Evaluation

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

Our media product “ You’re my Friend Now” has similar codes and conventions of the Horror / Thriller sub-genre. The story is about a physically disabled little girl, who on first appearance is very cute and girly, is really a sadistic and brutal murderess with deep psychological problems. Despite her physical disabilities she is very influential and super intelligent and has managed to make her cater her murder accomplice.

At the beginning of the film it shows cuddle toys giving an innocent appearance to the film , then the scene changed drastically when the teddy is being strangled with the ceiling and then in another shot the teddy is lying o n the floor being stabbed by a sharp knife.

You can see the similarities of “ You’re my Friend Now” with Orphan a 2009 American horror and thriller film directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. The two main characters in this film of horror are both children with physical disabilities, Max is a deaf-mute and Esther is actually a 33-year-old woman named Leena Klammer. She has hypopituitarism, a condition that stunted her physical growth, and has spent most of her life posing as a little girl. Leena is extremely violent and has murdered at least seven people.

When the carer committed the murders he was dressed as a clown, we used a clown because in popular culture the image of the evil clown is seen as disturbing through the use of horror elements and dark humour throughout many horror films. We also used an evil clown because some peoples irrational fear of clowns known as “coulrophobia”


Clowns are often shown as murderous psychopaths at many American haunted houses.

One of the most famous films with evil clowns is Stephen King novel It



The background and set where the murders occurred within an disused empty warehouse, the walls were all white and a very similar murder scene to the film Saw a 2004 American-Australian horror film directed by James Wan

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our thriller represents male and females to be quite the opposite to each other in comparison to stereotypical views on male and female. Our male character Jack is shown to be a very weak person as he does everything that he is told by seven year old Mary. Mary is our female character her mind is very advanced for her age and has a lot higher status to Jack, we see this when Mary orders Jack to put on a clown mask, then when he picks up a weapon she shouts at him to use a different one, then he complies.

 

Mary seams to be getting a lot of enjoyment out of watching others in pain we see this when she is laughing at the other little girl is about to be torched.









The other little girl (the victim) is represented as quite the opposite to Mary. Even though they are the similar age, the victim is portrayed to be a very innocent and scared this is shown when she is holding her teddy bear which is stereotypical of young girls.

The roles between disabled and non –disabled groups have also switched in this film, in past years disablied people in films have been portrayed with negative attitudes, for example, in Germany, during Hitler's Third Reich, there was a series of propaganda films to show how disabled people where considered inferior and useless to his society.

Feature films, such as Ich klage an (I Accuse) (1941, Wolfgang Liebeneiner), played a crucial role in justifying to the German population the concept of 'mercy killing'. This film was seen by 13.5 million.

140,000 physically and mentally disabled adults were murdered in 1939-40 at the hands of the doctors of the Third Reich. The killing of disabled children went on until 1945, with over 100,000 dying.

Our film does the complete opposite it portrays the disabled girl as the main and powerful character who was very influential and controlling of others. The other characters were very intimated by the disabled girl and obeys her ever command, she had all the power and prestige.











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



Our film is a British thriller with very little funding. There are various ways to help fund our film, one of the ways we could get the funding is from the UK film council (ukfc) this organization has access to money from the national lottery. The ukfc is soon to be shut down due to government cut backs so we may have to go to(BFI) the British film institution.


Our film is not likely to be funded by the big Hollywood studios such as paramount , 20th century fox or Warner bros. a more realistic choice for our group to get sponsored is by momentum pictures a UK independent distributor which produced the Oscar winning film The kings speech. Another sponsor is Warner independent UK also produced another low budget Oscar winning film slum dog millionaire. It would be nice to get the sponsors by one of these studios but I fink our best choice would be to go with BFC or UKFC.








4) Who would be the target audience of your media product

Our film production crew agreed that our target audience would be from the ages of 15 to 40 years old. We chose this because our audience researched showed that the people that enjoyed thriller movies the most were between these ages. The audience tended to watch movies that were 15 certificates some of the favorites that came out of our research were the matrix and orphan. We have decided on the BBFC rating of 15 as it’s not suitable for anyone under this age because there is blood and violence , the reason why we did not make this a eighteen is because it does not show nudity , strong language or detailed violence.

5. How did you attract / address your particular audience?

Because our target audience were aged between 15 – 50 years old we wanted to attract a wide range of age groups, so we began to attract the younger generation by having the opening scene in a park. Once we had their attention, we then went to grab the older peoples attention eg the adolescent age group by showing a click view of the stabbing scene where a hand is holding onto a big knife and stabbing a teddy.

To keep the older generation ege 30 + we needed to make the film clever and intelligent that’s why we included the twist at the end, portray the young disabled girl and the villain where most people would think she would be the one who was going to be murdered by the carer (eg the man wearing the clown mask).

