Evaluation

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

For our media product we developed a two minute opening sequence to a new fiction film called Fixation, which is a psychological thriller with a plot of a stalker and kidnapper, our whole film idea was to be a linear film. We got these ideas from films like the One Hour Photo and The Lovely Bones, the idea of the stalking came from the One Hour Photo and the investigation part of our film came from The Lovely Bones. 

Gilbert getting ready for a 'normal day'

Dexter title opening sequence

Our film challenges the stereotypical stalker film from the beginning as it doesn't go straight into finding out that he is a disturbed person, as he is shown as a normal man getting ready for a normal day.  The idea for this came from the television programme Dexter as the opening sequence is similar, normal daily activities but then it all changes. 


We didn't use the chronological order for a normal thriller, as we wanted ours to be different.  Our film starts by telling the story through Gilbert's life, then into the whole film we decided that it would be from Ben's point of view of him investigation is sisters disappearance.  Showing the story by Gilbert right at the beginning shows that he has to power and control. Although our film is different by the order of things done, we did have the typical characters for a stalker, kidnapping theme to a psychological thriller, with a vulnerable teenage girl, a psychotic individual. Although these are normal characters for a psychological thriller, we used the psychotic individual character and made him a doctor, to give the whole film a twist.

We used a clock right at the beginning of the final product to establish the time, also a clock was shown at the very end of our two minutes to show that the time is running out for Sky. We used close up of Sky's face to show that she had a black eye. We used make up to produce the black eye on Sky and a pale foundation so that she looked colourless, as if she had been there a few days. The time was established but the place wasn't, as the majority of the shots were filmed as close ups and no establishing shots meant that there was no detailed insight to Gilbert's life. Also none of the shots of Gilbert, show his face clearly which gives the mysteriousness and tension to the audience. We also used a spotlight to shine behind Sky so that you could see her but at first only an outline of her body, then as it got to the close ups, you could see her face but still no reveal of Gilbert's face.

We used a piece of music the whole way through the 2 minute opening sequence. When we edited the clip and the music together we made sure they fit and every time there was a cut it was to a beat in the music to give more tension. The piece of music is very different to what you would expect to hear in a thriller, as it was a classical piece of music with violins and a piano. This is supposed to show our character 'Gilbert' as an intellectual person which is also shown through the clips as he combs his hair and straightens his tie. 

The outfit we used for Sky was black jeans and pumps and a white vest top, we used these to show her as a normal teenage girl.The outfits used were dark and mysterious for Gilbert so you couldn't see anything other than his outline on some of the shots. This was because in our research we found that most villains wore dark clothing. 

The iconography used for our thriller also didn't match to other thrillers where they have red writing for danger, we used a typewriter font to hint towards Gilbert's medical career and is intellectual side. 

The setting of our film also challenged the stereo typical thriller as it was set in the morning and thrillers are usually based around dark nights. For our locations we used a TV and Radio studio in college for our basement as it had an electricity box that made it feel like a basement and we also used an house with small areas that we used which worked really well with our storyline.

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

We used the stereotypical image of a young female character to create our character Sky Harrison. Sky is a typical teenage girl, which is reflected through the costume as it is just an average female teenagers daily outfit. We decided that the parents of her and Ben (Sky's brother) would be married and typically supportive and caring. As Sky's bedroom would be shown in the whole film, we decided this to be a very girly bedroom to show her personality.

Sky's costume, Black jeans and
 pumps, white top.

To show Sky's vulnerability we filmed her in long shot and used make up to produce a black eye, we also decided that Gilbert would have drugged her and therefor she looks tired and a bit drowsy. We showed this more in the film by using the fade out transitions between shots which would create a slow build up. The positioning of our character Sky made her look more vulnerable and isolated, as we filmed the shots of Sky just in front of a spotlight to highlight on the make up and drowsiness. The only talking we have in our film is of Sky asking 'Who's There?' which was stuttered and slightly drowned out by the music in the film.




We imaged our stalker character, Gilbert Anderson, as a doctor that at first is just wakening up to an average day, then as the first part goes on we find out that Gilbert isn't the nice, kind, trusting Doctor we all expect to be seen by. In our project we image Gilbert in a dark shirt and trousers, with a slightly lighter tie. We used this costume for Gilbert as we found through our research in thrillers or horrors the villain is mainly dressed in dark clothing.

Villain is to the right, (dark jacket)
from se7en

Gilberts costume, dark shirt and
slighlty lighter coloured tie. 

