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

In our thriller we have incorporated generic conventions which are used to create suspense and build tension. In the first scene it shows the protagonist who is a normal modern day teenager, with all the regular conventional aspects waiting at a bus stop, which then later on in the opening is abducted and replaced with a clone. Our thriller opening can closely relate to the film ‘Taken’ which is also uses a 16-year old as the main character who gets kidnapped and then used for prostitution.

Our thriller opening begins with the protagonist traveling by bus on her own making her way to Broadway as she walks off the bus and down a shortcut in a alley way which is quiet, dark and creepy, she is suffocated by the antagonist who is the kidnapper hidden at the other end of the alley way fully hooded and covered to build suspense and make audience wonder who it may be and why this may be happening. 

Conventions of a thriller include action, suspense, mystery, violence, danger, hero/villain, and victim. Our thriller applies these conventions as the innocent; teenager making her way to her friend’s house is abducted by the unknown antagonist who slyly waits knowing she will be arriving down the alley way at that specific time. Danger is shown in the opening as the protagonist is unexpectedly kidnapped and re-placed my a clone wearing dark sunglasses which creates tension for the audience  and makes them wonder what happened and what is going to happen next. 

As the teenager walks down the alleys way it creates irony for the audience as she seems very vulnerable, walking alone in such a quiet, dark and shadowy place. This all suggests danger and builds suspense which a thriller should do. 

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The type of social group that we have chosen to represent in our thriller film is young teenage college Students. We choose this particular social group as the main character in our opening sequence is around that age and social group.  The characters represent the main target audience that we have aimed our film at. We felt that by representing the social group as main characters in our film it would appeal to the audience as they would be able to relate to them allot more.  

We have chosen to use female characters in the opening of our film. Because of this, this may make our film appeal to more of a female audience. We have chosen to represent our character as what we think is a stereotypical view. Our character is seen a a normal teenager girl.  

Even though the main social group is clearly represented in the opening scene through the main character, Amanda. There is also a mystery character within the opening film however the character does not definitely represent  any particular social group. They are more of a mystery character

 The clothing Amanda is wearing conforms to what normal people of her age and social group would normally wear. We felt that the would also help to reach out to the audience as it would be something else that they could relate to. The fact that the characters are wearing clothes associated with there social group makes the opening more believable.


During our film we have chosen to represent different social classes. We see Amanda as a middle class college student. More people can relate to this class status. 


The Opening of our film displays a variety of races. This is so that our film does not fit into any race stereotype. We wanted to display diversity of cultures in our opening. 

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Our film is not the type of film to be distributed by a major Hollywood studio such as universal, the reason being because our film is a low budget film, because of this It would be distributed by an independent cinema. Our film would be under limited release and is aimed to be a film that  the majority of people will people hear about from word of mouth.   It is easy to see that our film is a low budget film because of the quality of the shots and the general quality of the whole film. It is also possible to tell because of the setting in which our film takes place.  Our film tackles the issue of kidnapping which is a  relevant issue in society, because of this our film could also be seen as raising awareness.   Some of the independent studios that our film could be released by include Film4 productions. This would be a good institution to release our movie as they distribute a number of different independent films every year. Also it is a well known institution therefore increasing the number of people that may view our film. Other ways in which we could promote clips of or film is through the internet, we could use the internet by taking advantage of the many video sharing sites such as you tube. This would be an ideal way to deliver audiences small clips of our film. This would help to create an audience base around our film. As mentioned above it may also help to increase the number of people that can deliver news about the film to others.  (word of mouth). Popular social networking sites such as Facebook would also be an ideal way to publish our movie to a wider audience.  

    

Reservoir dogs, Little miss sunshine and juno are all examples of low budget independent films that are successful. 

  

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

As our Media product is a thriller genre film we decided our target audience would most likely be young people around the age of 15 - 25 year olds. However research shows that more males would be interested in this type of film then females. 