We made the film end in a thought provoking climax to keep all the audience interested and thinking abut the film afterwards, what we really wanted was them to recommend the film to others to watch, so the young children recommended to their friends, the young adults eg teenagers recommended to their school, college, university friends and the older generations also talk about it to their friends,. So it was important that the film had them on the edge of their seats in anticipation and fear, but most importantly we wanted to to think about this thought provoking subject how a young sweet looking disabled girl has managed to influence her carer to kill for her.

Usually the audience is always on the side of the child and never the carer, the carer is usually portrayed and the “bad” person who hurts the children, we did the opposites in this film so our audience would remember this and it is different and stands out, the more the remember the more they recommend to others to watch it.



Keeping in mind that our target audience is British, we made our locations very typically British. For example, the first sequence of the film is in a local park (as seen above), with everyone relating to this as a childhood pursuit. The more the audience can identify with the film the more inclined they are to take interest in it. Therefore, our audience will feel extra weary that a child abductor is on the loose in an area that looks very similar to theirs.The actors’ clothing also creates this familiarity as the children actors are dressed just like ordinary kids. Hence when seeing that a very ordinary looking child (excluding the fact that she walks abnormally) is really a twisted child killer, this leaves our audience thinking twice about the normal children they may now pass along the street.

From our audience feedback, we were very pleased to find that the sinister storyline to make it more thrilling for the audience. There was also an agreement that the camerawork and editing were of a high quality. For example, people like the use of hand held tracking shots in the warehouse as this made the scene more realistic. They liked Final Cut Pro’s “shaking screen” effect as it added a scary feeling of something not being quite right. They also particularly liked the extreme close up of the young girl’s (Mary) eye as they thought it made her look creepy and weird.




Finally, people also stated that they would want to see how the rest of the film would play out. So, all this shows that we were successful in making an opening sequence that appealed to our target audience


6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?

We have learned about forms and conventions by watching thrillers such as seven and usual suspects. As a group we did a lot of research like several questionnaires so could find out what kind of thrillers are most popular with our target audience. Once we gathered all our research we had to analyse the data then present it on graphs.

We had to learn in detail how to operate our camera cannons xm2





The camera can zoom in and out; also the camera could focus to the actor and constantly be in focus in the whole frame. The problem we had was the microphone on the camera couldn’t not pick up the voices, so we had to re-record the voices.

In the editing sweat we learnt about a programme called final cut pro. The scene that we recorded we could cut and paste and make the sequence for the movie. We also added in titles to fade in and out during the sequence.

For our different flashed images of clowns and teddy bears, we wanted to make them look more realistic and frightening but didn’t know how to do it at first. The group asked the teacher to show us Final Cut Pro, we wanted to choose particular visual effects to distort both image and sound – effects such as “earthquake” and “spiral” to give the scary vibe we were aiming for.

When blogging I found out that with the pictures you have to insert them one at a time which we find very time consuming. Blogging is a good way to representing data as you can add videos and pictures; you can enter it any way in the world that has the internet.

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

One of the most important things we learnt in our progression from the Preliminary Exercise to the Thriller Production is to be organised. To produce a good end product you need to be organised, with the creation of a detailed Project Schedule covering each stage in the production process being essential to this. Following a schedule gave us confidence when we were on top of things and a wakeup call whenever we started to slip behind.

When we first done the camera shots we were very nervuse and not very confident as we had never done anything like this before, plus we didn’t have enough research to do a good job. When we done the target audience research we realised what movies people liked to watch and how perceive you have to be to get a thriller movie to thrill them and also keeping them in suspense.

Evaluation

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

Our thriller, Your My Friend Now , is a horror/thriller hybrid and is successful at incorporating the forms and conventions of this sub-genre. The idea of having an innocent looking child antagonist came from other such thrillers such as The Omen 1976 & 2006.

Above is a picture of Damien’s Visit to a hospital (from the 2006 remake) as he creates more tragedy for the Thorn family. The movie features a satanically possessed young boy (Damien) who has the power to kill people around him. Children are seen as innocent in our society and hence it is more alarming and shocking to the audience when they find that an angelic child on the surface is really a sinister killer on the inside. This is typical of thriller films that contain children, with The Exorcist 1973 being another case in point, this time featuring a young girl named Regan who is possessed.                   

   

        Below is a picture of Regan who is in a possessed state.

Another characteristic that antagonists often have in thrillers is that they are in some way mentally, emotionally or physically disabled, so in our thriller we chose to have our antagonist (the young girl, Mary) walk abnormally. However we developed the idea of Mary only pretending to be disabled in public but walking perfectly normal once she enters the warehouse where she is keeping her victims. This adds another twist to the disability theme, as in The Usual Suspects 1995, where Kevin Spacey’s character makes out he has a limp to disguise the fact that he is really a ruthless killer. The line up clip from the film is a great example of Kevin Spaceys limp.

