Evaluation Question 7-
Catherine

 Evaluation Question 6- 
Catherine

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

Question 5 (Group)

How did you attract/ address your audience?

Conventions of a thriller we wanted to incorporate in our advertising and marketing campaign:

              

                An element of Tension 

                An antagonist

                Devices used to keep the audience guessing 

    Build up to a climax 

    Cliff hangers 

                Red herrings – misleading information  

                Big revelation at the end  

                Effective use of soundtracks 

                

Marketing through social media:

We feel that we can reach our target audience (15-21) successfully through the digital market- particularly social media. This is because this age range spends the most time on the internet and on social media sites. We drew inspiration for this idea from previous film marketing campaigns such as 21 jump street and The Hunger games who have all advertised through social media in order to gain the widest aufdience possible. 

Therefore, our team will create a trailer on Youtube, a twitter page and a Facebook page.

Visual Advertisement:

This form of advertisement had been used for years and s hugely successful if it is used in the right places and the visual aids are appealing. This includes posters, pictures and banners. These visual aids will be on buses, bus stops, motorway billboards and in newspapers. 



'Frank' Visual advertisement- Poster

Poster marketing in public:

Digital social media marketing- Twitter page

          Catherine- Evaluation Question 4-

Catherine

Catherine- Evaluation Question 3:
Catherine

Evaluation Question 2-
Catherine

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our antagonist, Frank, played by Patrick Coakely negatively represents teenage males in our film opening as he is portrayed as a brutal murdering psychopath.
We conformed to the stereotype of male teenagers being violent, aggressive and rebellious as Frank kills his mother and shows no signs of remorse.
 Frank is a 19 year old teenager that, as the audience see from the beginning of the film opening, creates a façade. As seen photos (left) Frank seems to be an average teenage boy which is initially communicated by his costuming. The black skinny jeans and Doc. Martins reflect the typical teenage fashion in the modern        

  day and the fact that Frank is holding a shopping bag shows that Frank is simply walking back from the shops after perhaps being sent out by his mother to buy groceries. These factors allow the character to put on a front of seeming perfectly normal despite the fact that the bag is full of cleaning products which Frank will use to clean up his mother's blood.

This façade that Frank puts on and the normality of his outside appearance is similar to the characters of Kevin in the independent film, 'We need to talk about Kevin' (Lynne Ramsay, 2011) and Peter and Paul in 'Funny Games' (Michael Haneke, 1997)

The central character in the movie 'We need to talk about Kevin' is very similar to Frank in our film opening as he also conforms to the male teenage stereotype of being aggressive and violent. Kevin is a 16 year old student whom like Frank murders his family. It's evident that Kevin puts on a completely different front when with his sister and father to when he is with his mother. When speaking with his sister and father Kevin is pleasant and cheerful, whereas when he is with his mother he shows a clear resentment towards her and is insulting and verbally abusive. This is the kind of façade Frank puts on to the outside world but is completely different with his mother.                                                                 The character of Kevin greatly influenced us when creating our antagonist as he constructed quite a disturbing and creepy atmosphere which we felt was perfect for our thriller. We thought the dark hair and pale skin was effective in creating a sinister character and so we took this into account when choosing our actor, Patrick as he had similar features.  I liked how Kevin always seemed to look quite tired and jaded and so when applying makeup to Patrick's face I made sure to emphasise the darkness of his under eyes.
In terms of costuming, though there are major differences between the characters as Kevin mainly wears white throughout the film whereas we decided that Frank would wear dark colours which blended in with the dark lighting and made him seem like more of a sinister character.

                                                                                                         

Although I did not particularly enjoy the  film 'Funny Games' as I felt that the breaking of the fourth wall  led to a break in the thrilling and tense atmosephere, the main characters were incredibly successful in creating a creepy atmosphere. The actors Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet gave life to the young and disturbed 'Peter' and 'Paul' and conveyed them as ignorant young men who displayed many psychopathic tenancies. This included aggression which we mirrored in our opening as 'Frank' violently threw his mother's arm into the
bath tub.


Peter and George showed obvious signs of psychopathy as they were overwhelmingly charming, self centred and impulsive, however I didn't want Frank to show these signs as it may have been too obvious to an audience that this character is disturbed which would leave no element of tension. The main aim was to create a suspenseful climatic atmosphere to shock the audience which meant not giving too much of the character away. I felt that we did this by deciding to not film Patrick's face and just his body as it leads an audience to be more intrigued with the character.

