Media Evaluation

Media Evaluation

Before going off to film our thriller we watched clips of different thriller movies to get inspiration for our own films. We watched such films as What Lies Beneath
The Shining

Because we watched these clips, we were able to extract certain camera angles that we could use in our thriller, or even similar themes that we could follow. It was a useful way of compiling ideas together.
After completing the opening there are many things that are noticeably different compared to typical thriller movies. Normally, a film would use an establishing shot as the very first shot; this is to set the scene so the audience is aware of where the film is taking place.
However, our thriller opening started with a close up shot of a face. Comparatively, it’s against the conventional opening of a movie – not necessarily a thriller.
As a group we decided to use flashbacks in our opening as a way of raising questions, this is a typical way of beginning a movie because the audience wants something to grab their interest the minute they start watching.
Not many movies begin their story with the end, but we decided to do that because it would make the opening itself more entertaining, as it makes you wonder “who is that?” “Why are they dead?” “Who is the killer?” etc.
We discussed the audience together, as a group, analyzing our ideas for the thriller and to which age groups they would be suitable for. In the end we chose the idea for our opening along with the age group we would be creating the film for: 15 plus.
A typical person that would probably see this movie would be around the age of fifteen or sixteen; likes to watch movies that make them jump, but can’t see 18’s yet. Probably an independent person, and wouldn’t go and see this movie with their parents. They would most likely enjoy it because it gives a slight eerie mood, but it’s not full on scary. There’s a lot of elements that could give a slight jump to that sort of audience but not enough to terrify them.
In order to attract this sort of audience, it is important to advertise in ways that would be visible to them. Technology nowadays allows us to advertise things in a much larger scale:


Television allows adverts to be broadcast all over the world.
This movie would be a big Hollywood production, so the first main thing that would attract the audience to the movie would be if there was a huge celebrity as the lead role.
Because there would be, massive billboard posters, and bus advertisements would mean that people would see it every day. Although, it would have to be an explicit poster to capture the attention of our target audience. Also, television and computer advertisements would successful ways of getting our target audience to notice our film, and to get them interested in going to see it.

The thriller itself, I felt was successful. Our use of sound was simple yet effective, as it emphasized simple sounds (such as a knife sharpening) into sounding menacing and creepy. We also, made sure that we used a lot of different camera angles when filming the opening,

because we wanted to display our knowledge of working the camera. This worked well when editing because it enabled us to select what we thought worked best when putting all of the clips together. We also decided on using a point of view shot in our opening, from the aspect of the killer; to one make our thriller different from others, and two to allow the audience to see everything from the perspective of the killer.

The aim of our opening was to raise questions, and to start a story which wouldn’t be a conventional story line to most other movies. It would have been easy to have a girl being stalked on her way home, but we decided against it, and to have the killer already watching menacingly only meters away.
We also decided on a broken narrative in our opening, cutting from flashbacks to the present, and back again. We decided on this because we didn’t want to tell the whole story within the two minute opening, we wanted to raise questions and to keep the audience wanting more.
When it came to editing the opening itself, I found that the process wasn’t hard at all. It did become tedious at times when clips kept un-rendering themselves, and sometimes when the effects didn’t work so we had to keep replacing them. But as soon as we go the hang of Final Cut Pro we were editing the clips well.
Once we had all the clips in the right place, and we were certain that was the final sequence for our opening, we began to add the text.
We decided against overlaying the text on to the clips of film because it might distract the audience view. So, we kept it simple with a black background and white text. Although, it was important to have a font that looked creepy to keep in relation to the theme.
The appliance of text didn’t take very long, so it soon became time to add our soundtrack to the opening. This was the bit that was probably the hardest, mostly because we had to find suitable music to play over the opening. We went to Soundtrack Pro as the program to use for our music.

We soon came across a simple violin melody that sounded rather eerie, and we decided to loop it because it sounded good against the film. We added sounds over the melody, and these were the sounds of water running, and a knife being sharpened etc.
On a whole, creating the two minute opening was a rather simple process, with a bit of help from the technicians when it came to editing, but once we knew what we were doing we had no problem in creating the mood we wanted.
Each lesson we had, we had to record it on our blogs by using Blogger.

This was the way we were meant to keep track of our filming process, and it was also a way to post our movie on to the internet. Other ways in which we could have done that are by uploading it to Vimeo or YouTube.

By doing this, we are releasing our film to a much larger audience, as they these websites are visited by people from all over the world.
Looking back over the whole experience, I feel that I have learnt some vital skills when it comes to filming; learning about angles, and how to capture a shot, and how to work the actual camera itself.
I found the planning was probably the hardest part of the process because it was vital to get the right idea in our minds before we went off and filmed. We didn’t want to go out and film something and not know what we were going to actually shoot. I think the filming worked well because we all worked well as a group, which meant we listened to each other if someone had a suggestion on how to film something.
Overall, the whole process wasn’t too difficult, our group worked well together and we managed to create a brilliant piece of media that shows our true potential. I’ve learnt all about the different elements of a movie – how it is made, the camera work, the music, and editing. I’ve become more confident in producing a piece of work that has been well edited and has clean match-cuts. I think as a group we all worked well together, each giving our own ideas and agreeing and disagreeing when necessary, if it wasn’t for that then the opening might not have been finished.