Thriller storylines are usually very chilling, twisted and menacing, often with an element of death, as in Psycho 1960 where a young man, Norman Bates, is superficially leading a fairly normal life as a struggling motel owner. However, underneath this façade lurks a homicidal maniac. Keeping in line with these elements, our thriller storyline becomes chilling when the audience finds out that the disabled young girl who walks abnormally all of a sudden begins to skip chirpily, laughing and giggling at the climax of when she is about to see one of her victims being tortured and killed. The thriller becomes menacing and twisted by the use of quick flashes of scary clowns and their high pitched crazy laughs. The fact that the man puts on a clown’s mask before he tortures and kills the victim is also very twisted as it shows that the girl has a strange fascination for clowns – This is very sinister, as clowns are supposed to make you laugh, giving our thriller a further disturbing edge.

The conventional element of looming death is captured in our thriller sound track, initially through the use of menacing theme music which continually builds up in tension and during the end scene where the theme music gives way to a young child singing.

Above is an image of a teddy hanging by its neck. This creates even further suspicion in the audience’s mind, still without giving anything away – a typical thriller convention, as in Seven 1995 where we see. We also present the audience with another enigma – suddenly a disabled girl stops limping and starts skipping around all these mutilated toys and bears.

Above is a captured image in the point of view of the victim as the clown with garden shears approaches.

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?


Our thriller mainly represents female children with the exception of one older male. The first gender representation is of a typical female child who is portrayed as innocent by the way she clutches the big white teddy in her hands. She is also seen as vulnerable and sensitive by the way she rocks back and forth, crying and whimpering in a scared manner.

It is clear to the audience that she is quite powerless as she shows no sign of trying to escape from the rope binding her. She wears black which connotes death and foreshadows the fact that she is later killed in the film. She also wears a touch of pink which is the general colour most little girls wear to show their innocence and feminine side. The only non-stereotypical point about the girl is that she is of black ethnicity which is not typical of thrillers as they usually contain children who are of a white background, for example as in The Orphan 2009, The Children 2008 and Home Movie 2009.
                                           Below is the trailer for The Children 2008.

As for the young girl (Mary) who is the unsuspected killer, she is represented as the conventional child killer, as seen in The Orphan 2009 where an adopted 9 year old girl named Esther kills the people who attempt to kill her adopted family. In contrast with our film, she however turns out to be 33 year old woman who looks like a child.       

                                 Below is an image of Esther after she has just killed a nun.

Mary is shown as a social outcast by the way she stands outside the park gates, shaking them aggressively and walking away as if shunned by her playmates. This makes the audience feel a slight sympathy for her because it is also apparent that she has a disability, which is typical of twisted killers in some films covering the fact they are capable of wrong doing. Scary movie 2000 is one example of this where Doofy fakes his mental disability while killing many people until the end of the movie where his revealed escaping the city with a news reporter who gave updates on the killing taking place.


Below is a picture of Doofy acting disabled and at the end of the movie when he is escaping.

Mary also wears a pink jacket which represents her as the ordinary little girl as many girls wear pink. This could be seen as an attempt to blend in with society and in order to hide her true motives, as underneath the pink jacket, she wears black which is a cold sinister colour that portrays her as being more sinister. Despite the fact that she is a child, she is represented as powerful and in control when she stands outside the warehouse and the Asian male opens the door for her to enter. She is represented as even more controlling when she orders the Asian male around, telling what tool to use for killing her tied up victim.

 As for the Asian male in the film (Jack), he is not the stereotypical male killer we usually see in thrillers due to the fact that he is unconventionally Asian. He is by far the oldest and physically strongest person in the sequence, representing him as being superior. Jack does the killing, wearing a clown mask, portraying him as a ruthless, sadistic maniac, all fairly typical characteristics of the conventional killer like Norman bates in Psycho (1960). Jack is also represented as being subservient to Mary, as she orders him to do the killing, even choosing his weapon for him. His clothes are very casual and a little scruffy, suggesting that he is an average Joe, probably just about holding down a mundane job or on the dole. Summing him up, he is the kind of faceless person that we walk past without noticing, which adds to the twisted feel of the film.

Below is a shot of the famous behind the shower scene of Norman dressed as his mother.

3. What Kind of Media institution would distribute your media product and why?

 Our thriller fits into the Category A rating of the British Film Institute as it has British actors, was shot in Britain, and is produced by British people, with British resources. It is a British independent film and it would hence be unlikely that the distributers of our film would be one of the Hollywood majors, such as Warner Bros, Buena Vista and Twentieth Century Fox, that dominate the world scene. This is because Hollywood based companies are more inclined to distribute American films, and would only choose to distribute a British film if they know it will clearly have international appeal – films such as The Kings Speech 2010, for example. So, it is highly unlikely that Hollywood would want to distribute our film.

Taking this in mind, our low-budget film could get funding from the UK Film Council as it funded The Kings Speech 2010 and The Arbor 2010. Both are low budget, independent films yet highly successful (with the Kings Speech gaining 4 Oscars this year). The UK Film council is however due to close down because of government funding cuts.

