Thriller Evaluation Final Draft

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

  
  

In our thriller, we looked at many traditional conventions of existing thriller movies such as The Blair Witch Project, Donnie Darko and The Book Of Eli. We did not want to conform to all thriller conventions as our thriller falls into the psychological thriller sub-genre so challenging some conventions (such as gender roles) would enhance the overall feel.

The location we chose for the entire opening for our thriller film (above right), a forest, is a common convention of the thriller genre as the setting can give the audience a sense of abandonment, loneliness and desolation. This helps to convey the feelings of hoplessness and being lost that the main character would feel. Also, the vertical lines of the trees can represent bars in a cage and entrapment, another convention of thrillers. This can help to give the audience the feeling that the character is unable to escape. We looked at other films where a wood or forest is the setting such as The Blair Witch Project (above left), the opening of The Book Of Eli and Dog Soldiers.

Masks are another convention of the thriller genre. Our hallucination character, the woman in the gas mask, wears a mask in order to appear more mysterious and less human. We chose to do this as she is not actually real so does not need to appear normal. A mask is worn by the character in the opening scenes of The Book Of Eli (left) in order to make the character look more mysterious. We hope we have achieved a similar effect.

We tried to use a variety of different camera angles and shots in order to keep the audience's attention focused on the action. We used some POV shots where the character is looking around the forest, this links to the Blair Witch Project again as the same style shots are frequently used in it.

Our plot fits into the Psychological Thriller sub-genre as it is a bout mental illness. Our media product is, in many ways similar to Donnie Darko as in the film he has hallucinations of a big weird rabbit thing called Frank. We looked at this film in order to draw inspiration for our thriller opening. For exaple, the eerie music during the opening scenes of the film.

We decided to have our psychopathic hallucination as a woman and the victim as a man. We did this in order to challenge the conventional gender roles in movies and hope to have achieved the effect of amking the viewer challenge ordinary conventions in their heads... We have chosen to conform to many traditional conventions of the thriller genre; bars, entrapment, voyeurism, masks... We did this in order to make it easy for our audience to be able to recognise it as a thriller movie but hope that they do not become bored through seeing exactly what they expect to see in a thriller.

• How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The main social group shown in our thriller is british youths as our main character is Rhys, a 19 year old schizophrnenic drug user. Our plot involves drug use and the rave culture. I believe that our thriller represents this social group well in that it shows how seemingly normal people can have serious underlying mental health issues...

Our thriller challenges gender roles as our 'victim' is male and the 'villain' is female. This contradicts the stereotypical gender roles in movies as it is usually a male who is the villain and the female is usually the damsel in distress.

Our thriller does conform to the theory of male gaze as the female character is dressed in tight jeans and therefore is slightly portrayed as a sexual object. However as this is combined with the challenges to gender roles, she is not seen as a useless woman in need of rescue.

• What kind of media institution might distribute your media product?

There are many ways to distribute our thriller opening. The internet is a good place to start. Websites such as Youtube allow anyone to upload and view videos for free. This is good in a way as there is no cost to us for distribution, however this also means that it is very difficult to make any money from these kinds of websites. One very good thing about using websites such as Youtube is that you can target almost all audiences simultaneously.

Our thriller opening has a challenging plot in that when we screened our rough cut, a lot of the feedback that we got pointed to the fact that people thought there was more than one gas mask-wearing figure surrounding the character or Rhys. This was the effect we were going for so that it could be explained during the film that she is a hallucination. This could lead to our thriller receiving finding to be made into a feature film and then released in cinemas. This is, in my opinion, the best way for our thriller to be distributed as it would be a lot more well done with adequate funding and would also make a tidy profit at the box office.

• Who would be the audience for your media product?

Through our audience feedback sessions, we discovered that most people enjoy watching psychological thrillers. However, to be a little more specific - our thriller is mainly aimed at intellectual people who enjoy watching movies that make them think... Movies that you need to actively think about while watching in order to fully understand the complex plot. I believe people who would most enjoy our movie are people who enjoy other Psychological Thrillers such as Donnie Darko, Inception and Shutter Island.

• How did you attract/address your audience?

One way in which we attracted our audience was through our choice to have no dialogue in the opening of our thriller. We did this in order to keep the tension in the scenes. We hope this had the effect of making the audience want to watch the rest of the film and our feedback supported this.

Also, by having lots of action during the opening we capture the attention of the audience. The beginning of our film is what happens in the end of the film. This could have the effect of boring people through the rest of the film as they already know what will happen, but we intended for our audience to be fascinated by the events leading up to the attack in the opening and also we wanted them to wonder who these characters are and what their stories were. In our audience research, many people did not realise that the woman in the mask was in fact a figment of Rhys' imagination so hopefully the audience would be interested in finding out what is going on by watching the rest of the film.

• What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

From making the opening of the thriller movie, I have learned many thing. Firstly, I have found out how to navigate my way round a mac, as I have only ever previously used windows. I found this very difficult at first, but after lots of practice and learning the various keyboard shortcuts (which was quite confusing after being used to windows shortcuts).

Also, I have learned how to use the video cameras in the college and the various settings on them which is very useful. It would have been a lot more useful to know more about the cameras before filming though as we had a lot of trouble trying to import some of the video we filmed as we had accidentily filmed it in HD which Final Cut did not like at all. I also had some advantage with the editing software as I had previously used it to make a music video during activities week at the end of last year and from doing the music video for A2 media.

We also ran into a bit of trouble every time we opened our thriller in Final Cut because it would tell us that it had lost some of the files or that they were 'offline'. This meant that they needed reconnecting every time which was annoying to say the least. I also learned a bit more about transitions and effects such as hue and saturation (used to make some clips darker to make it appear as if it is evening/night) as I had only previously used simple transitions and not used the effects fully.

We also used Garage Band to create our music track, this also threw up a few problems but only minor ones and they were easily overcome.

• Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you think you have learned in the progression from it to the final product?

Our prelim task was a lot different from our thriller opening in that it had a much simpler storyline and was much shorter. Creating the prelim did help a lot in the making of the thriller opening as it taught us how to plan a shooting schedule effectively and showed us the importance of following a storyboard (although we did accidently forget it the first time we went to shoot some of the thriller so had to go back for a second session).

Another thing I have learned is the importance of working in a group. We were all assigned different jobs to do so if we were too slack, we would be letting the whole group down. Audience feedback is also very important, we did not do any form of audience feedback for our prelim task as it was really just a practice for using the cameras and the editing software. We found the feedback sessions very useful and got some good comments from it to help us improve our thriller.