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.