Evaluation

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

Our media product uses most of our thriller conventions but we also added another level to it to portray our subgenre; psychological. Our product consist of a protagonist and an antagonist however we developed this idea of have just one character who represented both of these; it gave our product that nightmarish quality. There is a sense of voyerism throughout our thriller which may confuse our audience into beliving there is somebody watching over our sleeping character but it is revealed at the end when the antagonist is observing the protagonist in her mirror. IS this her reflection? or is this an actual different character? Is this her dreams? or her reality. This is left untold. We tried to challenge the conventions into our product to represent the confusion of our protagonist and her psycological state. We left out and typicality which may be seen in other psychological thriller; this included changing the gender of the main character (which is usually a male) and leaving out any thing to do with death.

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

Our product does not focus on any group; just on one dominant view of a little girl. We used such a girl because she demonstrates children of a small age whom have a wide range of creativity and imagine things that arent really happening in the dark and which can make anything seem alive but at the same time disturbing. The little girls psychological state could also show how the people around her influence her to such vivid images and corrupting something usually seen as so innocent and playful (dolls).

3) What kind of media institutions might distribute your media product and why?

Film4 seems a most likely candidate to distribute our media product as they've had experience in showing a wide range of successful films of any genre and filmed in any period from films such as "Slumdog Millionaire" to "Kitchen sink" realistic films which seem to have came across as just as successful of other films that have been done on an unlimited budget.This is just our kind of product where we show a sort of realism (psychological problems) and give it an Americanised twist to it with the girl in the mirror. Although Film4 is a British film institute; they do screen some films with american aspects in them like ours.

4) Who would be the audience for your media project?

From our questionnaire and general research;our target audience would be between the ages of 15-25 of both genders. This is due to the fact that at this age, our audience still have that creativity on them and could still vividly remember what it was like for them at a younger age to sleep alone in the dark with their imagination running wild. We didn't think anyone younger than 15 would be suitable in watching our product as it's content is quite disturbing and might encourage them to be as scared as our protagonist at night. Older poeple however may not be able to relate to our product as well as our targeted audience.

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

We started researching thrillers (such as its conventions and sub-genres) and saw which ones were the most common or successful. We created a questionnaire to ask our potential audience questions we were not sure of or could not find answers to from other general research. The most common answers we recieved are the ones we used in our piece to satisfy our audience and to attact them more to it. We used visual effects in our piece to set the style and scene but also to seperate the past and the present.

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

From our preliminary exercise, I learnt how to arrange good shots and get them to be very effective. This became a big part in our final piece as we needed the best angles we could and make them mean something everytime. Using the tri-pod sometimes became difficults as it would only go so high and only go so low, and became a problem but we worked around it. The iMac computers was something i never used before and found it difficult using the new softwares. After a few lessons of just experimenting I became very adapted to it and could do things alot more easier, even if we did encounter a few more problems; there was always a way of solving it if that included importing some more footage or changing some scenes around. The iMovie programme did let us down quite regularly. Our preliminary exercise didn't work as i would have liked as it kept jumping and speeding up. We still do not know why that happened but we used what we could. Our final piece also took a while to edit as the programme often didn't let us crop our piece properly or add effects. However, we did overcome these problems and produce a good piece.

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

I have learnt to keep enough time of planning, filming (especially when we are deciding the date to do it) and editing. I have also learnt that it is best to have more than one idea in case one idea does not work out properly and to overlook our footage during filming incase it doesn't look as good as we want it to be or we've missed something out. Also, when editing, make sure that we have a long enough time to edit, in case the programme and technical equipment does not work properly. Furthermore, always keep up to date with what is going on with your group and always ask when you are not sure if you feel uncertain about something.

Alice- Final Piece- re-edited

Neelam was not in media today. However Samantha and myself viewed our piece again and decided to change the voice over. We made a new one and edited the pitch of it to make it more higher to sound like a young girl.

Animatic - Alice [Pictures and Writing]

This is our completed storyboard (notes with illustrations) in an animatic style:

Animatic - Alice [Just Pictures]

As my group kept changing our Thriller idea we didnt have time to produce a storyboard to follow when we began filming. However myself and Samantha drew up one afterwards to show how we saw our thriller when it was constructed.

Questionnaire - Results

We gave our questionnaire to 20 people. The results are shown in the brackets below next to the choices.


1) Gender?

Male (10) Female (10)

2) How old are you?

11-14 15-18 (18) 19-23 24-27 28+ (2)

3) What appeals to you the most in a Thriller

The soundtrack (6) The cast (11) Director Plot (3) Others

Please state..................

4) What is your favourite sub-genre in a Thriller

Horror (12) Psychological (6) Action (2) Crime Sci-fi Others

Please state.......................

5) What was the last Thriller you watched?
The most common result was "Final Destination" with 4 results.

6) What mark would you give it (out of 10)? if the number is high, what exactly appealed to you
if the number is low, would could have been better?
On average, the viewers gave "Final Destination" 8/10. They enjoyed the action and the plot.

7) Who do you focus more on when watching a Thriller

The Protagonist (6) The Antagonist (14)


8) What do you find predictable/irritating when you watch any thriller?
Deaths (17) How the Antagonist is presented (3)

Final Piece- ALICE!

My group has finally, successfully,finished our Thriller. All we needed to do was to add more effects, credits and music (which was made by our friend, Ernest, who fully agreed into helping us with it). There didn't seem to any technical problems and the finished results seem satisfactory.

We came up with calling our Thriller "Alice", from "Alice in Wonderland" because of it's weird and wonderful contruction and it being a little girl's name which represents Samantha.
We also came up with other names before all mutually agreeing on this one. The lists of names were:
:- Emily
:- Candy
:- Carrie
:- Daisy
:- Sally
:- Alice
:- Sarah
:- Zahara
:- Lacy
:- Polly

When we chose the name for our piece, Samantha came up with the idea that she should say the name as a voice over when it appears on screen in a child like manner to create it a creepy atmosphere to the audience.

Here it is: Alice!!!!

Editing sessions

22nd April-

Myself and Samantha went after school to start editing our Thriller. We began to crop it but it wasnt going very well.; everytime we would cut a certain clip; the section we intended to keep was something totally different from what we had expected. It then started making copies of this unwanted footage. We asked our teacher for his advice and he thought it may be because we imported large amounts of the footage which was confusing the system and therefore muddling up our clips. He then suggested we start again but this time spliting a whole clip at playhead and cutting the parts we didnt need. However it began to do the same thing with making unwanted clips and therefore we decided to give up for that day and re-start it in our media lesson.

23rd April-

Myself, Samantha and Neelam continued editing and at first it was working fine and manage to edit some footage however after a while we encountered the same problems. We spent most of the double period lesson attempting to solve the problems and cropping as much as we could. We didnt manage to crop them all nor put them in order yet.

25th April-

Neelam didn't attend our media lesson today so myself and Samantha continued to edit ourselves. We cropped the rest of our clips by splitting them at playhead and it finally worked and we wasn't delayed by any problems. Once we completed the cutting what we didnt want, we began arranging the clips in order of what the audience will see but we didt manage to finish this.

Weekend-

Over the weekend myself and Samantha decided to talk about what genre of music we should use for our thriller but due to our busy schedules only had time to discuss this over the phone. Samantha did the research whilst i listened and we gave our verdict on the music she found. We found 3 non-copyright sounds that we may use which we agreed would suit our piece very well. When we have finished the editing which should hopefully be finished by Wednesday at the most we will then fit each of our tested music to our finished thriller and see which one suits the best. Hopefully we shouldnt encounter any more technical problems!!!