Evaluation - Ed Boyce

Conventions of a typical thriller

Iconography:

• Weapons such as guns, knives etc
• Urban city locations
• Police, Detectives
• Blood

Mise en scene:

• Location: Most thrillers are set in urban area such as town or citys
• Lighting: Lighting in thrillers can be used to create atmosphere. Often Hard low key lighting is used to create a sinister atmospere. Creating shadows and darkness.

Editing and Camerawork:

• In thrillers often there are many fast cuts. These fast cuts are used to create suspense-this is often in violent scenes.
• POV shots are sometimes used from the killers POV.
• Other techniques such as crosscutting can be used to build suspense. For example cutting between the antagonist and protagonis when they are approaching untill a collision

• Sound:Non-diegetic sound used for creating tense moments and building suspense.

• Unrestricted Narrative, where the narrative shows us everything, letting us know more than the characters. Unrestricted Narrative is used in most thrillers this is because it keeps the audience in the

• Restricted Narrative, elements of a story that are not presented in the narrative to interest the audience, it is usually used r to keep the audience always wondering what is going to happen next.Binary Opposition is also a typical convention of the a thriller, this is the way in which a protagonist will typically oppose an antagonist.

• Enigma Code is often used in thrillers. Enigma code is the devices used by the narrative to raise questions in the minds of the viewer. Questions for example, such as why has this murder been committed?

1. How did our product, Love Links, use the above conventions and forms of a thriller?

Enigma Code

• Enigma code. We used Enigma code to raise questions in the audience.

• Another example of how we used enigma code was that we chose not to show Fred's face until the bathroom scene. The reason for this is because we wanted the audience to wonder who this person is. We did although chose to show the picture that Fred was holding, whilst walking to Katie's house. This torn picture represented the broken relationship of Fred and Katie.
• We chose to have no dialogue in our thriller opening. This was to raise questions in the audience's minds as to what the motive was for Fred to kill, Katie.

Confrontion

• We had a confrontion that our opening had been leading to. This is the climax of the suspense building when Fred attacks Katie.

Unrestrictive Narrative

• We used unrestricted narrative in our thriller. Our opening shows Fred coming up Katie's stairs. The audience knows this and therefore more than the character. We used this as a tension building strategy.

Iconography

• We used the typical thriller element blood in our thriller opening. This is seen seeping through Katie's shirt.We also used another typical element which is weapons more particularly knifes.
• We also used blood which is linked to murders and deaths found in thrillers.
  

Sound

• For the sound we used non-digetic background music throughout the opening. We used quiet piano sounds and low bass notes. This sound fits with the thriller genre, it sets a serious tone and builds tension.
  

Mise en scene

• Costume: We had Fred wear dark clothes and a hoody. The hoody hides his identity making the audience wonder who he is. It also raises the question as why he would want to hide his face. Katie's custome was normal clothes which are also quite modern as we wanted people to be aware its set in the present.
• Location: Most thrillers are set in urban areas, ours was set in an urban area- a village. So this is a typical thriller convention.

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

• Our media product represents two different people, one of which is a 17 year old, middle class female and the other of which is a 17 year old, middle class male.
• One way in which we conveyed Katie as this is throught her appearance. We dressed her normally with a plain white shirt, you also see her putting makeup on a normal teenage girl thing to do.
  
• She is also listening to music, this is music we created ourself as we didnt want to have to get permission to use a copyright track.We wanted to have katie as a normal young girl who probably enjoys going out and having fun. She seems innocent with little wrong with her life.

• The way we wanted to represent Fred is that he is slightly odd and maybe outcasted from the typical 17 year olds 'social group'. That fact that he is breaking in to a house and grabing a knife shows this, as it is not normal behaviour. Also his black clothing paints the picture he is the bad guy.

• We chose the typical thriller convention of having a female protagonist and a male antagonist

3.What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
For our media product we would look for a well known independent film company that has a reputation for being good with distribution. A film distributor must ensure that the film reaches the largest target audience as possible. I haven't found any that specialise in thrillers but Momentum Pictures has been a distributor for some successful thrillers such as CSI. So this would be suitable for our thriller. Using a well known Distributor would be good promotion for our film as well.

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

I think that our audience would be most people. I think that most thrillers are aimed at the masses for example Seven is a very well known and successful thriller but these films arn't really aimed at anyone percificaly. I think that this is what our thriller is like. However our thriller could be aimed at younger demographic of girls (like the characters in our opening). This is because they can relate to wierd ex-boyfriends.

5.How did you attract/address your audience?

• Our main audience is teenage girls because they can relate to crazy ex-boyfriends. The way we let the audience know that this is point of the film is by showing the torn photo with Katie and Fred on it. Which resembles their torn relationship,the photo is then discarded and blown away. This is was one way of attracting our audience because after seeing this scene hopefully they can relate to the situation.
• Another way to attract our audience is by seeing the young characters in the opening and by attrated to watch it because of that.
• Our film is a thriller so the audience want the conventions of a thriller with it. Which we included, such as Enigma code to raise questions and suspense building techniques. Our thriller wouldnt address or audience well if it didnt entail the 'thrilling' part of a thriller.
• Examples of similar films.

6.What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
For the main task we used different technologies.

• For filming we used the standard cameras from the college.
  
• To edit we used Final Cut Pro
  
• For sound we used GarageBand
• We used blogger for blogging
• This software was on an Apple Mac
  

• When I have edited before i used the software called Imovie. Therefore using Final Cut was a new experience to me. I enjoyed editing before so i looked forward to this part. I found it difficult to get used to the program as it is a whole new interface compared to Imovie, but after a while and after learning the keyboard short cuts of the program i was able to pick it up and edit at a decent speed.
  

This video helped me come to grips with the program aswell.

• I was used to GarageBand as i have used it before so this technology was easy to use and get what i wanted from it though i did go deeper into the program and use more sounds than i have before. One thing i did learn in GarageBand is the editing of the Digetic sound. Making sounds louder or quieter to fit your film was something i was new at.
  

• To film we used a standard college camera. The camera is simple to operate and the only thing that you need to remember is to set the white balance so that the colour is the same throughtout all the shots you shoot. Not doing this can lead to different colours and therefore breaking continuity-like in our preliminary as seen below.
  
• I am now confident with the camera, although it is easy to operate it, to actually get good shots from it and not have jolty shots takes some getting used to.
• I am personally a windows user and i have not used Macs much at all. Getting used to the different layout and configuration of Macs takes some time. There is also a lot of shortcuts when editing such as cutting and slicing using the Control key. The tutorial posted above also helped me learn these.
• Blogger was simple to get used to, i am familar with interfaces sucha s the one on blogger. One thing i still find hard is placing images on the blog
  

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

Comparing our full product to our preliminary it is easy to say that as an individual and a group we have learned a lot.

Camera Work

• Camera work has improved. We had white balance problems in our preliminary and we have resolved this in our full product. The changes in lighting looks unprofessional. The camera shots are also better and smoother.
  
• In our preliminary we also used basic and the bare minimum of shots and our framing is better in our full product.

Example of bad light continuity changes from white balance.






Editing

• Our editing in our main product is a lot more advanced and took us a lot longer. With our full product we werent just putting the film together like in our preliminary but adding sounds and all types of different effects.