Evaluation / Question 1

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

Most film openings are around 2 minutes long, we kept to that with our opening at 2:43
We also chose a decaying/rough font because it made the titles look more gritty, which was inspired by se7en's font.
Conventions of a Title Sequence and How We Followed It

• Production company

We used the college Ident as it made more sense to the film to keep it small and independent. 

We made our own ident to follow the college ident. 

We repeated the production companys through discrete titles. This emphasied the companies names which is used in most films.

• Film Title

With this shot of our title, it was the only text and in the center, contrasting against the red and black. Although small, it still stands out.

• Main Cast 

The main cast have their own time on screen and are the only individual names.

• Smaller cast names

To make the titles as realistic as possible we made up random names and added them in. We also grouped their names together and put them in the corner; making them still noticeable by colour, but not by frame placement.

• Casting/Music

For the music and casting we put them on individually and gave them an equal amount of screen time

• Editor/Director of Photography

Editor and director of photography were in the same camera sequence and placed in the same corner as the camera was getting a big shot.

• Producer/Writer/Director 

These final three titles finished off the stylized intro. 

Evaluation / Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

RUN DOWN ON WHAT FEATURES IN THIS MOOD BOARD

An Interview from our Target Audience:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KwxTQwLjxfI

Evaluation / Question 3

Media Evaluation Power Point from EllarLion

Evaluation / Question 4

Who would be the audience for our media product (Thriller Opening)

-Our target audience would be teen/young adult. Mainly because the main characters are both teens which would appeal to a younger audience, proven by films such as:
The Hunger Games

.

The audience for the Hunger Games is predominantly female, although the main audience for a Thriller is male.
However this mix is shown for the audience of Harry Potter 7:

However
During our class feedback we were told that the film may appeal to more male than female due to the openings being harsh, bold colours, and the theme of the film being a spy thriller.
Doing some research, the main demographic of thrillers including 'spy themed' ones are male.

These 3 thrillers all used similar shots that we used; Skyfall, The Dark Knight Rises & Safe House.
The frames on the right mirror the shots we used in our thriller, following the character from behind.
The frames on the left show the action sequences of the thriller we didn't put in.

(Left) Dark Knight Rises audience (Middle) Skyfall audience (Right) Safe House audience

Evaluation / Question 5

An Interview from our Target Audience:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KwxTQwLjxfI

Evaluation / Question 6

Technologies I've worked with during this process 

In the center shows the Apple computer which i worked from in college and my laptop that i worked off at home. At college i was always at a slight disadvantage because you weren't allowed to download videos or music from the internet which was quite restricting. It also only had Photoshop elements which meant i could make GIFS. This resulted in me doing 99% of my work at home. The editing keyboard was very handy in getting the best timed shots, also with cutting the shots down appropriately.
From there i used Prezi but i didn't like it so i didn't use it again, Slideshare which i thought was a very handy program, Sony Vegas Pro although i never finished editing so i quickly used Windows Movie Maker, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, and the camera where we filmed everything and uploaded to Blogger.

Evaluation \ Question 7

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

Due to the shorter amount of time we had, we were much quicker making the preliminary than the thriller. Mainly because we knew the Thriller had to be done to the best of our ability and we couldn't re-do it, where as the preliminary was a warm up for what to come.
By that point we had learnt how to use the tripod but we took a while getting all the shots done which slowed the process down a tad. The camera we used was the JVC Pro HD GY-HM100 which we all knew how to use as it was very easy to film and portable.

Production
We had some dialog in the prelim but it was very basic, unlike the Thriller intro where we had none. This meant we could focus more on the shots, editing and sound rather than worrying about how realistic our script was, and in the case of our prelim, was very basic. We shot everything in the classroom which also brought the 'drug deal' scene down because it didn't look realistic at all, compared to our thriller where we tried very hard to get the best possible locations, resulting in us filming in St Pancras. In our thriller we have music that was created via Soundtrack Pro, but in the prelim we used foley sound which didn't add anything to the shots and certain sounds where slightly out of time.