Evaluation Question 1 - Catherine (Group)

Evaluation 7 - Seth Tumwa

Preliminary Task

Final Product

Improvements

u  Looking back and comparing our preliminary task it is easy to see how we as a group have improved our skills to go form a basic piece, to a full 2 minute opening filled with different camera angles and evidence of adapted skills like use of lighting, sound and editing (e.g. titles and credits) so that we have created a realistic thriller opening that conforms to mainly elements of the thriller genre and the sub-genre of psychological thriller.

Pre-Production

Pre-Production was important for both tasks at it made sure we were prepared for almost everything before we began filming

u  Planning: For our preliminary task planning time was very limited only having around 10-20 to plan our location, allocate roles and the actual concept for ‘the meeting’

u  In addition to this we needed to select suitable camera techniques and what to/not to do. For example it was important that we did not break the 180 degree rule whenever we were filming to maintain verisimilitude

u   Props: in our preliminary task the props used were very minimal and mainly included things we conveniently had at the beginning of filming  (e.g. pieces of paper, mobile phones

u  The location itself was a key factor in both our preliminary and our final product. For our preliminary task, as I mentioned before, timing was quite limited so we made the decision of filming in school as it was far more convenient, we then had to search for a suitable room that had enough room to film the preliminary task whilst including the key factors of showing a door opening and showing a conversation with a clear range of camera angles (e.g. over-the-shoulder)

u  In contrast to this, with our final product, we had a number of weeks to plan what location we were going to use for filming. In the end we decided Max’s home (group member) mainly due to its convenience, it was easily accessible with enough room for filming so we would be able to include a vast range of camera and angles, shots and movement and enabled us to have a low light setting that we could easily use additional light to, to improve visibility.

uOn the actual day of filming we had more time for preparation before filming actually took place. This enabled us to perfect things like make-up and costume so that we created a believable character

Production

u  Time management - due to the time constraints our preliminary task had to be produced and edited over a period of about 1-2 weeks meaning that all photography was completed in a single day. The complexity of the task was not high at all therefore the brief filming was still effective in providing enough footage for a suitable completed task. 

uFilming for our actual final piece was intended to take place over an entire weekend however we were surprised to find that all filming was completed in a single day and no further filming was required. This was somewhat similar to our preliminary task however the filming of that only took place in less than one hour rather than an entire day. This shows how even though we had to use more time, it was used effectively, even more than our preliminary task.

u  Lighting - ties in with the use of technologies (e.g. cameras) with our preliminary task we didn't really have to worry about our use of light as natural lighting was used (the lights in the room themselves and daylight) however when it came to our final piece, lighting was a crucial aspect and required a lot more work. This was mainly because we wanted to achieve a mysterious atmosphere created through the use of very

uOur use of camera angles was thing I believe we improved on most from our primarily task to our final product. We experimented with a only a few angles in our preliminary task for example over the shoulder shots, however we predetermined a vast range of shots to use in our final piece sand on the day experimented even more which better suited the darker/tense atmosphere of the opening. 

Post Production

u  Titles and credits - In our final piece their is a much vaster range of titles and credits than in our preliminary task, which included things like, names of editors, the production & distribution company,actors names, in addition to the film title itself whereas our preliminary task only included the title of the task itself and the names of group participants. This shows clear improvement as the use of tiles and credits is the complete opposite to how it was in the preliminary task, featuring far more titles and crediting a lot more people and institutions e.g. Film 4

u  Uploading our actual finished piece which we didn't have an opportunity to do for our preliminary task, this meant that our knowledge of technologies like 'Blogger' were improved and ways to upload our finished product to YouTube, making it easier to access our film outside of school. 

u  Editing - use of software: we definitely improved in our use of editing software (final cut pro) when it came to editing and completing our final film. For our preliminary editing took place fairly quickly mainly because there was much less footage to choose from and far less transitions were required. Also music did not need to be edited into our preliminary task which meant that a lot of time was saved in its completion. For our final task however, music, special effects (very minimal and brief), titles, credits and logos all had to be edited before our film opening was complete. This meant that a lot more time had to be spent on the film itself in addition to going through a lot more footage in comparison to what we had for our preliminary task.

Evaluation 6 - Seth Tumwa

Evaluation 5 - Seth Tumwa (Group)

Question 5 (Group)

How did you attract/ address your audience?

