Evaluation Of Final Thriller

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

For our preliminary task, we always had a vague idea on what we wanted it to look like. We attempted a Guy Ritchie-Esque type thriller, so to progress on this, we planned on a storyboard to see what sort of camera angles we would want, what props and what type of music we wanted. These main points were the building blocks for creating our task around. From the progression to the full product, we have followed this same procedure, as we found it was very effective in finding out what we wanted to do, however what we did find out whilst doing the preliminary task is that extra planning was needed to get every aspect of the thriller perfect. So, for our final task we used many spider diagrams, A4 sheets of planning and storyboards to create every possible aspect of planning we could muster. This initial planning was extremely important in creating our thriller, as it helped us have a direct procedure to follow, and as we knew exactly what we needed to do, it helped us create it effectively and on time.
Focusing on the idea of time, we found that with our preliminary exercise, it took much longer to film than we had originally expected, and this posed problems with the natural lighting and the diagetic sounds that progressed as the day went on. We learnt from this mistake, and we set specific deadlines to be met when filming. This helped us film effectively without the annoyance of minimal natural lighting, as a lot of our film was filmed outside.


On top of this, learning how to use the equipment effectively and efficiently was key in the creating of our thriller. In our preliminary exercise, we found difficulties with the cameras and the tripods, and we could not get it as steady as we wanted as the camera followed the action. We sought advice, and although we did not get chance to alter our filming in the preliminary exercise, we used our new found knowledge on the camera composition, movement and angles to use in our final thriller. This proved extremely helpful, as it makes the film look a lot more professional. Furthermore, we kept the same cameramen and used the same members of our group in our final who had a specific role in our preliminary. This helped us create a more professional atmosphere as each member of the group new exactly what they were doing, and if anything went wrong then we didn't have to waste any time as we had experience in the matter.
Also, we learnt that filming more than necessary was a good technique to do, as software errors and originally unseen or missed mishaps in the footage was a common occurrence in our preliminary, so we filmed more than we needed in our final piece, just incase we had to delete some footage or some footage was misplaced.
In doing this, we got used to the software to edit our movie, so we were able to use advanced tools to further our skills to enable us to edit our final thriller more effectively and professionally. Even little things such as uploading the video onto youtube became easy as we had the skills to do so from doing our preliminary exercise.


In conclusion, i believe that the creation of the preliminary helped us to hone our skills and to increase our knowledge to produce a more professional and effective final thriller, and it was key to helping us excel in every aspect of our final thriller opening.




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

The development of our Thriller used many key films, we had to research many types of 

different thrillers, but the main one that we took to was Inception written by Christopher Nolan, and taking into account how outstanding this film was and how unusual it is we decided to 

develop our thriller based on this.

The first thoughts for our thriller now took place around inception. We chose the dream 

world, like inception we made the film revolve around the dream, bringing into play the psychological aspects this would have, using this convention to induce suspense and tension . But unlike inception where the outcome is often good from the dream, the dreams in

our thriller are unstoppable and sinister in the opening, making the thriller differ from inception as if we were to develop are thriller further we could head off in many different directions

such as more murders taking place in the dreams. This convention relates to inception as although they differ plot wise, a sinister psychological underlying mysteriousness about both films creates tension within the audience.

Lighting in the development of our thriller was vital as it really brought the haunting of the

murder alive, by having only the camera flash from the FBI on the dead body it gave us

the opportunity to visualise on individual parts such as the dead body and blood giving

the audience a shocking and inspiring opening.

Editing was very important in our thriller, enabling us to introduce quick snap shots 

of important things using flashbacks on things such as the knife, a clock and the killer, 

which kept the audience suspended in thought over each picture and thinking about the representation of the pictures. This is important to are thriller as it keeps the audience understanding what's going on and by using a picture of a clock and a flashback of the murderer sleeping the audience understand that its a dream, this is used in many famous films, one of the biggest selling films "Harry Potter" uses this whilst he has dreams about his enemy. 

We also edited the killing scene to bring the thriller a more gruesome slow motion picture 
so the audience could really connect to the gore of it. This is used particularly effectively in Inception before the van hit the water, time slows right down to not only hold the scene in time, but to hold the viewers minds at the same time, keeping them in suspense. In our killing scene, we used this as the scene from Inception inspired us as we wanted to created a climax of suspense during one of the most important scenes.