Post Production
During this process for the prelim we had to quickly find a substitute for drugs which we managed to get, sugar. For the thriller we had time to plan our props which resulted in us getting sunglasses so the characters looked more suspicious, 2 bags for the bag swap and a newspaper. All that tied into the character, making it more realistic and believable, therefore catering for the audiences needs of mystery and suspicion.

Camera Skills
We used a range of shots in our prelim but we were advised to focus on close ups as that was important for the audience to follow along with detail.

These are our opening shots, a mid shot and close up.











We show her moving into the classroom through more mid and close ups

This exchange is filmed in a close up and i quite like it








Lighting
We filmed all the shots in mid afternoon, inside the college. There are a lot of windows so we had quite a lot of natural light coming in as well as lights from the classrooms, however, this did make some of the shots look weak as we had lots of light coming into one area whereas some areas of the shot had very little light at all.

The yellow arrow shows the natural light coming in from the large windows. Our framing clearly shows that whilst the character walks into a corridor with dim lighting and little natural light. This moves the focus off the character and onto the background which is something we didn't want.





For our thriller intro we framed this shot so she's walking away from the light but is still clearly visible and at the center focus of the frame.






Summary
For both productions I have learnt much more about the importance of a tri pod and how to make the best out of shots without it. I've learnt that planning ahead is very handy and persistence can pay off when i comes to getting permission to film in certain places. I've learnt that making a good thriller intro requires a good group where everyone gets stuck in to have the best possible outcome.

Evaluation | Question 1

These two videos are related to the 'Pace' post.

Question 1 from asmediaset

Editing: Soundtrack

Editing: Rough Cut Movie

This is our rough cut without sound, as we put the sequences and titles together to see how well everything will fit.

Production company IDENT

In our pitch we mentioned that our desired production company would be "Paramount Pictures." due to their positive reputation and history in working with thriller films. So here's the IDENT.

Screenshots/MYSPACE

Social Networking/MYSPACE

Screenshots/FACEBOOK

Social Networking/FACEBOOK

 

We decided that as distribution is vital when creating a successful film we would create several social networking accounts to promote our opening, just as we did with our swede for Twilight. :P 

Screenshots/TWITTER

Social Networking/TWITTER

We decided that as distribution is vital when creating a successful film we would create several social networking accounts to promote our opening, just as we did with our swede for Twilight. :P 

Hicccups

During  this project we did come across a few sticky patches along the way that we did overcome through teamwork and compromise some which were admittedly due to lack of preparation but others that were out of our control. For example we had to change our story board twice due to the fact that due to traffic I couldn't make it to one of the storyboard creation tasks, we had a strict deadline because Victoria had a lesson after lunch and needed to be back at college before 1:15 with all the equipment so they had to proceed on without me adding a green stick man to represent myself in places where I would have been if there which proved to be comical during our pitch to Marissa unconventional in terms of a serious project. Then to make matters worse on the first day of filming as a group we forgot to bring a physical copy of the story board we had presented and thus had to take time in creating a new one based on our new shots. In the end our second storyboard proved to be better than the first however if we'd taking the proper precautions in terms of organization we could have saved a great deal of time that we could have invested into editing or perfecting the soundtrack of blogging.

Editing/ Finishing touches

After a significant amount of time attempting to perfect our ideas, going out to film and bringing footage back and so forth we began to realize that due to timing and the strict limit of how long our open can and should be we had to cut out half of our ideas for a stylized opening similar to SE7EN's. Therefore we were unable to make use of the props we originally wanted like the passports, news paper cut outs etc and focused all of our energies into perfecting our narrative with the bag swap idea. in the end we had to improvise using left over and thought to be "useless" shots to make up for the stylized shots we were now missing. Thanks to Ellie's brilliant editing skills and background in film studies she managed to use a number of effects (Red colored and deliberate shaken shots.) to make our shots look as weird and distorted to match the soundtrack I created using Soundtrack pro.

Research | Using Soundtrack

We tested out sounds in soundtrack pro in order to understand the use of background music and foley sounds.

I used the tracks to overlap sounds and see what works and how they interact with each other and the volumes of each in order to create my own track with the provided sounds. This was very useful when it came to doing our own soundtrack for the opening because we understood how the program works.