Conventions of a thriller we wanted to incorporate in our advertising and marketing campaign:

              

                An element of Tension 

                An antagonist

                Devices used to keep the audience guessing 

    Build up to a climax 

    Cliff hangers 

                Red herrings – misleading information  

                Big revelation at the end  

                Effective use of soundtracks 

                

Marketing through social media:

We feel that we can reach our target audience (15-21) successfully through the digital market- particularly social media. This is because this age range spends the most time on the internet and on social media sites. We drew inspiration for this idea from previous film marketing campaigns such as 21 jump street and The Hunger games who have all advertised through social media in order to gain the widest aufdience possible. 

Therefore, our team will create a trailer on Youtube, a twitter page and a Facebook page.

Visual Advertisement:

This form of advertisement had been used for years and s hugely successful if it is used in the right places and the visual aids are appealing. This includes posters, pictures and banners. These visual aids will be on buses, bus stops, motorway billboards and in newspapers. 



'Frank' Visual advertisement- Poster

Poster marketing in public:

Digital social media marketing- Twitter page

Evaluation 4 - Seth Tumwa

Evaluation 3 - Seth Tumwa

Evaluation 2 - Seth Tumwa

Evaluation 1 - Seth Tumwa

Evaluation Question 7 - Maximilian

Evaluation Question 6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
By: Maximilian

Equipment used:
Canon DSLR 650d EOS
Camera lens’                                                                        

LED Spotlight and filter                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Flip-cam 

Final cut pro 

Strengths: 

The Canon DSLR 650d EOS was easy to use once you understood how to set up the white balance and manually focus correctly which was easily picked up. The tripod gave us the stable support that we needed to make professional looking shots when filming. The lighting was very simple and easy to use as well since we knew where we needed to place the lights to get the best naturalistic shot. The Flip Cameras gave us quick opportunity's to film audience feedback and our own discussions since they are simple to set up and easy to use. Final cut pro was amazing to use since the layout was very helpful and everything we waned to do to our opening, we were able to do it.    

Limitations: 

Because Canon DSLR 650d EOS is expensive, we didn't want to risk taking some of the camera shots we wanted to take because of its value, also sometimes when the camera would shut off it would take time to get back on when we would need it. The tripod was annoying at times since it was difficult to keep a steady camera when we were not able to place the tripod in a secure position because of space. In addition to this, the LED lights would keep dying because they consume so much battery life so quickly.  

Editing:

Final cut pro was very hard at first to understand how the software worked, but once I got up to date and speed with the program, it became very simple and easy to start and edit what I wanted to be shown. The layout became pretty clear and the key tools I needed to edit were placed clearly so that I didn't have to spend time trying to find every specific tool. Shown bellow is our finished Thriller opening in editing form where we can see each piece of raw footage being connected with different transitions and with different sound effects and music overlaying for the diegetic sound. We can also see the placements of titles and the raw footage still at the top section just in case we need to make any last minute changes.    

The main problem that we faced was trying to go through all the raw footage and deciding which certain sections we needed to cut and use since we had around ten times the amount of raw footage then the amount we actually decided to use, which was then even more cut down so that the music and titles could be fitted and so it could still fit near the two minute mark. 

Question 5 (Group)

How did you attract/ address your audience?

Conventions of a thriller we wanted to incorporate in our advertising and marketing campaign:

              

                An element of Tension 

                An antagonist

                Devices used to keep the audience guessing 

    Build up to a climax 

    Cliff hangers 

                Red herrings – misleading information  

                Big revelation at the end  

                Effective use of soundtracks 

                

Marketing through social media:

We feel that we can reach our target audience (15-21) successfully through the digital market- particularly social media. This is because this age range spends the most time on the internet and on social media sites. We drew inspiration for this idea from previous film marketing campaigns such as 21 jump street and The Hunger games who have all advertised through social media in order to gain the widest aufdience possible. 

Therefore, our team will create a trailer on Youtube, a twitter page and a Facebook page.

Visual Advertisement:

This form of advertisement had been used for years and s hugely successful if it is used in the right places and the visual aids are appealing. This includes posters, pictures and banners. These visual aids will be on buses, bus stops, motorway billboards and in newspapers. 



'Frank' Visual advertisement- Poster

Poster marketing in public:

Digital social media marketing- Twitter page