Final Edit

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

I looked into the company 'Lionsgate' to use to distribute my product. I thought this would be a good company to use because they distributed other thrillers such as 'American Psycho', the 'Saw' films and 'Hostel'. 'Saw' made $103,096,345 and 'Hostel' made $80,578,934 so their films also make a lot of money which would be a good thing for my product. Another company that I could consider is 'Universal Pictures' because they are a very big successful company, they have also distributed some thrillers including 'Dracula' and 'Frankenstien'. These films were very successful and are still recognized now even though they were both released in 1931 which is good for my film. Unfortunately I could not find the exact figures for these films, however I still think this would be a good media institution for me.

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

My preliminary task taught me the basics of using Adobe Premiere Pro and using the cameras, however the thriller opening taught me to use the cameras and software in much more depth. In my preliminary task I learnt how to import the videos and cut them but i couldn't use the software anywhere near as well as I can now. In my preliminary task I had a number of problems including the fact that our group didn't neccesarily balance out all of the different tasks that well, I did some editing but I didn't get the chance to do much filming, however I did a lot of the storyboards and planning. I learnt from my mistakes and for the thriller we managed to balance it out much better so each of us did a bit of each thing and we were all involved in the whole process. The fact that we got much more time to plan for our thriller than we did our preliminary task also helped and that we researched it using questionnaires and looking at other openings for ideas meant our thriller was able to be much more creative and interesting and if I was to do filming in the future I would definately consider doing questionnaires again.

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

I learnt how to use the video cameras and tripods from filming our thriller. I also learnt how to use Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the opening. In Adobe Premiere Pro I learnt a number of different skills, for example adding the different clips of film to the programme and cutting them to make them shorter. I also learnt how use fast colour corrector to make the clips appear darker and adding transition effects between the clips. I learnt a lot of things about using the cameras also, for example how to do the white balance with a piece of paper which I learnt from one of the problems that we had which was that all of the footage we had was much too bright when we first did our recording.

How did you attract/address your audience?

A similar film opening to ours is the opening to 'Se7en', the age rating for this film is an 18 which is within our target audience but as our target audience is 16 -25 we have made our film slightly less scary. Our film will attract our target audience by having an interesting story line and including characters that the audience can relate to and putting them in situations that the target audience could possibly relate to. We have done this by using people within the target audience to act in our opening and dressed them in casual looking everyday clothes. Also, although obviously supernatural things don't happen to everyone they are more realistic than monsters and other things like that and people do report to having them happen to them so our storyline is more believable.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The target audience for our media product are 16 -25 year olds. We can make sure that our thriller is enjoyable for this target audience because the majority of the people that answered the questionnaire were in this group and we made sure we took notice of the results from the questionnaire when making our opening sequence. Another thing that we took into consideration when choosing our target audience was that a thriller may not be suitable for under 16's, especially as our thriller is paranormal and therefore could be scary for the audience. To back this point up i looked into the age rating of other thrillers and all of the 'Saw' films are rated 18 in the UK and 'Paranormal Activity' is rated 15.

How does your media product present a particular social group?

The results of our questionnaire show that most of the people that answered it were between the ages 16 -25, we therefore decided that we would aim our thriller at this age group. The people acting in our thriller are also between this age group as they are all 16 or 17 so the target viewer should be able to relate to the film. The locations that we filmed are also everyday places that young adults might be around and the clothing that the actors are wearing are very simple, for example just plain blue jeans and and denim shorts.

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

After doing our questionnaire we decided to do a paranormal thriller and therefore we included forms and conventions of a paranormal thriller. We used the forms and conventions from other thrillers by forshadowing what is going to happen in the rest of the film in the opening. We have also used music that helps to build suspense which is another typical convention of thrillers. We got most of our inspiration for the opening from the film 'Se7en' this opening uses flashing images that don't give away the storyline to the audience but they do forshadow what is going to happen and leaves the audience wanting to know more which is what we aimed for in our opening. Below is an image of all of the characters from the opening and what they are wearing.

Improving our thriller

There were a lot of improvements that needed to be made to our thriller opening, the two biggest improvements were how short our opening was and the lack of sound. Unfortunately I was unwell for the week after our group finished our first draught and therefore missed a week of improvements. Lizzie, Emma and Kristina filmed some more footage at Attenborough Church to put into our thriller to make it longer. We then spent a lot of time on Adobe Premiere Pro adding this footage, changing things around and adding music to our thriller. We then still didn't have quite enough footage and decided that we needed to film a bit more, however we were able to do this in college on the field which was more convenient for us. We also decided to slightly change the story of our opening and use the clips we currently have as flashbacks and do some more filming of Kristina talking about her experience to someone else in order to make our opening longer and give it more of a storyline.