Once successfully financed, our film could then be promoted by an independent UK distributor, such as Momentum Pictures which is also known as Alliance Films U.K, one of the leading independent motion picture distributors in the UK and Ireland. Pathe UK could also be an option as our distributor as it also has a major presence within the UK film industry, operating as a fully integrated studio. It is involved in all aspects of film-making, from production and development through to international sales and distribution. Pathé UK's productions range from Aardman's Chicken Run 2000 to Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire 2008. Pathe would be interested in distributing our film due to its reputation, built on independence, innovation and quality which our film entails. It is an independent film, produced and directed with quality and innovative with our unique idea of having actors of a black and Asian background star in a thriller, unconventional of typical thrillers. Pathe distributed Stephen Frears' The Queen 2006 which is also a British independent film like ours and its massive success in the box office and the U.S signifies that Pathe would be willing to distribute our film as well. Below is the trailer for the film The Queen 2006.

Marketing opportunities such as producing T-shirts, mugs etc. with the slogan ‘Your My Friend Now’ would also interest our potential distributor as those products would rack in extra money

Funding from the council would allow our film to be initially shown on television. Channel 4/ Film 4 would be the ideal channel to air our film as it has an ethos of developing new British talent and to be a leader of innovation in the British film industry. It would have to be shown after 9pm however due to violent content. Although the film may not be distributed world wild on Channel four, we would still get the advantage of reaching a nationwide British audience.

4. Who would be the target audience for your media project?

 During the research and planning stages of our production we decided that our target audience would be aged 15 and above. This was because our initial target audience research revealed that people who were 15 and above particularly liked horror/thrillers. Other 15 rated films such as The Exorcism of Emily Rose 2005 and The Matrix 1999 were all rated 15 and were all very successful in the box office so we thought the chances of our film being successful would also be high including the fact of it being rated 15.

It was also after looking at the BBFC rating guidelines, and seeing the criteria that would allow us to make the best possible thriller that we decided that a 15 certificate was our preferred rating, as it allowed us to use some violence such as the threat of the man going to kill the young girl with the shears. However, as stated in the BBFC guidelines, we did not dwell on the infliction of pain or injury by not showing the actual image of him harming her.

The guidelines also state that easily accessible weapons should not be glorified and so we did not glorify the garden shears used in the film. It also says that aggressive language and discrimination of any kind is unacceptable to which we made sure not to include our film. We did not have any kind of nudity or sex scenes either making our film suitable for our chesen target audience of 15 and above.

5. How did you attract / address your particular audience?

From our initial target audience research interviews, it was clear that people who were 15+ were attracted to the tension / enigmatic elements in thrillers as it made them want to watch more of the film even though they were scared. We therefore created tension and enigma throughout the clip, firstly by the eerie theme music to connote a sinister ambience. The heightened sound of the young girl crying right at the beginning of the film also created tension and mystery, as the audience immediately begin to wonder why she is tied up and crying, making them feel sympathy towards her. They also want to know why the girl is in an empty room, surrounded by candles in some kind of ritual.

We decided to feature the sound of Mary’s footsteps over the shot of the young girl crying in order to create even more tension in the audience as they wonder where these heavy footsteps are coming form, again drawing them into the film. Another tension building strategy we used was having three news reports as voiceovers talking about missing children, with the audience suddenly realising that the seemingly sweet little girl on screen, so innocent and pitiful with her pink jacket, pigtails and disabling limp is not disabled and actually the cause of these missing children reports.

Keeping in mind that our target audience is British, we made our locations very typically British. For example, the first sequence of the film is in a local park (as seen on the right), with everyone relating to this as a childhood pursuit. The more the audience can identify with the film the more inclined they are to take interest in it. Therefore, our audience will feel extra weary that a child abductor is on the loose in an area that looks very similar to theirs.The actors’ clothing also creates this familiarity as the children actors are dressed just like ordinary kids. Hence when seeing that a very ordinary looking child (excluding the fact that she walks abnormally) is really a twisted child killer, this leaves our audience thinking twice about the normal children they may now pass along the street. This effect is similar to the movie Chucky 1998 where an innocent looking doll turns into a talking, killing machine making the audience look back twice at their dolls to see any signs of human movement.   

                               

                                Below an image of chucky displaying signs of human life.

From our audience feedback, we were very pleased to find that the sinister storyline we wanted to put across was perfectly understood, as a preferred reading. There was also an agreement that the camerawork and editing were of a high quality. For example, people like the use of hand held tracking shots in the warehouse as this made the scene more realistic. They liked Final Cut Pro’s “shaking screen” effect as it added a scary feeling of something not being quite right. They also particularly liked the extreme close up of the young girl’s (Mary) eye as they thought it made her look creepy and weird.

Finally, people also stated that they would want to see how the rest of the film would play out. So, all this shows that we were successful in making an opening sequence that appealed to our target audience

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing your product?

