Final Thriller

Final Thriller

Here is the final edit and final product of all our planning. To view it without the annotations go onto the settings of the video and turn them off.

Evaluation Task 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation Task 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

To present my ideas and exploration of whether various other similar media products share or differ connotations with the thriller that I made, I created a presentation on slide share:

Slide share final from O Pooles

Evaluation Task 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Evaluation Task 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In the opening of Fresh Fallen Snow there are two social groups that are acutely represented throughout, these being gender and ability and disability. Many of the stereotypes are adhered to within the sequence but there are moments, some more subtle than others, where through the use of editing, sound, mise en scene and camera, they are subverted. 

At the beginning of the opening, the shot duration on Molly is longer making her seem vulnerable and innocent allowing the audience to feel empathetic for her. However, as she becomes more agitated, the duration of the shots become longer on Detective Niland. This could have been used to retract attention from Molly or to present her as unpredictable and unstable however, I think this allows the detective to assert more authority over her presenting him as superior to the others. This variation in shot duration adheres to the stereotype that men are more superior by presenting the Detective as authoritative over Molly and overall, presenting men as tenacious and superior. 

Through the use of mise en scene, it initially seems that Molly subverts a stereotype that people with disabilities are villainous and vengeful by instead appearing innocent and scared. Through the use of character positioning and facial expressions her anxious and skittish persona are depicted. By subverting the stereotypes, people with disabilities are portrayed as scared and vulnerable. This is contradicted later on by the use of a low angle shot showing her pointing the knife at the officers, portraying her as strong and violent character who will not given to the likes of the detective. 

After Molly verbally attacks Detective Niland, he slowly brings his arms down surrendering to her. This partnered with the use of a handheld shot presents him as vulnerable which subverts not only the stereotype that men are stronger mentally and physically but also that people with no disability are always stable. Molly is not physically disabled but mentally, making her very perceptive of others and verbally invades Niland's mind. Subverting stereotypes, the Detective, a seemingly able character, gives in to Molly and is seen as unstable for the duration of the opening. 

The use of the props allows certain characters to have power that you wouldn't typically expect. For example, Molly and the singular female officer both have lethal weapons, a knife and a gun allowing them to assert more authority than expected. Molly uses her knife to successfully ward off the detective and the other officers as she has the power to take a man's life. In contrast to that, Matt, Molly's victim has no weapon and hasn't the physical

ability to run from her. This is shown through the mise en scene and camera angles used.  When Detective Niland points towards Matt, there is an eye line match which presents Matt in a slight high angel. Using practical effects, we see Matt's slashed neck with blood putting him in a very vulnerable but stereotypically unusual position.

In the earlier part of the thriller, the pace is slightly slow creating a somewhat calm and neutral atmosphere creating an enigma as to what will happen. However, as Molly becomes more distressed, the shots become much shorter heightening the pace of the action. This represents Molly as unstable, a stereotype often assumed with mentally disabled people. This contrasts to her out burst when she lashes out at the detective shouting her name. This juxtaposition presents her truly bipolar persona and can make the audience question which character they empathise with more, Molly or Detective Niland.

In terms of sound, there is no non diegetic sound nor any sound effects however, the ambient sound is emphasised. By setting the thriller on the top floor of a car park and especially due to the dull weather, ambient sound would be inevitable but the ambient

dietetic sound in the is opening was enhanced very specifically. Due to Molly's mental instability and as a consequence of her actions, the ambient sound could be used to reflect the stress and angst she has waiting for the police and debating whether to take her life rather than go on enduring life at the asylum she escaped from. 

Another clear moment where a stereotype is adhered to is in the dietetic dialogue when Detective Niland says, 'Keep the knife pointed at me'. The detective is trying to victimise

himself to distract Molly from her dying partner. This scarifies presents the detective as brave and selfless, two characteristics that go hand in hand when representing men. Whilst Molly is subverting stereotypes by not depending on a man such as Matt, Detective Niland is adhering to stereotypes by putting his life in danger to save another's. 

Overall, every character who was used to represent certain social groups were often never just adhering or subverting a stereotypes, there were moments where they did both giving a very contrapuntal performance. Through Mike, we adhered to gender stereotypes that men are stronger and usually have higher status than women. However, through Molly, Fran and Matt, we subvert gender stereotypes because Molly and Fran are have more power than we would necessarily expect to see. Matt on the other hand, is far more vulnerable than an audience would expect subverting to gender stereotypes because he's under Molly's control. When it comes to our second social group, ability and disability again we both adhere and subvert stereotypes. Through Molly's aggressive nature, she adheres to the stereotype that people with disabilities lash out on to seemingly able characters to try and gain power over them presenting her as a villain. Mike subverts to the stereotype that fully able people are mentally strong and stable however, in our thriller he's vulnerable to some of the things that Molly says presenting him as slightly unstable. From this our audience would be able to establish that our thriller is very unpredictable and that although we conform to many of the connotations of a thriller, to make it more interesting we don't conform to all stereotypes.

