Evaluation 2 - 'How does your media product represent particular social groups?'

We have the female gender being shown as the weaker sex in our sequence. We didn't focus much on the character itself for too long as she wasn't the main factor in the sequence. Although if seen in this frame one can see that she's a young female probably in her late teens or early 20's - we've shown her as being tied up and a victim of a male villain.

Our main idea was to focus on the male character and what he was doing. We didn't show much of the male character but we wanted character type similar to Christian Bale's character in 'American Psycho' who was a successful business man wanting to fit in with urges to murder. Like in 'American Psycho' there is a male character who is dominant to the female gender (as seen on the right) just like in our sequence. Since we didn't give a lot of information on our male character we can't say much about ethnicity but our main idea was to show a normal everyday male who can't control his urges to murder, like the character in 'American Psycho.' 

Evaluation 3 - 'What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?'

'Psyche' is a more of an independent film which would be based in the United Kingdom. The first idea is that it could be directly sent to DVD instead of going on screens, although taking the movie and showing it in film festivals (eg. Sundance) could be a goos first step to see how well it does. We can them decide what the best decision would be for the movie.

The UK film council has been distributing and funding movies for 10 years including films such as Kidulthood and Bafta and Oscar winning 'The King's Speech.' Although a comapny like Paramount Pictures may be more reliable, since they have been around for nearly 100 years, the UK film council would be a better choice as they are situated in the UK and distribute non-mainstream movies to the audience as seen in previous movies.

Evaluation 4 - 'Who would be the audience for your media product?'

Our project is a psychological crime thriller with elements of blood, although we didn't want to put too much in as it would just be seen as a horror rather than a thriller, like the 'Saw' franchise. Our main inspirations were movies such as 'Se7en' and television openings from 'Dexter' and 'Six Feet Under'- this was for our film opening idea. We got a character idea from the movie 'American Psycho' and wanted to do something similar. Both 'Se7en' and 'American Psycho' are classed as 18 where most of the audience for it were males aged 18 and above;

Above is a demograpgh breakdown that displays viewers ratings on the movie Se7en. Most males and females above 18 rated highly, the younger generation and those above 45 rated lower. There is also many more men who rated meaning more men watched the film.


We did not want to be restricted to just 18 and older so we wanted something similar along the lines of those 2 movies but not as gruesome so that it could only be watched by 18+. By getting information from our questionairres from many school mates (aged 15-18) we figured out how to tone it down so that the movie would appeal to 15 year olds as well as 18 and above (18-26).

The target audience of our product is between 15-25 years old, older teens to mid twenties. By looking at movies such as Se7en and American Psycho we decided that our movie would fit that audience range the most due to the type of genre it is and the content that is displayed on scene. Our product also shows blood meaning there would probably be a bit of action in there as well as a male character being the dominant gender. Many movies with similar genres show males as the dominant. This means that our movie would also target males more than females.

Evaluation 5 - 'How did you attract/address your audience?'

http://ashwin-dabasia.blogspot.com/2011/03/evaluation-task-5.html 

This video answers the above question and is about the project that i was part of. Unfortunately i cannot upload the video on my blog at the time although it will be uploaded asap.

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

There are many different programmes and applications form websites that we used to make our media products. Some new to us while others we found familiar, there were those that took time to get used to where a few we got the hang of straight away.

The first new product, at least to me, was the use of a Mac conmputer. Personally I had never used one before and it took a little time to get used to. But it is because of this that we were able to use some of the programmes needed to make our media product as some applications only work on a Mac computer.

We also had access to a sony HD camcorder which was where we filmed all our scenes and takes. There weren't many problems with the use of the camera and it didn't take too long for us to get used to using it. The addition of a dolly helped with a couple of shots. 

The first application we used was blogger which we needed a google account for. It allowed us to make a blog so we can record all our work on the number of different blogs we have. As it is accessable via the internet a browser was also required, i personally used Safari. 

Safari was the main browser that i used to do most of my work and research. I also used mozilla firfox many times but not as often as safari which i used both at school and at home.

We were then introduced to the non-linear editing software Final Cut Express. This is where most of our video editing happpened. All the cuts twe shot with the camera were put on the Mac and then put in Final Cut Express so that we could get the best takes and fit them in the scene to make a flowing sequence called our thriller opening sequence.

- The interface of the Final Cut Express application

We also used the Adobe After Effects application available to us, more specifically Adobe After Effects CS4. In here we did some of the video editing and added a few effects, well the only thing we changed of the video was the brightness and contrast. We mainly used this application to create and work with the text and integrate it with the video.

Garageband is another useful application we used which is only for the Mac. We used this and the enormous number of loops it provided us to create our soundtrack for our opening sequence. It had a wide range of sounds from a great number of instruments as well as other more 'wacky' sounds.

The ever so popular youtube allows you to upload your own videos as well as watch what other people have done. This site was one of the most useful in terms of research into other thriller film openings and allowed us to embed those videos to show exactly which ones we did research.

What work would be complete without the use of Google. Probably the most important factor for our research it allowed us to find many different sites, including art of the title, IMBD and more, for our research.

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

In our preliminary task we were unprepared. We didn't plan everything and a lot of the things we did weren't in accordance to the proper thriller genre. We though if we got some good camera angles and we did something spooky, that our preliminary task would fit the thriller genre - we were wrong.

We hadn't done any research on our prelim task and so we didn't know so much about how the conventions of thrillers worked and how important they were to making a successful opening. We didn't take into account the various elements needed at first. We had also just got started with all the equipment and applications on the prliminary task, we didn't know too much about them and couldn't use them to maximum efficiency.

We began the creation of our opening sequence much differently than we had for our preliminary task. We didn't just make an idea on the spot, we had many different ideas on what we wanted to do and how we were going to them, if we could add things from all our ideas and put it into one finished product. We also did our research into the thriller openings and movies and how the openings of thrillers lead to the movie and the story it portrayed. We even used openings from television shows to broaden our perspective. This allowed us to get a better idea of how thriller movies work and correspond with the audience, something we did not do in our preliminary. Using real life products as inspiration (movies such as American Psycho) helped immensely.

We were also a lot more comfortable in the use of equipment. We were more used to using the camera and applications which allowed us to shoot our scenes with a variety of different camera shots and angles suited to our genre and story.

We learned a variety of different camera angles and shots and used them better than we had in the preliminary task;

Medium close-up shot of the victims upper body

Close-up of character's feet as he walks alongs

                                                                                        
These are screengrabs of shots we used in our thriller sequence. We used some of them in our preliminary task although with not as much efficiency. In our preliminary task we were to absorbed in the idea of using many differeny kinds of shots at once (even though there wasn't much going on) and making them as 'extravagent' as possible.

A high angle shot we used in one of our scenes

Although there are still things that could have improved. The soundtrack for one didn't exactly fit the purpose 100%. Unfortunately our original music editor/creator was not present and could  not create the music so we had to improvise. We could have also improved on our setting/location, there were many places we could have explored although alas it was not meant to be.

 

Soundtrack

 

 A screen shot, taken by a member in my group, of him creating a soundtrack for the thriller production. The application 'Garage Band' was used for this process where it's vast amount of sample tunes and loops allowed us to experiment with the music to create what we thought a suitable track which would go well with the sequence as well as emphasis what we wanted to show.