The use of search engines was very regular at our research stage. We mainly used the Google search engine which we learnt gave us links to other websites that contain your chosen word or phrase of search. It gave us great links to official web sites like the BBFC website and allowed us to gather a variety of valuable information and images that we could use for our research and blog. We did however learn to be very cautious with the information we chose to take from certain websites as there are ones that were bias and not particularly reliable. This issue arose for me, when getting dates for when certain movies were released. Some sites would say one date and another site would say a different date.

The next thing we learnt about technologies came in the very early stages of using the camera. We did not realise that, while shooting on location, the camera’s volume level for the on-board microphone had been turned off, so when it came to editing we found there was no sound recorded. We had to reshoot everything, only this time we made sure that the volume levels on the camera was set correctly, playing back each scene to make sure picture and sound had been captured correctly. 

Also when shooting our films in the chosen locations we found that the camera did not pick up the sound sufficiently. For example, if the person was not standing near enough to the camera they would sound very “distant” and unclear on tape. We could not do much about this as we did not have an external microphone and boom to get nearer to the action. We learnt how to correct this slightly by using the audio mixer in Final Cut Pro. When doing the radio voiceovers, we also learnt that it would be easier to use the camera’s mic to record people doing the news, as we could have them close to camera. Here we learnt how to separate picture and sound at the editing stage, so that we could delete the picture.

For our flashed images of clowns and teddy bears, we wanted to make them look more scary and weird but didn’t know how to do it at first. But after asking our teacher, we learnt that using Final Cut Pro, we could choose particular visual effects to distort both image and sound – effects such as “earthquake” and “spiral” to give the scary vibe we were aiming for.

When trying to insert images from our USB to Final Cut Pro on the timeline, we found that once we had inserted the image and then taken the USB out of the computer, the images would not show on screen, staying offline. We did not understand what this meant but after asking our teacher we learnt that in order to put images onto our timeline we had to first copy and paste the images into our own personal file on the computer and then import the image into Final Cut Pro from our file.

Below is an example how the screen would look when we took out our USB and the file went offline.

Finally regarding editing, early on in the process we discovered that when playing back our scenes on the timeline, beeping sounds would occur. We soon realised that the timeline needed rendering. To find out how to render, click here.

Blogging from the beginning of this project was very hard for us to get our head around as many problems did occur. For example, when adding pictures and graphs to our posts we found that they would not appear on the wall just by copying and pasting the images onto to the post. We soon realised that we had to copy the images onto the application Microsoft paint (The image on the right), and save them as image files such as a BMP file or JPG file. The next step was to then insert the image onto our post by uploading it using the insert image icon. We found this quite tedious.


7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Through frequently using the blog, we discovered a variety of ways in which we could use it to make our work look more user friendly. For instance we learnt how to create hyperlinks to other websites by highlighting a chosen word and then clicking the link icon which allowed us to type in the website that we wanted the word to be linked to. We learnt how to upload videos from YouTube onto our posts by simply clicking the insert video icon which allowed us to type in the name of video we wanted. The videos allowed viewers of our blog to not only read our work but watch and listen as well giving an overall good internet experience. Finally a beneficial factor I learnt when using the blog was that I could start a post and leave it in a draft state until I was completely happy with uploading it to our actual wall. I found this gave less hassle rather than uploading an unfinished post and then having to go back and press edit post each time I wanted to change it or add something to it. It also created less confusion for other members of my group.

Planning the preliminary exercise was enjoyable, as we learnt quickly that we could work well together as a team if we took on board everyone’s ideas and tried to incorporate or build on them within the final idea. However when planning how the different shots would flow together in continuity, we found this quite challenging. We overcame this by carefully storyboarding our ideas and doing test runs with various camera positions / angles / movements.

The preliminary exercise also showed us how difficult it would be to create the actual thriller as it took a lot of time and patience. We therefore knew that for the actual thriller, we would have to be very organised, practical and expedient in order to shoot the film in the time given. While doing the preliminary task we also found creating different shots was difficult due to our lack of experience but after trying to achieve a range of different shots, for example point of view, shot-reverse shots and pull focus shots, we slowly learned our way around the camera controls, finding that we could put all this learning with the camera into our actual thriller, especially the shot-reverse shot which was the most difficult for us to achieve.

The main problem we came across when doing the preliminary exercise was editing what we had shot, as we were completely foreign to using Final Cut Pro. We simply just had to learn everything from scratch, from capturing the rushes, to using the timeline and saving our work in the right file. (Aside right is a Final Cut Pro screen shot. showing which camera shot is being highlighted on the timeline).After continuous practice using Final Cut Pro, we managed to edit efficiently. I, especially, became fond of pressing Command Z to undo any mistakes made! The blade tool also came into use a lot of the time as we discovered that instead deleting a whole shot on the timeline, you could use this tool to just cut out the section you don’t want, making the whole process of editing more efficient.

Creating a script for the preliminary exercise was also quite straightforward. However, when it came to scriptwriting the thriller, it was really challenging as a lot more thought and energy was required for a longer sequence with a title and credits. If I had learnt about this earlier, I would have given myself a lot more time to create the script as I realised that a two minute script needs to be meticulous, covering every shot required as well as the sound involved and the time it needs to be on screen.

