them, so they can relate to it. Having a teenager as the lead should draw in lots of attention from teenagers.

- Violence

The success of media products, like 'Bronson', 'The Walking Dead' and 'Inglorious Basterds' provides proof, that violence is appealing in films. Generally younger males find violence entertaining to watch, therefore this brings in males ages 15-30

- Drama

The sequence begins with Harry crying, this shows the characters internal struggle with his actions. From the research I discovered that drama is generally more appealing to older audiences. It should be interesting to watch how this character got into this situation, what led him to do it, how he copes with it.

Sub Genres of my Thriller

My thriller incorporates elements of social realism, Mystery and Action. As I discussed previously this does bring in a wider audience, those who watch any of this Genres may be interested to see our film as it is a hybrid of many, and incorporates something that may be appealing to them, whereas simply action or mystery, for example, wouldn't.

Setting

My film has a very British forrest setting. meaning the film may not be as appealing to foreign audiences.

Evaluation task 4 - Who would be the audience for your Thriller?

After actually making our thriller, we thought it would be important and interesting to discover what our target audience would be in the real world. This would be useful in a real environment as it would gave the production company clues as to how they would market the film, and what demographic they would aim the campaign towards. In order to do this I went to london and interviewed a varied sample of people in the street, to interview them on thrillers in general to obtain some information about what they like and are interested in.

My own initial idea of target audience is around 15-30. As well as being a social realist thriller, at the heart of the plot is a detective/investigation story. It is quite uncommon to find low budget investigation thrillers, that tell dark stories of troubled teens. Most commonly these types of films are made on a larger budget. However I believe this will pull in audiences from both those who watch investigation thrillers and social realist films which tend to be in this age range.

I interviewed 6 people: 3 females 3 males, at the age ranges 16-25, 26-39 and 40+

The questions were ;

1. How old are you?

2.What is your favourite genre of film?

4. What do you like about thrillers?

5. Do you like social realist films?

6. Do you like mystery/detective films?

7. Would you go to watch a movie about a teenager who kills another teenager, and struggles to hide this from his father who is a detective and his mother who is an alcoholic?

The responses are featured here in this video:

Here is a powerpoint analysing the responses and discussing my target audience:

Evaluation task 3 - What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation task 2 - How does your product represent particular social groups

My Thriller opening sequence features only two characters, who are very similar to each other. Initially they are both represented very similarly; as normal teenagers. When they begin to argue, one boy is shown to be dominant, showing lots of anger then unexpectedly the other boy turns violent, creating a very alternative representation to the initial one.

Initial representation - Middle Class Teenagers

At the beginning of the opening sequence the two teenagers are represented to be ‘the average teenager’. There is no indication that these teens are involved with crime, drink or drugs. But it is also made clear through the arguing that these two boys are far from perfect.

We first meet the two characters together as they are walking through a forrest. The dress code conveys to the audience that these boys are middle class and ‘normal’, wearing nice jumpers and jeans. It should be evident that from the way they behave what they are wearing and their situation that they have not been exposed to much violence in the past, they have grown up with a stable bakground and appear to be typical middle class teenagers, perhaps even nicer than the common representation of teenagers. By presenting these boys as ‘normal’ The impact of the later events are heightened and made more surprising. Subverting their initial character type of well behaved, nice boys.

Later Representation - Troubled Teenager

After the murder it is obvious to the audience that this is not your average teenager. There is clearly a lot more to him than we initially thought. Even though he was in a way defending himself. It is clear that a normal teenager would not do something of this nature. The audience should begin to speculate on what is wrong with this teen. They may suggest he has anger issues, he has lots of family troubles, he was bullied, or even the possibility that he is a psychopath.

This representation of teenagers is negative, however it does not resemble all teens in Britain, it represents an extremely small group of teens; those with personal issues, led to commit such an act. Despite this, the film also makes a statement about all teenagers. Even an average normal looking boy is capable of murder. The fact that this boy looks normal doesn't mean that, beneath the surface, he is going through something that is effecting his mental state.

Evaluation task 1 - In what ways does your media production of film use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Account of Editing

Rough cut
On the first day of editing we had to recoup some of the things we learnt at the very start of the school year when editing our pre-lim's. We started by putting our original footage into a newly created 'rush bin'. We then simply sifted through all of our footage made an assessment of clips we were likely to use and put these into the 'log bin.' After the footage was organised we then began editing. We initially made an extremely rough cut by following our storyboard and test shoot. seen as the sequence was very much all over the place, and could be edited in a variety of different ways, it was a very tough task. However we ended up with quite a long film, but at least an idea of the direction it would take. From this we could then cut, move, and delete clips to form a more realistic cut. We firstly edited all the visuals and brought sound in later, which I found difficult as the sequence looked very dull without musical accompaniment. we picked up some useful tips such as that clips should be introduced at the last possible moment and cut from at the first possible moment. This stops the film from dragging and becoming boring.