Evaluation Task 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation Task 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

For my evaluation task three I made a presentation on SlideShare briefly exploring the history of the two institutions I chose and then explained why either company would be suitable in the production of our thriller. Here is my presentation:

Evaluation task 3 from O Pooles

Evaluation Task 4 Part One: Preparation

Evaluation Task 4 Part One: Preparation

Within the film industry, marketing is one of the vital processes when it comes to a films success. A film is advertised to as many people as possible but, one of the most important pieces of information needed is the target audience so that they know who exactly they're trying to appeal to. For our thriller opening, we too need to consider the age range, gender and nationality our film would be aimed at. To identify our target audience, we constructed some questions that would allow us to sample a range of age groups and genders helping us to determine the common likes and dislikes within each category. From this information, we would be able to decipher our primary target audience. These are the question that we will ask:


 1)  How old are you?

 2)  What gender do you identify with?

 3)  What’s your favourite film genre?

       -  Action
       -  Thriller
       -  Comedy
       -  Romance
       -  Sci-fi


 4)  Who’s your favourite actor?

 5)  Who’s your favourite director?

 6)  What’s your favourite film? Why?

 7)  What do you look for in a film?

 8)  Do you like thrillers? If so which is your favourite?

 9)  Out of the following, what’s your preferred thriller sub genre? Why?
       -  Action-thriller
       -  Sci-fi thriller
       -  Political thriller
       -  Survivalist thriller
       -  Forensic thriller

10)  What’s your favourite TV series?

11)  Would the exploration of mental illness within film interest you?

12)  Do films that involve violence put you off?

13) Do you prefer films that are easy to follow or have twists and surprises within

      their narrative?


A lot of our questions are less about our thriller opening and more so about people's interest to help us establish the differences between each age, gender and nationality category. Using a variety of opened and closed questions, we will be able to gain both straight answers as well as more free, opinionated answers. Questions 4,5,6 and 10 are examples of open questions and will help us identify categorical differences as we can research the certain genres or styles that connote with their answers i.e question 4 if they were to say someone like Will Ferrel, we would be able to infer that they enjoy comedies whereas if they said Keanu Reeves, they likely enjoy action films.
The answers to questions 11, 12 and 13 may effect the way we edit our opening because if our target audience don't enjoy violence, we would avoid using the shots where the victims wounds are particularly visible or if the would prefer not to get a deep insight into the disturbed nature of our character, there would be certain parts of the dialogue that we may not include.

Harry edited the footage we collected from our questionnaire, interviewing different categories to identify the one(s) most relevant to our opening. These were our results:

From this video we managed to gather results and establish our a target audience but we wanted to compress our data further. To help us to narrow down our target audience farther we created these graphs:

The video alongside these graphs allowed us to determine that our target audience would be males aged 18-20

Evaluation Task 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Evaluation Task 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

After receiving the results from the interviews, as a group, we decided that a our target audience were men of an age between 18-20. Their interests include activities such as paint balling and other activities/games they can contribute to with friends and seeing films with them.

I have made a fake Facebook account to represent a stereotype based upon our results. The page includes comments he may make about events he may partake in with friends as well as photos that suggest his interest in action.

This would be his profile:

In the post that you can see on the bottom right corner, he's seen as a sociable person who enjoys going to see thriller films.

As a 20 year old university student, it's likely that he would work at somewhere with lenient hours such as Waitrose. He has an interest in film and lives in the UK.

As a film fanatic, I've posted some film memes to show his type of humour and present his interest in films.

Lastly, this is one of the adverts that, using the information provided, was purposely targeted at males like Sam based on their common interests such as PS4:

Evaluation Task 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

Evaluation Task 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

In order to address this question I decided to create a magazine interview answering the necessary question about the process and discrimination we used when making certain decisions.

Evaluation Task 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Evaluation Task 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

My group and I made annotations on our video highlighting key moments when we used different technologies and why. I've attached the video but please ensure that you go onto the settings for the video and turn on the annotations to view our post. Underneath you'll find a list of various technologies that we have used.