Overall, our thriller production went far more smoothly than our preliminary task ask as we had all gained so much experience regarding the progression of each stage. We planned the shots we were going to have in the thriller very carefully making sure there was continuity editing at all times making the editing process easier and we made sure that we stuck to our schedule and worked efficiently to stick to our deadlines.

Evaluation

  

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

‘You’re my Friend Now’ follows the codes and conventions of the Horror / Thriller sub-genre. For example, our storyline follows the common theme of sadistic kidnapping. This occurs, for example, in Silence of the Lambs (1991), Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) (seen here) which both revolve around victims being held captive and tortured to death. However in our production the victims are young children. As in other films, our killings take place in an isolated location – an abandoned warehouse.

You can see the similarity between the locations used in Hostel and our film here.  Another convention of the thriller genre we have incorporated is the use of keeping the audience in mystery / suspense by not revealing too much about what is about to happen. For example, from the beginning of the film we see a young girl with a limp which makes her appear harmless and weak. However the quick flashes of ambiguous items act as multiple enigma codes, adding disruption to the equilibrium by making the girl seem sinister. This gives our exposition a unique twist. Another enigma coding is that we see our victim surrounded by candles inside the warehouse (as above), connoting some kind of demonic ritual is in progress (as in Hostel, left).

Our thriller does not use a typical antagonist and protagonist, as they are very similar characters on the surface, only with glaring differences hidden deep within. The antagonist (the ‘disabled’ girl, Mary) and the man (her subservient carer) conform to typical horror thriller conventions in that they are both psychopaths, showing no remorse towards taking lives. The main antagonist, however, is very much the same to look at as her victim in the clip as she is around the same age, which is an atypical characteristic.

As in other horror thrillers, such as Valentine (2001), the killer holds a grudge against others.  In our case,  this is because Mary is seen to be without any friends of her own age. Using a false disability has not helped, other than to enable her to carry out her crimes without being seen as a suspect, similar to Kevin Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects (1995).   

In our clip, Mary is also seen shown wearing a bright pink coat and with her hair in pig tails, connotating that she is just an ordinary little ‘sugar and spice’ kind of girl, adding to the shock value when it is revealed that she is actually a mentally disturbed killer. Hitchcock used this technique to good effect with the character of Norman Bates, in Psycho (1960).  As Mary is physically weak, she uses a subservient young man to obey her orders and carry out the killing. This male character follows the conventions of a horror thriller by wearing mask as he is about to kill the girl, techniques commonly used, for example in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974 & 2003) and Halloween (1978) 

Our use of camera shots and angles also follows horror thriller conventions. For example, we use a canted angle to add disarray and tension to the shot of Mary walking down the road - a technique used in Batman (1966) and The Blair Witch Project (1999). 
For the POV shot of the two killers walking through the warehouse, we speeded up the action to connote the feeling that the killers were somekind of animals closing in on their prey, as in An American Werewolf in London (1981).

We also used a variety of weapons including knives, hammers and pliers which were all covered in blood connoting that the killers had already tortured people, a convention used in Saw (2004). Regarding mise-en-scene, we decided to shoot in an abandoned warehouse, as it connoted lifelessness and despair with its cracked walls and dirty floors – a similar setting to the dungeon-like areas use in Hostel (2005).



2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Although the girl killer, Mary, is presented stereotypically, with her girly pink coat and charming pigtails, her personality is completely different. She is shown not to be the joyful, innocent little girl that her appearance suggests. Instead she is a dominant, crazy psychopath, shown through how stern and confident she is when ordering around the other, much older, male killer. Mary is also represented as being disabled through her limp in the beginning, which we later find out is actually a trick to convince others that she is weak and vulnerable, similar to Kevin Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects (1995). But disability is also conventionally associated with strangeness and evil in films, such as in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939 & 1996) and 300 (2006). Mary's portrayed as lower middle class through her fashionable clothes and being well groomed, while the male killer is portrayed as middle to lower class through his  hoodie which is seen as a symbol of deviance among the youth culture and has become an image that strikes fear into many people.  

The little girl victim on the other hand is represented in a stereotypical way, as vulnerable and mentally distressed, emphasizing that she is just a weak young girl. Regarding masculinity, the male killer is shown to be strangely subservient, happily adding to the little girl’s suffering by wearing a clown’s mask, connoting that he is doubly evil, as in It (1990). We also attempted to represent modern London through the use of both black and Asian actors as this is a way of showing how London is racially diverse and shares many cultures. We also managed to avoid racial stereotypes by representing both good and evil by black actors.

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

Our thriller would most likely be funded as an independent British film, for example by UK Film Council / BFI who encourage the development of film in the UK and produce film funding through the national lottery.  The UK Film Council / BFI would fund us as our film has a very British feel to it, using British characters and locations. 

The UK Film Council has helped many British film companies to produce and distribute very successful films; such as This is England (2006) and even the Oscar winning The Kings Speech (2010). 

