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

How have i progressed since my preliminary task? from ShannonCJ

Also I feel that I have learnt more about teamwork and how it can help me make a product better than what I would've been able to make by myself. At first when we got told that we could work in groups I was worried that there would be some people who don't put in enough time into the product but my group has turned out to be brilliant for making a media product. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses in media so when one of us doesn't know what to do, someone else in our group will. We all agreed on the idea of the plot from Alex but each of us put in our opinion on how to develop it to make it a group decision. I was the main planner of what we would do in our film and how we would create it. I made the storyboard with inputs from everyone else in the group, I got the main female actress to take part in the film and I organised when we would meet up and what time. I learnt that some of my main qualities are organisation and determination. Where as the other members had other qualities that made the filming and editing of the film easier, such as how to work the software and the camera, Ellie and Alex, or how to compose relevant music to create an atmosphere in the film (Phoebe). Our friendships developed to allow us to feel comfortable offering up our ideas to the group and to take everything each of us said into consideration.
The preliminary was a quick video to shot and the idea was simple to conduct after being told what had to be included but from that to our main outcome, we have learnt that the making of a film takes a lot more time and effort in planning to make it look professional.

How does your media represent particular social groups?

How did we attract our audience?

Attract audience from ShannonCJ

What kind of media institution would distribute our media product and why?

Who would be the audience for your media product?

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

Thriller films have many common conventions and we have tried to portray some of these elements in our video so as to convey the appropriate genre of our film. We especially took influence from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho film as this is one of the most famous thriller films.

 

Bus Stop was influenced by shower scene in Psycho

We wanted to take the element of the unseen protagonist from Psycho into our film. We made sure that the antagonist of our narrative was not seen clearly and that you could only see the outline of him or aspects of his body, you never actually see his face. We found that the mystery of who the antagonist is keeps the audience interested in the film. This technique is also used in the opening scene of No Country For Old Men. The antagonist of hidden in the back of the police car until around 5 minutes into the film when we finally see his face. We filmed the antagonists movements and made him keep his hood up so that his face wasn't visible so as to make the audience feel uncomfortable for not knowing what he looks like and to show that he is dangerous.

No Country For Old Men influenced the idea that you can't see who the antagonist is clearly in the beginning.

    Black and White flashback influenced by Memento.

We also used flashbacks like in the films Memento and the Bourne Ultimatum. I especially liked this technique in the narrative, I think it keeps the audience intrigued about a certain characters story. It will make the audience understand a character more in a short period of time but will also give them leading questions about the narrative. In the film Memento, the flashbacks are major scenes in the film, making it confusing but interesting. When used properly, it can put big twists in the narrative within a short period of time. We wanted people to understand enough about the antagonist in our narrative, to know that he has been obsessed with the female victim since a young age by showing flashbacks of him giving her a rose while in school uniform. We also wanted to show the kidnap scene as we knew that would be the scene that could create the most fear in the audience and it would also explain how she ended up tied in the chair. 

Another convention that is often used in thriller films is voiceovers. We took this convention and used it in our own film. It helps to make the narrative clear to the audience but also helps to create suspense as the audience can't see who is speaking and that would make them uncomfortable.

To add to that the sub-genre of the film had to be interpreted to the audience somehow. Our film is a psychological and crime/conspiracy thriller as the antagonist has a psychological disorder and because the narrative includes a detective as the antagonist trying to save the female. The psychological element was fairly hard to put into the two minutes as the opening focuses in the situation of the female being kidnapped and the antagonist psychological state would've been revealed closer to the end of the film. So the only feature we included to show that it was also a psychological thriller was the flashback of when he gave her a rose when he was younger. The rose is first scene as a stick (which is the reality) and then quickly changes to a red rose (which is what he sees it as). His psychological disorder means that he has a altered state of reality so when someone asks negatively towards him he wouldn't understand and would continue to talk to them. The quick cuts to reality and an altered state of reality shows that he doesn't see things right and has a psycholgical problem, much like in the film the Black Swan. The main character in the Black Swan frequently sees things that aren't real and the quick editing from one reality to another shows this.


Psychological aspects influenced by The Black Swan.

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

Difficulties in using After Effects

After finishing putting on all the credits and after effects on, our final outcome was complete. In the next lesson we hosted a screening of every media groups thriller film clips, including our own. This allowed us to get feedback from a fairly large audience on our video. We asked them questions such as, how do you think we could improve?; did you like it?; and what level do you think it would achieve on the mark scheme? They gave us honest answers so that we could learn how to improve our video.

The initial response from the audience was fairly positive. Certain members of the audience explained that they like the flashback after effects. They said that the black and white effect helped them to understand what the narrative was about and that the effects resembled going back in time. They especially liked the bus stop scene where the victim is about to get kidnapped. This was good news for us seeing as initially we weren't going to use a black and white effect on the flashbacks, we wanted to use a different effect  that meant that the image would appear slightly blurred and brighter, much like the flashbacks in the Bourne Ultimatum as seen below

Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out how to apply this to our own clip on after effects but we could adjust the saturation of the clip so that it appeared black and white instead. We were considering not including any effects on the flashback clips as we thought that the black and white effects might make it too dark and therefore fairly difficult for the audience to understand what they are seeing. However we thought that without the effect, the narrative might be seen as even more confusing as the audience wouldn't be able to tell what is the past and what is the present in the clip so we played around with the effects and eventually managed to adjust the saturation so that it appeared all black and white.