We also made 2 surveys to support our findings which showed most people agreed that people around the age of 15 - 25 would be the most likely to watch a thriller movie however a large percentage also thought any age would be likely to watch a thriller. We also took a survey which suggested  that males would be more likely to watch a thriller then females and that the majority of people asked believed that people between the ages 15 - 25 would be more likely then other ages to watch a thriller based movie.

Survey results:


Which age group would be most likely to watch a thriller genre movie:

Which gender would be most likely to watch a thriller genre movie:

We also searched for a movie similar to ours to get a clear idea of our target audience. We found that a film was similar to ours was ‘Taken’ which is also a thriller movie about a kidnapping. After research we Found two sites that suggested 'Taken' also had a target audience of people around the ages of 15 and over. 


http://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/taken

http://business.pearlanddean.com

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

We have addressed our audience by giving very little information and detail in the opening as possible so it grasps their attention and draws them to continue watching the whole thriller. In the opening, we didn’t include any dialogue to give the audience very little insight into the film. The feel of crime, mystery and suspense in the opening attracts wide group of people especially from the age of 17-25 because a young audience enjoys the build of tension as they are always curious to know what will happen next. The use of different shots, especially close up shots allow the audience to see deep into the characters reactions at certain points in the opening such as when the protagonist is being suffocated and dragged away in the alley way it draws the attention of the audience and keeps them enticed in the thriller.

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

We have learnt many skills and techniques from creating our media product, we begun to gain more knowledge into the video and sound software which we hadn’t used before. It has definitely made us realise the challenge in making a media product of very high quality. You also learn to appreciate the effort made in films, because you know how much editing and manipulation is involved and how time consuming it is, especially when you have a certain time deadline it can all become very overwhelming. 

 We found that the strengths of using camera equipment was that it was fairly simple because the functions on the camera were easy to follow and understand which made it easy to use and also the tripod was quite simple to setup and place the camera on.  Both the camera and tripod was convenient to use and carry as the camera was a small portable size and the tripod could be fold to make it smaller.     

        

The weaknesses we found whilst using the camera equipment was the difficulty in getting the camera onto the tripod, so it was positioned straight and the video was taken in an upright position because of this a couple shots had to be re-done as the camera looked like it had been tilted slightly. 

The equipment which we used helped us a lot during the filming of our thriller as it produced a quality steady shot and also helped us operate the camera as we wished.

         

Final cut pro, provided various features and options for the editing of the thriller an example of this was the cutting tool to take off certain parts of a shot which we didn’t need, also the captions and credits function, which helped to complete the thriller opening to a good standard.

We used garage band to create the music for our thriller, we then imported the sounds into Final cut pro, which was simply done by rendering the sounds, changing it to mp3 and then opening it into final cut Pro. Garage band was a very useful software which was quite easy and simple to use.

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

Looking back at our preliminary task where we created a short part of a movie we learnt that you can improve the final product by using editing techniques such as text editing for credits and transition etc. We also learnt filming techniques such as ‘over the shoulder shots‘ which are used in dialogue to show the characters expressions etc. we also used a ‘shot reverse’ technique which is a reverse from a shot of one character which then switches to another to show a pair in conversation the pace of the reverse shot can be used to manipulate the emotion weather it is a heated argument or a romantic or subtle conversation. another  another shot we learnt about was the match on action shot which is used to introduce the scene and surrounding and give the viewer a clear view of what going on and a better understanding of the surroundings.   

Audience Questionnaire

The eight graphs below are the results from the questionnaire which we took. The results have helped us to review our research in much greater detail:

How old are you?

                                                    
















 What Film Genre do you Generally Prefer to watch?

Is dialogue and important part of the opening of an Thriller film?

What feature in a thriller mostly appeals to you?

Do you think that the conventions within a Thriller Film should be subverted?

What conventions do you expect to see in a Thriller film?

What gender would you expect the antagonist to be male or female?

What Plot would you most like for a thriller?