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

From day one technology use in our project has been a major learning curb. Most of us 

had not used and programmes such as sony vegas or iMovie before. So, as soon 

as we got started we researched these programmes, because of such great technology 

production these editing systems were very clear and easy to use. It came to an 

amazement on our behalf how easy it was to cut scenes out that were not needed etc. This made our job much easier knowing that we could just video for extra amounts of time, then go

back and take the valuable parts out. This was especially useful for the killing scene

as it took a number of times to get it correct, making it as close to reality as possible. We used iMovie 09 for our editing software for this product and noticed considerable differences from its predecessor iMovie 7 that we used four our first film. At the beginning of the course editing seemed quite a daunting process however over each product we grew more confident in using the different features available to us in the software. We learned how to alter colour used in the film and also how to cut the film to match certain areas in the soundtrack, in order for the film to reach its full potential. Following that we learned how to alter diegetic sound picked up when filming our product and how to balance that with non-diegetic sound such as voice overs and soundtrack.

Technologies are great as they come in all shapes and sizes, we used a digital camera

to take many of the quick snap shots that would be flicked through during the thriller

being able to use such a durable item made it very easy to take it around and get shots

without effort. 

This is now our 3^rd attempt at filming and producing a film this year. At the beginning of the course, none of us had ever used a digital camcorder with the idea of editing a film together as a product of the film taken. However, when the time came to film this product, we certainly had a more advanced knowledge of how to use the camera. We soon realised there are right and wrong ways to use the zoom in a camera and became aware of when it was necessary and unnecessary to use in the in-zoom camera feature for our film. When used effectively it can be a key feature in our film making, but when used ineffectively, it can make the final product look really quite amateur.

Who would be the audience for your media product and why?

Because most thrillers are aimed at the ages of 12A, 15 or 18, we have chosen the age classification of 15.  We have made this decision because we would be looking to attract the same audience of the thriller ‘Inception’.  The thriller ‘Inception’ had frequent action sequences, including weapons, violence, and killings, located in unrealistic settings, this thriller was at the high end of 12A classification. The difference from ‘Inception’ and our thriller ‘Lucidity’ was that we filmed our thriller opening in usual known places, a street. We were not purposely aiming for a specific gender; it would be watched by both. It is also expected that not all people enjoy thrillers, but it is also needed for the watcher to grasp an understanding what is happening in the scenes and the reasons the actor did the specific actions they intended. Our product holds a lot of conventions of a stereotypical Thriller as there are jumpy and climatic moments using powerful orchestral music. Therefore we feel it has a cinematic vibe and scenes that can reach their full potential in a cinema. This leads us towards targeting an audience of 15-40 year olds who are likely to go to the cinema for a thrilling adventure with their friends, family or partners. It falls into the psych/thriller genre alongside films such as Inception or Shutter Island so our audience would be people who are up for a psychological and complex trip of the mind putting the pieces of the film together, again this leads us towards the decision that our audience would be for people in the ages of 15-40 who take an interest in films that make them think and take them on an psychological adventure.

How did you attract your audience?

Firstly, to make the audience aware of our new thriller we would be showing numerous advertisements of channels: BBC1, BBC2, BBC3 and BBC4, these would be shown after 9pm as the thriller has a 15 age certificate and also to make sure the correct age group is watching them.  To address our audience we located our thriller in a normal street that everyone would be familiar with. We also aimed for people to think; ‘Why is he doing that?’ ‘What is wrong with the woman actor?” This hopefully got the audience intrigued and wanted to watch the rest of the thriller ‘Lucidity’. By using the scene at the start with an actor photographing the dead body on the floor it gave a sense of mystery and what can also commonly occur in some thrillers.

What kind of media institution would produce and distribute your product?

As our film requires a complex filming technique in order for the story to reach its full potential, we feel that an institution such as warner bro’s would be a more than suitable brand to distribute our product as it is part of ‘the big four’ in film producing and distributing. It is the institution behind action packed thrilling titles such as ‘Inception’ and the ‘Harry Potter’ sequels and as they have a large budget available they are able to create high-spec action sequences into the film to maximize the story and films potential. As it is a multi-national company it would also be able to distribute the film to all major countries around the world and as our film incorporates an action packed thriller story line, it would be a very sought after film all around the world as those types of film have a universal appeal.