Our whole film would have used more stereotypes of a caring older brother (Ben Harrison) to Sky, as he goes searching for her because he believes there is something wrong with the situation in hand. Ben also has to take control of the situation more once he contacts the Police and they cannot find Sky in the house he as stated.

3. What kind of media instituition might distribute your media product and why?

 After looking at a few distributors we decided on Soda Pictures, a UK based film distributor of art house, independant and world cinema. Soda Pictures started in 2002 and has established an impressive catalogue of world cinema and independant films working with upcoming directors.
Soda Pictures is made up of a small team that consists of 6 people, the most successful films over the last few years distributed by Soda Pictures have been 'Head-On by faith' and 'After the Wedding.' Soda Pictures have also represented a collection of films on DVD, from vintage to classic.


  Soda Pictures is our chosen distributing company because they distribute small independent British films, and for our film we are aiming it at British film lovers, so having Soda Pictures as our distributor will help to promote our film to the right people, and show the film in the right places.


Film distributors such as 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers would not have been suitable to distribute our film as they are large-scale distributing film companies that specializes in Hollywood Blockbusters.  If we chose one of these distributing companies for our film we would have had to change the audience of our film and focus more on the events in the story. Although the budget would be higher we would have to change the events in the story to aim it at a different audience.

The similar film we researched was 'The Lovely Bones' this film had a similar story line not a similar genre, but The Lovely Bones was distributed by Paramount Pictures. Paramount Pictures also distributed the re-release of 'Titanic' in 3D. Paramount Pictures have distributed a lot of films over many years, but 'Vertigo' which was distributed by Paramount Pictures is a psychological thriller, the same genre as our film.


'One Hour Photo' which is the same genre as our film and a similar storyline was distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Fox Searchlight Pictures is a film division of Fox Filmed Entertainment alongside the larger Fox studio 20th Century Fox. It specialized in independent and British films, alongside dramedy and horror and non-English-language films.


Through out the research into these two films we found that they both have an authentic feel of independent films which is what we have hoped to captured in our project Fixation.

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

We decided on a 15 certificate for our film because of strong language, concept horror, imitable behavior, and the whole theme of the film is appropriate for 15 years old. Also our project is aimed towards teenagers and young adults. We found more out about what this age range would like out of a film with our research, as both men and women like large range of genres such as Action, Romance, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Thriller, Western.

 The certificate also came from our research into our target area and what they thought so we created an online questionnaire for them to fill in. We posted the link to the questionnaire on social network site, Facebook. We found this to be the easiest way to access our audience as we are in that age range. Doing the questionnaire online made it easy to compare the results at the end as we received the feedback via a spreadsheet.


The audience we received feedback from were mainly students, and then the employed, who were age ranged from 13 to 71, although we didn't want to aim the film at this large of a gap or so young we took into consideration what they would like to see also, as for the younger ones they may be watching films like this in a few years time. Their media consumption's entailed watching films at the cinema, on the TV or on DVD at home, watching online and downloading the films or via games consoles.


After receiving the feedback, and comparing the results we then created two treatments, one for the two minutes that we were filming and the other for the whole film. These treatments drew on the strong points that we received in the results from our questionnaire. We realized by doing this research and using the research that we where then end up with a finished product that our target audience would like and enjoy.


The feedback showed us that we should have a lot of twists and to create unexpected events to create the suspense needed for a thriller. Although, they audience would prefer a realistic story outline but with an interesting plot to keep them watching it.


Questionnaire Link

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

Using Facebook to get our questionnaire out to our audience was probably the best way we could, as it made it easier to reach our target audience, of teenagers and young adults. During the pre-production stage of the project we developed the idea for our film and realized it would be best to aim at teenagers and young adults as they will be able to relate to the film more, with one of the main characters being a similar age. We did find through the questionnaire that most young people like watching thrillers, and used a kidnapping scenario as our plot. To get this effect we needed to use certain lighting, props, and costumes otherwise it wouldn't look like a thriller.  

Dark effect to create tension.

Once we received feedback, we then noticed that the film did attract our target audience. The feedback comments reassured the whole group that we did achieve as we wanted, with comments like 'I like the dark, mysterious feel of the film' and 'The music creates tension because it's not what you expect to hear.'  We did successfully manage to fit the film together to give tension also by the camera shots as well as the storyline being as we wanted, comments such as 'The film looks very technical and professional' and 'The film as good suspense.' The effect of the clock showing at the beginning and the end of our two minute project shows the time is running out for our female character, Sky. 


Not all comments were good like these ones, some of the other comments were, 'The music should stop when there's dialogue, so we can clearly hear what the characters are saying' and 'To get a more spooky effect maybe it would be better to film late at night?' We didn't film late at night as this would ruin the whole getting ready for a normal day, to find out that he's a bit creepy. 