Thriller Opening Draft

Editing

We spent the day editing our draft in Adobe Premiere Project, we realised that using our storyboard the opening wasn't long enough. Unfortunately we don't really have enough footage at the minute to make it the correct length but we will use this as a lesson and make sure we get a lot more footage for our final film. We also didn't have enough time to find music to put over it so we had to leave it with just the video. I will upload the draft in my next post.

Filming and Uploading

We went to Emmas house and did lots of different shots there and then went to Attenborough in the graveyard and the church. The filming at Emmas went really well and we made sure we did at least 2 of each shot we did incase some didn't look as good. In Attenborough the filming looked very overexposed on the camera screen so we were worried that it would look bad when we uploaded it to the computer but we did our filming anyway to see what it looked like and we hoped that it would be okay.

Me and Kristina have now uploaded all of the filming onto the computers and changed them all into MPG files in order to import them into Adobe Premier Pro. Some of the videos do look over exposed but we are hoping that we will be able to balance the light on the computer in order to make it look better.

Title Ideas

During todays lesson we also discussed some ideas for our thriller title, some ideas we came up with were 'Posessed', 'Haunted', 'Supernatural' and 'The Haunting'. We decided that these all foreshadow different storylines, for example 'Posessed' would suggest that someone gets posessed while 'Haunted or 'The Haunting' just suggests that they stay in the haunted place shown at the beginning and 'Supernatural' doesn't give away a lot.

We finally decided that the title will be 'The Haunting' and we have come up with some different title images, the images are below.

Change of plans

Our group have properly looked at the footage that Emma and Lizzie got from Tutbury Castle. We have decided that it isn't very good quality as it it quite shaky and there isn't enough footage because the camera battery ran out and they were unable to charge it. We have decided that we are going to start again with the filming by filming an old church that is near where we live in Attenborough, this is good for me and Kristina anyway poo as it means we are able to help with the filming, we are also going to go to Emma's house to film a ouija board and a table being lifted for our opening. Unfortunately this doesn't give us a lot of time to film but we are going to do everything we can to get the filming done tonight (17/03/11) and as me and Kristina have most of the day off college tomorrow we are going to spend the day doing editing and Lizzie and Emma have a few hours off so they will be able to help us. We are hoping that bumhole we will be able to get everything done and therefore get everything done on time, below is a picture of the church that is in Attenborough nature reserve that we will be going to tonight to film.

Location

We are doing our filming at Tutbury Castle. These are pictures of the castle, it is a place which often holds ghost walks and events and it is also quite 'spooky' looking at night which will help our opening to create suspence and mystery and so we thought it would be an appropriate location to do our filming.

Storyboard

This is our storyboard, we all contributed to drawing this and used the mind map to come up with some ideas for shots and put them into the storyboard. We would like to do filming at Tutbury Castle, I will upload some images of the castle in my next post.

Mind Map

Our group sat down and discussed some different ideas, his is the mind map that we made using these ideas. We included shots, mis en scen, sound, editing and ideas of who we would use to act for us. This helped a lot with our storyboard and the actual planning of our opening.

Questionnaire analysis (Question 6)

These are the results to the question "What kind of shots do you like to see in a thrillers opening titles? (You may tick more than one)"

The results show that the majority of people want to see 'quick flashing shots' in the opening titles of a thriller, the second and third most popular choices are 'more music than dialogue' and 'lots of action'. This shows that people want to see an action packed exciting opening to a thriller, we can use this information in our thriller opening.

Questionnaire analysis (Question 5)

These are the results to the question "What is your favourite thriller/the most memorable thriller you have ever seen?"

This was the only open ended question put all of these thrillers are very popular in general, the most popular thriller was 'Seven', the second most popular was 'Paranormal Activity' and 'Inception', 'Pulp Fiction' and 'The Dark Knight' were all very close. Our group will use this information to influence our thriller opening.

Questionnaire analysis (Question 4)

These are the results to the question "Which type of thrillers are your favourite? (You can tick more than one)"

These results show that the most popular sub-genre is Horror/Paranormal, the two second most popular are Action-Adventure and Historical, then Sci-Fi, Disaster and Medical. Our group will definitely bare in mind that Horror/Paranormal is the most popular sub-genre, it is also the most common and we will therefore include this genre in our opening.

Questionnaire analysis (Question 3)

These are the results to the question "How often do you watch thriller films?"

The results show that only a small amount of the people never watch thrillers, the other two categories came out equal, this is good as people who don't watch thrillers wouldn't have a good insight into what thrillers usually include.

Questionnaire analysis (Question 2)

This is the analysis of the second question from my questionnaire "what age group are you?" This shows that the majority of the people I asked were 16 - 25 and the second most popular age group was 5 -15. I think the majority group was 16 - 25 as this is the age group I am in and therefore most of the people I know are in this age group, I think our group will use this as our target group because we have the most knowledge of this group anyway as we ourselves are in the group.

