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.
