It is easy to confuse a thriller production with a horror one, but there are a few significant differences when you know what to look for, for example, horrors involve a lot of gore, guts, scary scenes and they would also usury include a monster, whereas thrillers tend to only use gore when necessary and tend to focus more on a plot driven story. Some typical conventions of thrillers are, they question the audience, they make the audience know as much as the main character and a thriller would definitely have an enigma. our thriller uses some of these conventions for example, we create enigma by have the opening in non-chronological order which questions the audience so we don't give them much of the story which is also known as restricted narration and we do not go over the top with gore or violence in the opening. We do include some violence so as to keep the pace and the excitement of the opening.
Our thriller does not aim to construct traditional representations of gender. In our opening I (Jake) gets chased through the woods by the Hitman (George) if we had been aiming to enforce a more traditional view of women we would have changed the protagonist from myself to Dani which would of made her the sensitive, passive female victim. The only scene that would hit at the more stereotyped view of women is the bar scene between me and Dani where she plays a bar maid, however i think this scene indicates that she is the antagonist because the drink she serves me is drudged so in a sense the female is the antagonist in our plot.
3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media production and why?
Our thriller would be distributed by 'Soda pictures'. It is going to be shown at the 'Duke of York' Art house, and eventually move onto sky movies. our certification is going to be 15 as our production has violence and also drugs in it, so our audience is a bit thinner then we hoped but we intended our production for a more mature audience and we have hit that target. we intend to do a regional release to start with and gradually expand throughout the country, eventually ending up on sky movies. because we are only releasing our production regionally the amount of prints we will have to produce would be considerably less then if we went straight for a country release however when we do end up printing for the country release, we would have to transport the prints safely in lorries and vans.
4) Who would be the audience for your media product?
Our media product would be aimed at an more mature audience between the ages of 17 and 30 however i think that our product could be shown to those of a younger audience as well, the age rating could go as low as 15 as our product has no swearing or bad language and no blood or horrifically Violante scenes. The main reason for it being aimed at a more mature audience is that we want the audience to understand the plot as it is given to them instead of having to work it out during or after the product has been shown.
5) How did you attract/address your audience?
I feel that our product has hit the Target audience that we intended but may also be shown to a slightly younger audience. Before we began filming we asked a couple of people what they thort of our idea and plot. Alot of them liked the idea and said it used thriller conventions like enigma, and it "questioned the audience". However there were those who believed that our idea was going to be hard to pull off which we as a group knew when we began to plan our idea. the people we asked were our own age, 16-17 year olds, when we told them they seemed to like our idea we feel that the complexity of our plot could attract a more mature audience and not just teenagers but i also feel that the action within our plot would appeal to a slightly younger audience, no younger then 12 years of age.
6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
For starters i got to use all the filming equipment, like cameras and tripods alot more and i am alot more competent with them then i was while doing our preliminary exorcise, i also got to use some voice recorders as well which was a good way of getting real, live sound which helped alot with the realism of our product. Another thing i used alot over a period of time was the Mac computers in the editing suite, i used alot of different programs while editing our final product, for starters we used 'I Movie' to get a rough cut of our opening going, once we were happy that this was the base line for our thriller opening we moved it to 'Final Cut Pro' to be more specifice about shot length and tidy up the opening by adding smother cuts and trimming down shots. After cleaning up our opening we then moved on to do our titling which did not take us long as we were shown how to do the first one and then continued by ourselves.
We then moved out of changing our product and stated working on 'Garage band' which was the program we used to put all the sound effects and non-diagetice sound onto out opening we experimented with a number of effects before hand and had a rough idea of what sounds we wanted for certain shots for example we wanted heavy breathing or panting for the close ups of both mine and Georges legs during the chase scene, because there were next to no breathing effects on garage band at all we had to search the Internet for sound effects, luckily we found two that were as close as we were guna get so again used microphones to record the sound and then export it from the mic to the computer.
I feel I am now confident enough that i can plan a sequence and create a plot for a specific film genera, that i can use the practical equipment such as cameras and tripods to a good extent while obeying rules like the 180 Degree rule and finally use all the programs needed such as final cut and garage band to create a decent movie production.
7) Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?
In my opinion, i feel that me and my group are alot more acustomed as to how to make a film, our Preliminary task was basic but good and it showed we couldmake a decent film extract as a group. The main problem with our Preliminary task was white balance, there were alot of shots that the white balance was off and it stuck out when we showd the final prelim inary product to the class so we madesure we checked the white balance regulary when doing our full foundation production. Another problem we felt we had was during planning our preliminary,we felt that we underplanned and had not considered enough, so we made sure we planned more cafully when doing our foundation production.
In a nut shel i feel thatme and my group have really taken to filming and editing, we have more of an idea of what we can do realisticly speaking we can make and plan a story and because we are all now experienced with the technology and equipment we are using we can film and edit our own foottage compitantly, i think we would just need a little more time to plan and we can come upwith a really good idea and also be able to film and edit it alot better then our preliminary task and our faoundation production.
