Media Blog: 2013

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

My group’s thriller movie was based on a variety of other different sub-genre thrillers like action, psychological thrillers that have the same aspects of a horror movie. For example in my planning I talked about the analysis of a similar product which relates to the movie that my group filmed. The movie was “Scream” and this was what gave me my initial ideas to plan it. The conventions that were similar to that movie were the scenery of the disturbance of the equilibrium. In this background it is dark, the main character feels isolated and there is a lot of suspension. How my main character compares to the main character from scream is that they both feel that they’re outcasts from everyone else as they feel that they can’t trust anyone, because they believe the killer is or was someone close to them.

Like all great thrillers there are certain stages where specific events happen, this is where the Todorov narrative theory is applied. It starts off with equilibrium, a disruption of the equilibrium, recognition of the disruption of the equilibrium, the attempt to repair the disruption and then the equilibrium is restored to the way it was. However in our short movie it doesn't follow the narrative theory, it starts with the equilibrium where the five friends go to the woods to set a camp fire and have fun. The next stage was for a disturbance of this peaceful scene, but then it jumps to the recognition as the main character knows what he’s done in the past and he knows that he is being haunted, which is why he acts paranoid and doesn't show his real emotions of regret and loss of sanity. The stage after shows the main character trying to repair where in a typical thriller the protagonist would try to stop the antagonist where in our movie there was no way of repairing it as the main character easily id defeated by the killer. For the fourth stage there are two sides to the equilibrium being repaired. The other way of looking at it was the antagonist who played the role of the killer was just trying to restore balance to the scene by avenging her death; I believed that there is justice that has been served. For the final stage everything was back to normal, however it doesn't show the friends noticing the main characters corpse.

In our media product it is different from a typical psychological thriller where the five steps of Todorov’s narrative theory are applied as in the start of the movie the disturbance occurs. Also there was a change in the subvert conventions of our characters. For example the antagonist as the role of the killer, whereas if you look at it from another point of view she is technically acting like the protagonist as she is going to kill him for vengeance and it is something the protagonist deserves. Also a typical killer would be presented as a strong male character that is heartless and his reason for killing is unexplained. Whereas if you look at our antagonist she does not appear as a cold killer nor does she emphasize any killing ambitions as a typical killer would be represented in thrillers.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In my media product the target audience that we were aiming for is rated age 15 mainly male viewers. whereas in the movie that is roughly what kind of social group we’re now looking at, which is basically young teenagers that go wild, who are immature school kids that are likely to smoke and drink as this is how most teenagers are represented in modern day society.

Of all social groups our media product is representing teenagers, showing our viewers the similarities between the realities and fantasies of how today’s younger generation is represented. In my groups short thriller we can see the five friends chilling out by the campfire, drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes this shows the stereotypical representation of youths being immature and going against the law of taking of being intoxicated.

How this movie would relate to other people would for example in the movie there was a scene were a couple were seen arguing, after watching this some people who are in relationships could relate to this or others could disagree. There could be people who would argue that during the argument scene that no couple would resort to extreme violence over a petty quarrel. Where in the film the girl in the relationship was brutally beaten after arguing with the boy and this especially represents the harsh reality between two people in which the viewers can understand. This was all originally portrayed as I was drawing the storyboard where the couple had a scene where they were arguing, but they didn't show the murder part.

What kind of media institution might distribute you’re your media product and why?

A media institution that would distribute our thriller would be through social networking sites between YouTube and VEVO. I think that these two establishments would be best for my movie because first of all anyone around the globe can access YouTube and that is the best way to get many views. And also it is a web 2.0 network where anyone can comment and as the views pile up more people will notice and it will lead to a chain of viewers.

For VEVO I believe that it will also attract viewers as it is the type of institution that is respected and vastly well known for having good high quality music and videos. If our video was distributed in these sites its fame would be recognized through the global social networking of people commenting and talking about the video.

The best institution to distribute my media product would be New line Cinema as my film is aimed at teenagers at the age of 15 and also 51% of the viewers are male. Many movies have started off unknown and made it big, If our movie was distributed by a big name such as New line Cinema it would be represented as a film that people would be interested in because it was known for sponsoring one of Hollywood's greatest trilogies the Lord of the Rings film trilogy and many other famous movies.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

My target audience is going to be age 15 and most of them are likely to be male viewers, also with a small portion of females. My thriller movie will include strong language, adult scenes that include alcohol, cigarettes and possibly some nude scenes. The reason that I thought 15 rated was right for our movie was because it’s people were old enough to watch these adult scenes that contains profanity and that they will also be prepared for gory scenes that will show a lot of blood.

Another reason why this movie is perfect for our audience is that they are at the appropriate age category that fits into my media products plan. For example people who are around the age 15 are neither too old or too young to watch my film as younger viewers are slightly interested in a bit of action, which is why the sub-genre of the film is part action and older viewers and are more interested in psychological thrillers and this is why the movie is half sub-genre action and psychological thriller.

In our film we will be using actual prop’s (not real blood, urine) such as knife as this shows that our movie is just above the boundary of a rated 12 movie. However there is a limit to how much scenery were going to involve using the knife, because if our movie presented extreme gory scenes, it would have been a rated 18 movie.