Questionnaire analysis (Question 1)

This is the analysis from the question "Are you male or female?" this shows that I asked slightly more females than males in my questionnaire, I will bare this in mind when looking at the results.

Questionnaire

These are the questions from my questionnaire, I begun by asking questions about the people doing my questionnaire as I thought it would be useful to know who the information has come from and whether the majority should be the target audience. I then went on to ask questions about their taste in films and what they are looking for in a thriller so that I can use the results to help our group make our thriller what people want and enjoy.

Starting on our thriller

Last week we got into groups, I am with Kristina, Lizzie and Emma. Our group started by doing questionnaire to help us with our ideas, Emma and Lizzie made a questionnarie but to benefit my grade and help me have a better understanding of the research process I also did my own questionnaire and I will later upload a copy of it and the results I gathered, my results were very similar to Emma and Lizzie's so this helped back up our research and ideas. Our group also did a mind map to think of ideas for our thriller opening. We have come up with a final idea for what we want to do using inspiration from the openings we watched in our research and we have started drawing a storyboard up for it and we have divided the responsibility of the drawing of it between the group, I will upload when it is complete. We also planned that we would do our filming on the 5th March that will take place at tutbury castle where there will be a ghost hunt happening that our group have permission to film as we are fortunate to have Emma's mum working for the company doing the ghost hunt. Unfortunately only two of our group are allowed access to the castle and Emma and Lizzie have decided to go, me and Kristina will make up for the fact we couldn't be part of the filming by putting a lot of input into the editing. We will film shots of around the castle and some parts of the ghost hunt.

'Pulp Fiction' opening analysis

Pulp fiction is a very popular, classic thriller and that is why I chose this opening to look at.

The opening begins with two people talking in a restaurant, they seem like two ordinary people and you can't really tell what kind of film it is going to be fore the first minute or so. This is a nice effect because it helps the viewer get to know the characters straight away. The two people then start talking about robbing banks and various criminal activities, this is when the film begins to obviously be a thriller but as the two people look so ordinary it seems quite unusual which makes the viewer want to know more. The male then gets a gun out and once again this seems unusual as the characters are being portrayed as a very ordinary couple calling each other "pumpkin" and "honeybunny" and kissing, right before they rob the restaurant.

The scene finally ends and freezes on the image of the male and female stood holding guns up in the restaurant and some fast paced music comes on and the title 'Pulp Fiction' comes up in big orange writing. By this point the viewer knows what is going on and the film is ready to properly start. This opening is good because it doesn't mess around, it gets straight into the film and hooks the viewer straight away and I think that is good.

'Se7en' opening analysis

I chose this thriller opening to research because I think the opening has a good idea behind it and it's the kind of thing our group would like to do.

The opening to this film is good because it creates mystery, however it also forshadows what is going to happen later on in the film. I think the way the credits flash up between clips has a really good effect and helps to create the suspense and mystery. Another good feature of this opening is that you can tell what kind of film it is going to be and that it is going to be a horror film as it appears that someone is trying to hide something and it includes some gruesome things like someone cutting their fingerprints off. Although we might not be able to do something that extreme, we can add spooky things like this to let the audience know what kind of film it is going to be. Something else that has a nice effect and could be a good idea for our opening is when the name of the film flashes up mid opening and it appears to be on one of the objects which if we could find a way of doing that would also be very good and interesting to include.

The Final Clip

This is our groups final outcome of the preliminary task, I am very happy with the way it has turned out. Fortunately the only thing that went wrong was that the clip was slightly too short which was fixable, nothing else went wrong and everything went to plan.

Music

We decided to add music to our clip as there was a buzzing sound in the background and it added to the dramatic effect. It took a while to find a music clip that related to our clip but we managed to find one that helps create tension and drama in the clip, and therefore make our video more effective. This is the music we found...

Editing

We edited our shots in 'Adobe Premiere Pro' to put the whole clip together. We added different effects including a letterbox pan style shot at the end, this helped us because once we edited it the clips were too short and we needed a way to make it longer. Doing this task really helped me understand how to edit a video.

Actors and Props

We decided to use Emily and Francesca as our actresses for our project as they are drama students and therefore would be the best actors. For our task we didn't need many props, however we did need pictures for one of our actors to throw on the table and we decided to take our own pictures to make our film more realistic and therefore more effective. These are the pictures we took.

Preliminary Task Storyboard

This is the storyboard me and Richard made to plan the filming of our video, we did it as clearly as possible and included all of the information we will need including the shots and dialogue so it will be as simple as possible to do the filming.

Starting the Preliminary Task

We have began planning the preliminary task by discussing what storyline we want to inclue in our video, we also discussed where we can do it and who we can use to act in our video. We then drew out a storyboard and wrote up the dialogue and camera shots we will include.