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?

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?

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?

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

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?

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?

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?

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?

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