However the UK Film Council is due to close down in April due to government cuts, though they are handing all of their operations to the BFI. A company such as Warner Independent may also distribute our film as they have also produced UK based low budget films that have become an international success, such as Slumdog Millionaire (2008).

However I believe that our thriller would go straight to DVD as it would not get enough funding for a cinema release and even if it did it could not compete with the high budgets of American films, which dominate the film market. I believe that our film would get a BBFC rating of 15, but I believe that our film could be shown on TV, for example  Film 4 as they show many UK independent films such as Kidulthood (2006). Because of its violence our film could not be shown before the watershed of 9pm.

UK independent films often have trouble getting distribution deals, as they don’t bring in much profit compared to the major Hollywood films. So the major distributers don’t see UK independent films as good investments. However our film would stand out from other UK films as its unique in that it portrays a young black girl as the main villain, and it also has all the thriller conventions that would appeal to the audience such as mystery. There would also be a lot of marketing opportunities for our film, we could have TV interviews with the stars of the film, posters and even T-shirts with the title of the films printed on them and even quote’s from the film. This would entice distributers, as they would receive a share of any merchandise from our film.
 
4). Who would be the audience for your media product?

As indicated by our initial research, our target audience age range is mainly 15-40.

Initial research showed that our target audience mainly watched thrillers with a BBFC rating of 15, with their favourites being such films as Orphan (2009), the Butterfly Effect (2004-2009) and The Matrix (1999).
 Obviously, our film is similar to these thrillers, so their audiences may also be attracted to our film.

Our film would particularly appeal to the Black and Asian communities, as the main characters have these ethnic backgrounds. However it would also appeal to wider audiences as it is based in and around London and uses British characters. As there are no foreign locations or actors, a foreign audience would not be interested in a film like ours, which is essentially British.

Our target audience also indicated that their preferred sub-genre was horror thrillers, so these are the fans we will be appealing to most. .

We also discovered that our target audience did not like storylines that were almost always similar but produced in a different way. In order to overcome this, we came up with an original idea, based around our main villain being a serial killing, young, black girl.

5). How did you attract/address your particular audience?

Our research revealed that most of our target audience enjoy mystery in thrillers, as they believe it adds tension. We therefore incorporated a lot of mystery, such as mutilated toys, leading up to the ambiguity of who the killer really was. We also found that horror was the most popular genre in our target audience, so we made sure to incorporate a lot of horror techniques.  For example, we used plenty of enigma codes such as the blood stained sheet with legs sticking out from underneath it.  For the sound track, we used typically eerie music, with news reports of a missing child – all helping to disrupt the equilibrium and key the audience into the nature of the film. 

Something, which we found that our target audience did not like, was when the story got to confusing and complicated with a hard to follow story or too many characters. So we decided to make the story as straightforward as we could while still keeping it tense and mysterious. We also used quick flashes of objects that linked to what was happening in the scene, be it a metaphor for something such as when we see the bear being stabbed to symbolize the forthcoming doom of the girl, or the cutaways to items already in the shot that lets us focus on them with better detail.

We also scripted everything to achieve a BBFC classification of 15, as this would be the lower range of our target audience. For example, although our film clearly contains violence, it is not as graphic as the girl is never mutilated on screen, with only the implication of this. Also there is no nudity or strong language.

From our research evidence it showed that our Audience loved horror thrillers and that they also enjoyed mystery and suspense in their movie. They also liked movies such as A Clockwork Orange (1971) and V for Vendetta (2006), which are both movies with a very dark overtone so we decided to incorporate this into ‘You’re my friend now’ with the issue of child murder. We also attempted to attract the audience through making them feel sympathetic towards the girl who is going to be killed as seen in the shot where you are put into the victim’s point of view. You can see the killer snipping his shears, and because the shot is looking down at the little girl it helps the audience realize just how small and hopeless she is and how overwhelming and freighting the killer is.

Another thing we found that our audience liked was the feeling of excitement and a thrill so we addressed this by exaggerating the process of when the killer is going in for the kill which was done by snipping the shears very loudly and also having even more rapid  shots of items covered in more blood, indicating that things are about to get gory. We also address the audience's need for a thrill in the POV shot of the killer as he gets closer to the girl going in for the kill, like the killer shark in Jaws (1975).

The reception we got back from our audience feedback was good. They thought the shots flowed together, meaning that our editing was good and most of them also believed that the music was conventional of a horror, helping to further make the audience believe that the film is a horror. All of our respondents believed that are costumes, locations and props was of a good standard, especially the fake blood which they thought looked lifelike and helped to enforce the convention of a horror thriller movie.

To start the project we first conducted research into the genre of thriller and our target audience where I learnt how to use websites such as Google, Wikipedia and IMDB in order to find detailed data on specific films that related to our project. I also learnt how to use Microsoft Excel so that I could analyse data that I had collected and put it into easy to understand graphs.

6). What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing your product?