The project we have done could be improved if we took what our audience gave us as feedback and used this to make the work better.

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

We used Google blogger throughout our whole project to upload all our work to keep it all together. The only problem I found with Google Blogger is that as we didn’t post our work from the beginning, the work wasn't in order and we could find out how to put the posts in chronological order, eventually we did find out how to do this and that is the only problem I have found with using Google Blogger. My skills of blogging by using Google Blogger have increased dramatically as this was the first time I have used it. 

 In the pre-production stage of our work we used many types of technology's. During the research of our film we used Google to find out about similar films, genres, and the certificates we were thinking about. Although using Google is very common for us, we had to make sure the websites we got the information from was reliable sources of information so that we weren't finding information that was incorrect. As we wanted reliable internet web pages we were told not to use Wikipedia as information can be uploaded and changed by anyone and could be wrong, but I did use websites such as Internet Movie Database (IMDb) Link. Also to research films similar to ours we used YouTube to find video clips that we could embed onto our blog, but we did have a problem with one of the videos as there was no embed code so this video had to be shown on the blog as a link.

To create our questionnaire for our audience research we used Google Forms, as it was easy to use. As we had used Google forms before to create a questionnaire we didn’t have any problems what so ever. It was also the best way to create our questionnaire as it meant we could easily send it out to people to fill in as it was electronically. Once the questionnaire was finished we sent it out via a social networking site, Facebook, so it reached the audience we wanted it to. We posted the link to our questionnaire easily onto Facebook because we were all knowledgeable of that social networking site.  As people filled in the questionnaire we received the results in a spread sheet which made it easy to analyse. 

During the production of our film we used Photoshop to create the production company logo. As Emma was experienced for using Photoshop, she created the production company logo so it was done quicker as she wouldn’t have problems doing so.  The class was advised to use Celtx to create the script but as Celtx is only available on apple computers I decided not to use that so I had more time to create the script. I found a website to create scripts on which were available on all computers, this website was Scriptbuddy. Scriptbuddy allowed me to create a professional looking script with all the correct features such as ‘Character’, ‘Dialogue’ and ’Action’.  During pre-production we did a few paper based plans for the script and then it was just typed up onto Scriptbuddy. Using Scriptbuddy for the first time I did have a few problems such as not knowing how to add Dialogue and Actions but I soon learnt how to do so.  We used a scanner to put some paper based documents onto the blog.

Also during the production of our film we used a Digital Video Camera to film the whole project. We used this type of camera as we had used one before and because it was really easy to upload the filming onto a computer ready to edit. Although we had used one of these cameras before, we did have a problem as who was using the camera kept clicking the camera button and not the record button, this was soon sorted once we realized what was happening. 

For our post production part of the project we used Final Cut Express to edit the clips into a film so that it would have a realistic yet professional quality. Using this software allowed us to develop our editing experience. We were able to use fade in and out transitions in between shots to create the dreamy effect we wanted. Final cut was suitable for us to use because it allows users to upload all possible shots to the library, so that you can compare shots easily and choose the best one.

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

180 Degree rule

The preliminary task was a much easier task than our main task, as we weren't experienced with the equipment we would have to use for our main task. The preliminary task was a continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing room, sitting down in a chair opposite another character and having a conversation to the other character.This task had to demonstrate 180-degree rule, shot/reverse shot and match on action. During the pre-production of this task we had to allocate job roles to each member of group, such as director, editor, and camera. We also had to brainstorm ideas for the short conversation, producing a script and storyboard and filling in all required documents, such as risk assessment and location recce.



This is an example i found on YouTube of shot/reverse shot, continuity, obeys the 180 degree rule and has a match on action.


The above were also needed to complete the pre-production of the main task although we had to go into more depth with the research so we had to find similar films to the idea we came up with. This helped us to recognize how much time and effort would have to go into producing a quality project. The main task consisted of filming the titles and opening sequence to a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.


This proved to be a lot harder than expected once we got further into the project as we had to share all work out equally between the group as for the preliminary task this wasn't needed as much. Although the preliminary task was given to us directly and the main task was decided by us, just had to be an opening to a new fiction film, I felt that as the preliminary task was our first practical task and this made us feel more free than the main task did.


The fact that in the preliminary task we learnt how to use the equipment, in the main task we all felt more confident using the equipment and the skills for using them soon progressed during both projects, mainly during the main task as we had longer to finish this task. We decided to attempt to manage our time better so that the filming would be done a while before the deadline as then we had longer to edit and re-film if need be.