However in the scene that involved weapons showed minimum violence as an aged 15 movie is only supposed to show very little blood. If this were a 12 movie there is a probability that the young kids will imitate what they see. This happened because of the hypodermic needle theory which is a theory that suggests messages are being injected into people’s minds. For example the game Grand theft auto was giving teens messages to subconsciously copy the game and kill.

The reason why our film fitted the audience of the age 15 and not 18 was because it wasn't as explicit and was meant for adults who mentally strong enough to watch a 18 rated movie. However audience who were 18+ tended to be more interested in psychological thrillers than 15, but we decided to stick to 15 as this has less explicit, sexual scenes with profanity. Also by lowering our age restriction of our movie we can still increase the amount of viewers as people who are 18 and over are still likely to watch it, because of the hypodermic syringe theory.

How did you attract your audience?

The method we used to attract our audience was through websites that allowed people to socialize through social networking or “We” media. The movie became known first through YouTube, which allowed people from all over the globe to watch our media product. And then as months passed by we were able to so far get 30 viewers. After this was accomplished we then uploaded it onto other networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and etc.

Because of web 2.0 social media allowed our video to get peoples feedback and also helped the expansion of globalizing our video across to other people. Because of technology we were able to distribute our video worldwide, which allowed people to engage in conversation and talk about to other people by sharing, posting it to other peoples blogs, Twitters and Facebook accounts.

Also another way we were able to attract a wider audience was through the characters that starred in our movie. For example our antagonist was played by a girl and because of this change of a killer, which was typically recognized as being a tall, strong and dangerous man, but instead we used a girl. Because of this change we would possibly have just as much female viewers as well as male.

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

The technologies that were used throughout the construction of our film mainly consisted of hardware such as cameras and computers. The use of cameras allowed my group to capture different shots and angles for various scenes such as the zoom shot, which moved closer and focused on a person this worked without moving the camera. Also because of the zoom we were able to see the characters expression and body as it zoomed out.

For computers when all the shots were collected it was stored in an USB and plugged into a computer. From there on one of the persons from my group used programmes such as adobe after effect CS6 and adobe premiere pro CS6 to edit scenes by cutting bits, changing sound and fixing any continuity errors .The full task of editing was contributed by Atta Ahmed as he was the only person in our group who was capable and was experienced in editing videos. Although I had no part in using the software to edit pieces of our video I watched how he edited our continuity task.

After the editing was complete the next step was to upload onto websites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and etc. By sharing this video on social networking sites this allowed people to comment, share and give feedback on what was good and bad about it.

Throughout the filming my job was mainly to do take responsibility of character prop’s and the storyboard, however during the final stage of filming I was able to help film shots that were forgotten in the film. By using the camera I managed to use different shots such as close up and zoom in shot, which taught me how to use the camera.

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

The comparison between the continuity task and the thriller is that looking back at the continuity task there was very little work to do as there were only three scenes to shoot and many different camera shots in between them. The three scenes were the employee working, then him walking down the hall to the boss’s office and then talking to the boss in the office, whereas in the thriller we had around 20 shots and roughly 8-10 scenes.

From the continuity filming just about everyone in our group had a role to play and the progression for our movie almost took us three lessons to complete as one of our actors had laughter problems. The characters that were involved were a lazy employee, an assistant and a boss.

During the filming there were certain continuity errors were some of the characters couldn’t focus on their scripts, which made it hard for one of the persons from my group to edit and we would have to retake certain scenes as there was a continuity error where the same character is wearing different clothing in different scenes.

One thing that our group should’ve focused on was the camera shots; somehow our camera was able to shake the camera during the important conversation scene in the continuity task, whilst still using a tripod. Also in one of the shots where there is supposed to be a close up shot of the bosses face the bright light from the window caused a shadow to blur the bosses face and therefore we weren't able to see his facial expression before he was going to fire the employee. So because of the carelessness of the shot the lighting, which was supposed to be taken care of, interfered with shot. However because of the darkness that covered the bosses face this showed how evil he was as he fired the employee.

From the thriller movie there were many shots of the characters in the dark and that was the problem. We couldn't see their faces clearly so we had to use a flash light to point at their face to get good expressions. For the continuity and thriller task we first had to rely on the natural lighting of the sun and then we had to use an LED flashlight.

The sound that was used in the continuity task was all mainly diegetic sound that we relied on ourselves and the background that it was created from. Whereas in the thriller task we involved diegetic and non-diegetic sound as it was a psychological thriller that we were filming. The non-diegetic sound that was used was a soundtrack that was bought on Audio jungle. The music that was used was perfect as it made the protagonist paranoid and caused him to be in misery.

In conclusion from what I've learned from progressing in the preliminary task to the full product is that we learned from making any more continuity errors as this would've been a problem for the part of editing. Another thing that we learned was to get actors who would take their roles seriously and because of the acting that was done during the continuity task we wasted a lot of time. Also the main problem was due to the lighting of some shots, because of the incident in the continuity task, we decided to use a torch instead of the use of natural lighting.