At the start of filming we encountered many problems when filming, such as having problems getting the Cannon XM2 camera shots in focus using the focus ring and also getting the correct lighting for the different setups. However we learnt to overcome these issues by practicing shots and analysing them. In this way we were able to pull focus smoothly, as can be seen in the first shot of the girl victim tied up where the camera starts off with a blurred shot that slowly comes into focus. We also tried out different lighting techniques, such as how to use natural lighting to good effect. We could see how much better this softer light could be than three point lighting. For example in the scenes in the warehouse we used natural light to give a flatter, more gloomy and more sinister feel.  We also learnt how to use the tripod correctly in order to get a stable shot, as can be seen in the shots of the girl killer walking through the park.This contrasted to some very effective hand held shots, such as the fast paced track through the warehouse, which was quite shaky, giving it more of a documentary feel  . We were also able to use our knowledge of the tripod to produce canted angles and very low angles to good effect, for example the canted angle of Mary walking down the road gives everything a very distorted feel.

During filming we also encountered a major fault with our camera, as when we played back our footage there was no sound. We had to reshoot.  What we learned here is to check your equipment before going on location!

We also learnt how to use Final Cut Pro. In particular we learnt how to: -Capture footage from our tapes into different folders.

     -Add footage to the timeline.

     -Use different transitions (such as cuts and dissolves
  -Add a coloured title and coloured captions.

  
We also learnt how to use colours efficiently by using red text on a black background as we knew that it would make the reds stand out and also connotes blood and the darkness. Red was also the best colour to use against black as we had tried many different colours such as brown, blue and yellow however these colours it did not give us the menacing effect we were looking for and it looked dull.

As well as learning how to edit and use the camera correctly we also learnt how to blog our work and transfer videos onto our blog. At first we had trouble uploading our work onto our blog as it came out differently to how we had made it, with text in different sizes and places. However as we continued to use blogger our experience grew and we learnt how to successfully transfer our work into blogger without any problems.

 7). Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Research & Planning

When we started to come up with ideas for our Preliminary Exercise we were a little unsure of ourselves, as we did not know if our ideas would work or not on film.  However, as we progressed through the shooting and editing of our Preliminary Exercise, our understanding of things improved. When it came to the same stage of the Thriller production, we realised that we had become more confident in our ability to pitch ideas and give feedback as a group. We also learnt that we had to research things more thoroughly for our thriller. Such as having to look at genre, where we researched the forms and conventions of a thriller horror as well as conducting a similar text analysis where we analysed all aspects of the first two minutes of a thriller , looking at the use of picture as well as sound, lighting, mise-en-scene and all the connotations. We also learnt from our preliminary task that we have to know our target audience in great detail, their likes and dislikes in order to tailor our film accordingly. We carried out questionnaires and interviews in order to collect quantitative and qualitative data so that we could analyse the information in more detail.

In order to get a more professional looking film compared to our preliminary task, we also had to look at institutional context and professional practice. We also learnt how to conduct our roles within the group according to how they act them out in the film making process. The producer took a leadership role, while the director held the position of head of the film itself while the cameraman made sure the shots looked good and captured what the director had envisioned. We also learnt about BBFC guidelines and what we can and can’t include in our films depending on our age certificate, for example we could not have excessive gore or nudity in our film if it was only a 15 certificate.
 

Construction

We also had problems using the camera and being able to remember how to set it up or even turn it on. But we gradually developed our camera skills and we were able to set up the Cannon XM2 in very little time. Our use of camera shots also improved, as in our preliminary task we only had a limited skill to produce certain shots, However, during the filming of our film we gained experience and had learnt to incorporate many more different types of shots, such as canted angles, close-up shots, mid-shots and long-shots.

Our editing has also come a long way from the preliminary task. At the beginning we were unsure of what the different functions did in FinalCut Pro and when we tried putting all our shots together they did not flow and we lacked continuity. However as time progressed we became familiar with Final Cut Pro being able to do a multitude of task on final cut pro such as creating captions and adding special effects to our video. We also learnt to improve our camera angle techniques using low angles especially which we also had trouble with in our preliminary task, not being able to get the correct high and low angles for the effect we wanted.

We also improved our use of sound, incorporating incidental music, non-diegetic and ambient sound into our film, something, which we had not done in our preliminary task. We learnt the importance of getting the right sounds as we went through many different songs and sounds in order to bring te fullest potential out of our scenes.

We also improved our mise-en-Scene from our preliminary task, which was set in just an ordinary classroom with just one lamp for lighting. In are final video we used an entire warehouse, a park and a street just for settings and we also had a variety of props including a clown mask, garden tools, children toys and fake blood all of which helped to add to the effects of the film and connote that the film is a thriller horror.

From our preliminary task till now we have also learnt how to use the website blogger and our blogging skills have improved. When we started to first blog our work we were unsure of how to incorporate pictures and videos into our text. However, over time we learnt the necessary skills in order to add videos and pictures as well as changing the background to make it more horror like and also being able to add power points into our blog.