Evaluation

Question 1


CONVENTIONS USED.

  


One of the ways that we used the conventions of real media products was when we did our credits. The example that we have used are in the credits in the film "Inception". The credits from that and the credits from ours reflect the subject of our piece and of the film Inception. They are both in black and white, and they both show confusion as we don't want the audience to really know what is going on at that stage in the film. We wanted our credits to not give away anything, which is the same with the Inception credits.

 

Another way that we used conventions is that we showed suspense, which is common in thriller films. In the scene in our thriller we have our main character walking along a long straight road. It is not clear as to why she is doing this, which creates mystery for the viewers. We used a scene from "The Da Vinci Code" as an example. There is a scene where an old man is in the middle of a art gallery naked and dead, and hes been spread out. The viewer has no idea why he has or the relevance, but as you watch the film it all becomes clear. We did the same for our thriller.

 

CONVENTIONS DEVELOPED.


We also developed the usual conventions by having a female, young protagonist. Our example of this being done in another film is the film "Black Swan" In the film she is a young female. This is not common in horror films, normally they are middle aged men. We didn't want to use the normal horror convention for this and decided to make our different from all the others. It also meant that we had the target audience that we wanted.

Another thriller convention that we challenged was the fast that we used cross cuts between flash backs and flash forwards. Normally in a thriller film the cross cuts go between two plot lines.We decided not to do this. An example of this in another film is "Inception". Our thriller film goes in between the past and the present. From the screen shots you can see the present (when she is walking along the street) and the past (when she is trapped in the cellar) In the film Inception you see the past and the present. The two shots show this. We thought that it would be a good twist for our thriller and would be more exciting for the people watching our film.













CONVENTIONS CHALLENGED.

We challenged the normal thriller genre by adding in a twist of thriller to our piece. In the screenshot of our film you can see that our protagonist is trapped and isolated, which is also something that happens to the girl in the film "The Ring". We decided that by twisting in a mix of horror we would be able to grip our audience more and also get them to pay attention. Because our opening two minutes don't give away much, we thought that by getting their attention would be vital if we wanted them to want to watch more.

 




Another way that we challenged the typical thriller conventions is by having our protagonist that had a physical injury. Normally if the protagonist has an injury its mentally, but we have challenged this. Our example is from the film "Se7en". We decided to use this because he a very able bodied man, and is a strong character. Our main character has a limp, and you don't find out in the opening how she has got it or why she has the plaster on her arm. This also creates mystery as the audience will want to know how and why she has those injury's.

Question 2.

Caroline Anderson - Question 2 on Prezi

Question 3.


 http://nfgsnorthstar-noone.wikispaces.com/


Question 4.

• Our ideal audience member would be a 20-25 year old female. She is middle class, and lives in a flat with a couple of other housemates, all female. She is currently doing an apprenticeship  at a law firm, which she takes seriously. The course is 2 years long, and she is in her final few months. She feels the pressure to impress her boss because at the end of her course, only 3 people will be hired out of the 20 people she is currently working alongside. She enjoys going to the cinema to see films, but also enjoys buying them on DVD when the are released.

• She goes to the cinema at least once a week, sometimes with her flatmates, but sometimes alone. She enjoys films that play with your mind, and films that leave you wanting to see more. One of the last films that she saw and really enjoyed was the Da Vinci Code. 

 

• She studied Religion at university, and also enjoys films with a religious theme. 

• She enjoys coming home of an evening, sitting down, having a glass of red wine and watching a film on DVD. Most of her housemates go out to the bars and pubs, which she doesn't mind as it gives her a chance for some peace and quiet and to enjoy her film in peace.

• She likes watching T.V programmes like Whitechapel, as she feels that they play with your mind and you have to pay attention to little details to be able to make your own choices about the storyline.

• Although she currently lives with her flatmates, she hopes to find a place of her own soon, so that she will have more space. She doesn't like living in a mess, and does struggle to live with so many people.

Question 5

Here is our media piece that is on youtube. Tags have been added in to explain the different costumes, lighting, camera angls and general Mise En Scene that we used.




Question 6

This is a picture of me using the camera to film a scene. I had to learn how to use the camera's because for our preliminary task i didn't get to film as i was starring in it meaning that i had no experience with how to use the camera's. I learnt how to film with the camera's and also how to take pictures. Also by using the tri-pod i learnt how to make sure that the camera was steady and that it didn't jog. It made it easier to film our scenes.

This is a picture of a scene that we filmed. It was a close up shot of the phone ringing. I learnt how to do close ups on the camera, which worked well for the effect that we wanted. It looked very dramatic which is what we wanted.

This is a picture of when i was creating my Prezi for my evaluation. I learnt how to use prezi by looking at youtube video's to help me and also by listening to other people in my group about how they learnt how to use it.

I learnt how to use Final Cut Express by playing about with the Macs. I slowly started to pick up how to to different things and how to make different effects on our media piece. At first i wasn't comfortable using the macs as i didn't understand fully what i had to do or how to use them, however after a few weeks of using them i started to pick up different things, like how to add in music, how to use cross fades, how to lighten or darken the scenes, and a lot of other things. In our preliminary task we rushed through it meaning that we didn't experience how to properly use final cut express. After using it for our real thing i now feel comfortable on how to use the Mac's and how to use Final Cut Express.

We decided that for our media piece we were going to use the Mac laptop. We did this so that it would enable us to use it whenever we wanted and also meant that we could take it with us when we filmed so that we could transfer our footage onto it straight away and see what it would look like. By doing this we thought that it would be easier to see what looked good and what didn't and would mean we would know if we had to re-film or not if it didn't look how we wanted.

This is a picture of Final Cut Express, the piece of software that we used to create our opening thriller. it shows the different clips that we used, how we put them in place and the use of the cross fades. It also shows the title's to our film, where we used the broken television effect with the credits going on top.

Question 7

this is our preliminary task, that has been annotated. We annotated it to show all of the things that we did and how we felt we improved on them through out the making of our actual piece. this includes things like how we didn't use a tri-pod, making the camera shaky, and also the fact that we didn't use good camera angles.