1. Evaluation Commitment
Stephanie Harding.

2. In what was does your media product use,developor challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
I believe that our opening developed forms and conventions of real media products rather than challenge them. We decided that we would rather have an opening which kept to conventions in previous products rather than challenging the form and ending up with a poor final product. We did decide to do a thriller horror hybrid as we decided that we wanted to use blood and have one of the characters already dead within the first few seconds of the opening and this therefore fell more under the horror genre due to the gore.
We incorporate the generic conventions for both the thriller and horror conventions. The opening scene with the blood on the hand is used to create the idea of a horror as the hand is appearedseparatefrom the body with blood on it.
The idea of a thriller is used as the audience suspects the killer as he has his face hidden throughout the scene and this hiding of the face is carried on throughout. I don't believe that we were influenced by any one film in particular and therefore I think that our opening is simply pieced together by taking ideas from many different thrillers and horrors.
Hand covered in blood to meet the codes and conventions of horror genre.
Face hidden in order to keep a sense of mystery with the thriller.

3. How does you media product represent particular social groups?
In our media presentation we have a male who is meant to be middle aged. We represent the male and his age through the use of his clothing; a suit. We decided that having the male in a suit would help represent that he is older as this is typical of an older working man. We also have a female within our media product, however, it is not easy to understand her social class by simply looking at the character as we only focus onseparate parts of her body.We therefore include shots of toys in order to cannot her age to the audience.
Gender is represented in astereotypical way with the male as the dominate character as he is the murderer. By having the male as the strong dominate character this fits with the usual conventions of a thriller when the male is seen as the main character and often the killer. We decided to not challenge these conventions as we felt that they were important to keep at the time of deciding on character, however, looking back I think that it may have been good is we did use a female character to challenge conventions.
Shot of the shirt which we used in order to represent the characters age.
Shot of toys to convey age of girl

4. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
I believe that this is something which would be able to be produced by a major Hollywood studio. I think that our media product leaves on an opening and therefore can be expanded in order to be a Hollywood film. I don't believe that our product is similar to any other film in particular however, I do believe that the type of film would be able to be seen in cinemas as it appeals to a wider audience due to the fact it is a hybrid focusing both on elements from a thriller and a horror.
The film has potential to be an Arthouse film as the film can be directed to be for more of an niche audience if the director was to take the film down more of the horror root and make the film develop in a way which would appeal to a specific target audience. I believe that the opening allows for the story to be diverse and which offersopportunitiesto be expanded. I believe this as Arthouse films are usually directed towards a small audience and therefore focus on specific aspectsof the film in order for it to appeal to their target audience.
20th century fox also filmed Die Hard, which is of the thriller genre and therefore I think they would be the kind of company which would considerproducing a thriller horror movie.

5. Who would be the audience for your media product?
The target audience for our film is males in particular. This due to the fact thatstatisticallyfrom our own research and fromresearch we found on the internet that it ispredominantlymales who enjoy thriller and horror genres more than females. The age range for our film would be above 18 as this is what we chose when doing our research from the BBFC website. I believe that if our media product was developed further into a real film it would stay at this rating.
(look below for audience feedback)
The male character who is dominate is more appealing to males watching as it enhances astereotypeof males in control. Women would perhaps be more threatened and scared by the narrative.A film which issimilaris theDie Hardfilms. It begins with the opening scene with credits over and this is what we were trying to achieve over all. These films are also aimed at male audiences in particular and use a dominate male character throughout.

We used the same idea of titles on our shots as used in the Die Hard films.

6. How did you address your audience?
Due to the fact that our media product was aimed at apredominatelymale market we incorporated different camera angles in order to appeal to our target audience. For example during the opening of our film the camera is used to pan along the floor simply following the male footsteps, this would be morefrighteningfor a female watching as the dominate malecharacteris obviously much taller than we are allowing the audience to see and we are made to look at his feet, this use of a low angle allows the main character to appear dominate.
Another point in our film which would perhaps terrify a female audience is when we use the camera to move around the head of the dead girl, this would be more frightening as it also shows the maledominancein the film andtypically a female would feel much more uncomfortable watching this scene.The use of different shots such as over theshoulder shots allows the audience to feel that they are more a part of it. This would probably appeal more to a male audience whereas a female audience would perhaps be more nervous by this thought of the maledominanceand what a male character is thinking and doing.This helps create tension within our opening as the different camera angles and shots change what you are witnessing the characters from different angles and therefore able to make different judgments of the characters.
Panning of the feet.
Head separate from body.

7. What have you learnt about technologies from theprocessofconstructingyour product?
From our experience with camera equipment we found we didn't like the quality of the camera we had used as we watched back the footage. We also realized that we were unable to work the tripod correctly throughout the entire filming as when looking back a lot of the original shots we had taken were very wonky. We decided that we would re-shoot with anothercamera which was better quality.We also decided that we would use a tripod that we knew better. We learnt that some camera equipment is a lot easier and the range of things which can be done on one camera can not always be done so smoothly on another for example the zoom on both of the cameras was completely different and we muchpreferredthe second one. Any issues we faced with the equipment was easily resolved by the second shooting.
Editing waspredominatelymy job and I spent a long time on the mac learning premierpro. I found it fine as we had used it when doing outpreliminarytask and I had a basic understanding already. Once we began to edit I realized that the editing could be much harder than I thought but I learnt a lot. I found different effects such as fades and this helped with the general mise-en-scene of our opening as it allowed us to move from one scene to another scene, this helped as it created suspense as you often were left to wonder were the character was going. I learnt a lot about editing footage together from different angles to allow the audience to see that the character is travelling rather than panningcontinuouslythroughout which is what we did in our rough cut.

8. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to your final product?
We started with research on the genre, from this research we were able todevelopan understand on genre. We also did genre of hybrids and sub-genres, this helped us chose our hybrid film and therefore made the process when planning easier as we knew what was expected of our film due to the codes and conventions.We quickly learnt what was tooclich of a thriller-horror and we were able to plan the opening. Once planning different ideas we started on the story board and then the animatic, these stages proved difficult, however, they had a significant impact on how smoothly the filming went as they gave us an idea of what it was we were shooting as we knew what we were trying to accomplish. Our planning and research could be improved but when producing our media product it was a lot better than our preliminary task, due to the time spent planning whereas we had a very tight dead line with the task and it was no where near as good in comparison as we still had a lot to learn.
Watching our preliminary task you are able to see a clear improvement within the speed of the editing and also theprecisionof filming. We wouldn't of got to this point with our final product without the preliminary task and our re-shoots as this was how we were able to improve by seeing our mistakes. I feel more confident with the camera, tripod and the mac now and I feel a lot more confident that I would be able to work all three things by myself.
I believe that we were successful in creating an opening for a thriller despite the difficulties we faced, we over came them and I am pleased with our final product as I think that it does every thing that we wanted it to and addresses the codes and conventions as well as its audience well due to the shots, angles and editing of the product.
We gained knowledge on how we should and shouldnt shoot.