 

Technologies Used

Pre-production

• Blogger: used to track out our process and develop our idea

• Samsung Galaxy S7 camera, Final cut pro and Youtube to create our test shoot: used to try out our ideas and develop our concept further

• Facebook group chat: to organise meetings and discuss our narrative as well contacting actors

• Email: used when contacting actors

• Keynote: used to present our pitch and display our idea simply and clearly

• Chrome: used to research into our mise en scene and other thrillers

• Youtube used: research into other thrillers

Production

• Blackmagic 4K ursa mini: used to film our thriller 

• Directional shot gun microphone: 

• Practical Effects: used to create the slash on Matt’s neck.

Post-production

• Adobe Premiere Pro

• Youtube

Evaluation Task 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Evaluation Task 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

For my evaluation task 7 I created a visual presentation on prezi portraying how we have progressed through our journey from prelim to thriller.

Extra Editing Time

Extra Editing Time

When it comes to editing our thriller, we don't have a lot of class time because there are other media classes who need to use the edit suit too. So, in order to finish our thriller by the deadline we have to book out our set computer and come outside of lesson time. Due to other commitments, we've never been able to book a session that we could all go to however, yesterday Harry and I decided to stay after school for the 7-9pm slot. This was we knew that we would be able to finish our thriller and make the last minuscule changes. 

Together we managed to add the credits that we'd designed on his laptop on Final Cut Pro because we had a larger range of options than Adobe Premier Pro like the motion snow effect that we've placed under the title. We had a little difficulty importing them from Harry's laptop because it doesn't have the typical USB port. We decided to move on and finish the import the next day so that he could bring in the correct cable. Fortunately, another student who booked the same time slot had the correct cable and allowed us to use it. This got us back on track and allowed us to cross one more thing off our list.

Whilst Harry was organising the import, I decided that it was finally time to tackle the issue of the ambient sound. In certain clips the diegetic ambient sound of Guildford was rather seamless and wasn't too over powering however in others it was far too loud. We'd focused so much on the continuity of the footage that we hadn't necessarily thought of the importance of the continuity within the sound. I found a piece of ambient sound from one our panning shots that was uninterrupted by dialogue or other unintended chat that I decided to copy and paste under the entirety of our thriller and then later delete the original pieces of ambient sound that was under the majority of the clips. By doing this, it actually became easier to watch our sequence because the ambient sound wasn't over powering and didn't distract from the action. However to make it even more seamless I added a small transitions in all the moments where I'd copied and pasted the sound so that you didn't hear it clip at all. Although the clipping of the sound was only a very small buzz sound that you could only hear if you specifically listened in for it, I wanted to ensure that there were no unnecessary distributions. 

After doing this, Harry took over and he edited the volume of some of the dialogue. For example, when Molly states her name at first it was slightly too quiet but when she shouted it it was far too loud. So, he made a small cut in the middle of the sound clip and lowered the volumes on the latter on and increased the volume on the first. Other moments that needed the volumes adjusted slightly were clips of Mike. On the shoot day, when filming most of the shots of Molly, we were quite close to her alloying the Røde directional shot gun microphone that we used to pick up the sound far better than when filming Mike. We were usually placed the camera further away from Mike and simply zoomed in to get the close ups rather than what we did with some of Molly's shots. We would have preferred to get closer but because of all the cars, it was hard to. This meant that we had to deal with slightly quieter sound that was overwhelmed slightly by ambient sound. Harry and I used to various levels of audio to find the right balance and to try and get Mike's dialogue as close to the clarity that we had on Molly's as possible.

By the end of the session we were left with only one other thing to add which we unfortunately forgot about at the time probably because we were tired after our 13 hour school day, was a small piece of audio that I felt should be dubbed over the shot just before Molly turned around. My main motivation for this addition was that at the time, Molly was turning around without being triggered by anything, not even the sound of the car engines. I suggested that we added either something like a gun cock to provoke her or a piece of dialogue. There was one piece of dialogue where Mike said, 'Don't be alarmed' which I thought would work perfectly but I had to leave that in the hands of my group because unfortunately I was absent on the very last editing lesson. 

Naming Our Thriller

Naming Our Thriller

When it came to naming our thriller we got quite caught up in a number of ideas. However, what we needed to remember was that we were not just naming the opening sequence that we had made but naming the film entire film. Initially we were thinking of names that had links to vertigo which relates to our opening sequence because Molly begins contemplating her life and whether or not she should jump however this isn't necessarily something that relates to our entire film narrative.

