Evaluation

We were asked in groups of three to four to film and create a short opening of a thriller within a given time. We were shown the opening scene of the thriller “the shining,” then it was discussed between the class of all the different ways in which this thriller was made effective. After this we were put into groups my group consisted of me, Kaher and Imran once the groups were formed we were asked to film a first practice so we could get the feel of using all the equipment.
We tried to use, develop and challenge conventions of real media products. We did this in many ways including costume, in our thriller we used dark clothing this was to hide the killers identity and make the victim look more easily recognizable to the audience. Our location was an old church, which was surrounded by grass, and trees, which gave it that, added spooky look that you see in most well known thrillers. By the bonus of added bushes and trees in our location it gave somewhere for the killer to hide during his stalking of his victim, this technique is used in many successful thrillers including Scream and Halloween. I feel that it gives the audience the chance to explore the location more and allows their imagination to think of all the possibilities of what’s going to happen here. The body language that was shown by the victim was mainly curious actions as if he had a sense of déjà vu but didn’t really know what was going on , the killer body language showed determination and confidence of what he wanted he was going to get. We used many shot types including medium close ups when we were filming shots such as victim smoking his cigarette this shot is common in most genres because it allows you to see everything you need to see in a particular shot, we also used long shots. Low angle and panning to create all effects necessary to make it as interesting as possible to watch. Most of our shots were in full colour because this allowed the audience to see details of the church and it surroundings however we still used a black and white contrast of when the killer was in the process of approaching the victim and murdering him, this highlighted the importance of the scene to the audience and gave the murder an extra thrilling effect. We also slowed down and speed up various shots so that it made the scenes more tense and suspenseful. The software we used to edit was final cut pro this was a professional software which logs and captures video onto a hard drive, where it can be edited and processed, I found that the software was easy to use once you were shown how to use the basic tools. Our film was the thriller genre we tried to keep it as simple as a thrilling genre can be by creating the typical victim and killer, this avoids any mistake which may occur when you take risk.
Our thriller represented the younger teenage social group this was shown in many ways including, choice of actors, our actors were teenagers between the age of sixteen and seventeen years of age this helped the young audience to relate to them and feel there fear. Also body language was very calm and relaxed as most teenagers are although the victims body language did get tense when he felt he was being followed, the costumes worn were mainly black fashionable clothing this gave an indication that the characters were fairly young.
If our thriller were to be launched on a professional level it would probably be distributed to either a major film studio or a smaller studio this is because it a difficult genre to master and not many British thrillers are released so film studios are always on the lookout for new material which they feel may be a success and I think that our thriller does this because it is rare product that would want to be seen.
Our audience will be young people aged between 15-24 male and female of any cultural background who are probably middle class and just enjoy watching the thriller genre as a whole.
We will attract our audience by using people of a similar age group so they can easily relate to them, the location will be a old looking church which will attract our audience because this is what our audience will like to see because if you see a big old church in the opening of a thriller you will automatically want to see what’s going to happen in this location. The storyline will be the typical murder, I feel that keeping the storyline more simple makes it more effective because it avoids the mistakes that taking risk contain and people may not always emit to it but I feel that most people like the film to keep it simple. Our thriller does not contain any dialogue because we were told not to add any voice instead we used a fast upbeat tune which went along with the action as it happened. Our title ‘The Hit’ was chosen between all three of our group members, we chose it because we thought that it was a short but “in your face” kind of title that is also easy to remember.
In the making of our thriller we used many different forms of technologies including cameras, apple Macs, software etc. I’ve learnt that once you have been guided on how to use these different new forms of technologies that is very useful to know and could be useful in your future career so I am glad that I have learnt this. The apple Mac computers differ from the traditional windows they are more made for any media based work so they came in handy when we were uploading and editing, the cameras were good in quality but also quite easy to use we also used a tripod to support it so we got a steady shot.
From our preliminary task we learnt that we needed to plan more in advance because on the days of our practices we rushed the filming because we did not really plan what we was going to do which made us do many retakes, we also needed to research more into the thriller genre because we didn’t really understand the concept of it at first until we watched real thrillers, once we were shown how to edit from the preliminary task we found it quite easy to use the software the task helped us to learn how to use a camera in a more professional way we learnt the five second gap before and after shots. We used the same groups for the practice as we did for the real thing I feel that this was an advantage because we knew each others strengths and weaknesses for example some were better at filming and others were better at editing.