Refining
As we continued the editing process we trimmed, and cut the sequence down to 2 minutes, it appeared just like the test shoot, but filmed much more professionally. As a group we were quite pleased with the way it was looking, however when we asked for the opinion of a few of our classmates, it became evident that what happens at the end is clear: 'He kills him'. Everyone worked this out as soon as we saw the blood on Harry's face, when he was running, so about 30 seconds in. Therefore there was no suspense and from all of our research, the key convention of all Thriller films is 'suspense'. Our sequence could not lack this key element.

Change of direction
After recieving this criticism we had to seriously rethink the order of our sequence. We contemplated different ways in which we could order our sequence to sustain interest and we began to think about 
the film momento. In this film things are revealed by showing sequences backwards. we believed that this may work on our film. So we created a new project where we re-ordered the sequence backwards. We began with the fighting section. We split it up into small sections which we re-ordered backwards, this proved interesting, as each stage of the fight, shows the build up and reveals a little bit more information of how things escalated. Then we decided to remove all establishing shots and begin the sequence with the final shot of Harry crying, this long tracking movement creates suspense, and imposes questions in the viewers mind: "Why is he crying?" / "Where is he?" / "Why is he there?". We then decided to add a small chunk of the running section in before the fighting begins to suggest more questioning in the 
viewers mind. We then placed in the fighting sequence, ending on the intense closeup of Harry where he decides to confront Gabe. Once we had perfected this version of our thriller we asked our classmates what their opinion was now. We had some mixed 
responses, they were all mostly positive, saying that they now were intrigued by the film and liked how they had to work things out, however a minor few did not understand that the sequence was shown in reverse order, which we thought was a big issue. We then had to decide whether to go with our original idea or stick with the new version. In the end we decided that with a soundtrack, that reflected the reverse order, such as a heavy drum soundtrack with reversed beats, would make it more obvious to the viewer, and more understandable, therefore we chose to stick with our new idea, and keep the sequence non linear. We turned a good piece of film that lacked interest to a good piece of film that built the interest of the audience. 

Typography
Pleased with our cut we then focused on our titles. We pictured these to be big and impactful. so we experimented with different effects on the text, and in the end decided to use photoshop to add smudges and blurs to the words, which we would then cut together rapidly making the text flicker around and hopefully excite the viewer.
We began by Choosing a font, we wanted something exciting that reflected the title such as scorch marks on the letters, however we couldnt do this without downloading a font from the intenet, and as we were short for time, we chose to go for a basic font which we would then edit in photoshop to look more interesting. We chose the font 
'Orator Std'. Which is a very simple sans-serif font, that was modern and easy to edit. We exported a frame from each text section, and 
opened it in photoshop,  Using the smudge tool we were able to blur  parts of the word, to create a sharp point, which appeared menacing and a lot more exciting than the original text.
We made three different versions of this, placing the smudges in different places, which we then put back into premiere and cut between rapidly, to create flickering effect. We also experimented with size, some frames were enlarged to make the text bounce out at the viewer. To some clips we added sparks in the background, we did this by inserting a video of flying sparks behind the text, and changed the blending mode to overlay to remove the background, and dipped the opacity to about 80% making it less distracting from the titles.  It was a very long process to edit the typography however we think it paid off in the end. We had interesting text as opposed to simple boring text which would not have suited the style of the piece.

Sound

After our footage was completely perfected and refined, we had to add sound. We originally planned to use a soundtrack the whole way through, as the dialogue between Harry and Gabe was all improvised, and would not make much sense. But after listening to the dialogue in the shots we had chosen, it appeared to work very well without revealing anything about why there were there, it was mostly shouting. Therefore we experimented with this audio, by compressing it, add a lot of reverb and echo which left a brilliant almost surreal effect on the dialogue. We built from this adding a constant beating drum throughout which built in tension at exciting moments. After this we added in large reversed thuds on the moments were Gabe gets hit. After this our Thriller was pretty much completed.

Finishing touches

Very pleased with our thriller we watched it over several times, looking for imperfections or mistakes, and we noticed how we had cut shots together where Harry is running left to right, with ones here he runs right to left,. Making it look like harry has completely changed direction. We resolved this by flipping the shots, meaning it would appear he is running the opposite direction. Once we had done this we were finished, and uploaded the video to youtube.