Although we wanted to expand our field of ideas, all our ideas stemmed back to one thing the line, 'we leapt and we landed in to the fresh fallen snow'. We decided that because this is the line that creates the biggest enigma in our opening and is something that would be referenced again and again if we were to continue the film, there wouldn't be a more suitable title. Our initial title was simply 'We Leapt and We Landed' however after a few days dwelling on this title, I felt that if we focused more on the latter part of the line, then we would have a far more ambiguous title; 'Fresh Fallen Snow'. In our thriller, there are a lot of twists and turns as we venture through various stereotypes making our sequence quite unpredictable. By naming it Fresh Fallen Snow, we would be creating a title that is just as ambiguous as our thriller and doesn't give too much away.

Editing Evaluation

Editing Evaluation

During the editing process of our thriller, everyone in our group has had a chance to edit different moments and contribute ideas as to what angles would be best to use to portray the narrative and various moments where we reveal something within our piece.

On our first day of editing we were advised to place all the shots that we thought were the best or best depict our narrative into our timeline so that when it came to making our first draft, it would be quick and easy to find the best shots rather than having to hunt through our rushes every time we want a new shot. However, for our group this seemed to be hared than with others mainly because our our repetitive dialogue so there were some occasions where we had to settle for the shots that we didn't like as much because they had a nicer moment of dialogue that hadn't necessarily been used yet. This did mean that we lost some time to searching through our rushes rather than getting all our footage together into our first draft. Sometimes there was more than one shot that we thought would work well in certain sections we would scroll across our timeline and experiment with each one to see which ones were most compatible together to clearly illustrate our narrative. Things that we decided were deal breakers between shots were things to due with continuity, framing, overlapping dialogue or moments where we broke the 180 degree rule.

Another issue we had with some of our shots is that some had better audio but some had better framing. Unfortunately the ones with better framing were hard to put in because it's not like we could change the audio because the synchronization would be out of place. However, If the audio was very good and especially if it was something fresh that on the day the actors improvised, we would place different shots over the dialogue such as reaction shots and close ups of the other policemen. This not only allowed us to have a larger variety of dialogue but it also allowed us top reveal the extent of the police force that were called to this scene and also highlights the extent of the crime and hints into Molly's crime related past. 

Our sequence is built around 5 main reveals; Molly at the edge, the knife, Detective Niland, Matty and the other policemen. Each one of these reveals increases the tension within the scene because the audience are being fed more and more information about Molly's crime. Some of these moments have allowed us to create very juxtaposing messages and allows the audience to see the intimidating situation Molly is in making them identify and sympathies with her as well as assisting us in how we reveal this information. There is one moment in particular that I feel does this and this is when  Detective Niland says, 'everything's going to be alright'. This was a very unique moment in the dialogue because it wasn't planned but has created a remarkably contrapuntal moment because whilst we hear this audio, the is a shot when we see two police officers Fran and Manu holding guns to her. If we continued to make this a full scale feature film we would want the audience to be confused with their decision to sympathies with Molly because it gives both our narrative and Molly more depth.

I've found that as we progress through our narrative, our shots become shorter and more arbitrary to reflect the ever growing tension and fear within the scene. However, towards the end I feel that this turns around.Throughout the whole sequence our main character Molly holds a knife to the police and against the dying boy physically defending herself from anyone coming near her. Nonetheless, when she says the phrase "we leaped and we landed into the fresh fallen snow" she is defending herself mentally against Detective Niland. It isn't revealed within the opening sequence why this is a trigger to the detective but if this was a full length feature film, the audience would learn why he is effected by this. It's in this section when I feel that the shot duration becomes longer especially on Molly because it allows the audience to establish that the status is being manipulated and Molly gains the higher power by the end of the sequence.

The significance of 'We Leapt and We Landed in the Fresh Fallen Snow'

The significance of 'We Leapt and We Landed in the Fresh Fallen Snow'

Molly is a character that suffers greatly with mental illness and feels that the whole world is out to get her, so she lashes out using any weapon she can. In our thriller you can see that she'll extremely distressed and that she tries several ways to get out of the situation. At first she appears somewhat innocent as she tries to fight off memories from her past that she tries desperately to suppress  When she gets no sympathy from this, she uses the knife and the life of her companion to threaten them. But non of her obvious ideas work. However, when she says the words, 'we leapt and we landed in the fresh fallen snow' Mike is deeply hurt by this. Although in the sequence the significance of this line isn't completely established, it's a link that would later on in the film allow a plot twist to occur which after our study we found our target audience enjoy. If we were to continue our thriller into a feature film then the audience would find out it's true significance and why it effects Mike so deeply. On the surface, it effects Mike because it was the name of the book that he used to be read when he was a child but as he grew older it became associated with something much darker that Molly has found out and will use to her advantage against Mike.