Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

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

When creating out film opening, we have learnt a lot about technology and it could improve our media product. During the process of creating our product we have not only learned how to use different technology but we have improved our knowledge about camera shots and editing.

To make our product we have used a number of different technologies. Below is a list of technologies we made use of for the task;

·         Digital Video Camera and tripod

·         iMovie and Garage Band (Mac)

·         Internet Explorer (YouTube, Blogger)

We have used Panasonic HD camera to film our opening sequence. To make sure all the camera movement and editing in our film opening where affective we had to use a HD camera because if we used video camera with a bad quality then that would disadvantage us as a group because the film opening wouldn’t look as affective. We found Panasonic HD camera successful because we were able to record high quality footage using natural light. However the sound quality was very bad, this is the reason we haven’t used that much of diegetic sound. As our shots required the camera to be stable, we used tripod. This really enhanced our piece as if we have used free hand filming the film opening would look more like a documentary. Overall, using a Panasonic HD camera and tripod really helped and made it easier to film our thriller opening because without both of these technologies our film wouldn’t look as sleek and professional as it does now.

We used iMovie on Mac to do all the editing and special effects for our opening sequence.  This software enabled us to cut/ crop the unneeded scenes. This allowed our film opening to flow smoothly just like a high quality opening film. As me or my partner never had experience with Mac before it was hard at the beginning to use iMovie and cut scenes and edit the sound, however from the help of the teacher and other students at the end of the filming we were able to correctly cut and crop unwanted frames.

Garage Band was programme we used in order to make our soundtrack. Because of the low quality sound of the Panasonic HD camera we had to make most of the sound on Garage Band. This programme offered a wide range of sounds. Garage Band also allowed us to edit how loud we want the sound that we produced to be. This was good affect as this allowed our muscle to be scary and therefore add to the thriller of our opening sequence.  

Next technology that we have used was Internet Explorer (YouTube). This has been used to help me and my partner with some ideas for the opening sequence.  I and my partner used to sit down and watch different opening sequences that are relating to ours, but also we watched film openings like Se7en just to get idea of the editing and camera movements that we could use for the thriller opening.

We have also used Internet Explorer to post all our research, planning and evaluation on blogger. This was for our teachers to be able to give us feedback and for us to improve our work.

 

Work completed by Aleksandra.

Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

To attract the audience, we had to make sure our key characteristics were met. We aimed for a movie based on a target audience of both genders, with a rating of 15; this would mean our audience age isn’t too restricted. Once we figured out our target audience, we then came up with the different features that would attract this audience and how these would help to maintain the interest of the viewers. We decided to put the twist in the first two minutes as we thought it would keep the audience interested. As the twist was the victim being the girlfriend of the male murderer we thought this would allow there to be questions that the audience would ask themselves such as "
why did he kill his own girlfriend?" and "who is that other girl?". 
We wanted our audience to be drawn into our film straight away so we made one of the main characters relatable to the audience. The main character we chose was the victim. We chose the victim because we thought the audience would feel more sympathetic towards the female victim, also woman are seen as more vulnerable. However because we didn’t want the cliché male killer and female victim theme in our opening we decided to have a female killer along with the male.


Completed by Somer.

Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Work completely Aleksandra .



Originally, we though that he perfect audience for our thriller sequence would be young male adults aged 15-20. The audience have to be a certain age due to the strong language and scenes of violence.  This is represented through scenes we have created when the victim is shown as a young adult female (in her mid-20s) who is a business woman.

My thriller sequence also represents the social group of people that like to watch thriller movies. I have achieved that through using diegetic and non-diegetic sounds often used in thriller movies. I have researched what people who watch thriller movies like to see when watching them and tried and include them in my thriller sequence, for example; dark setting of the scene.

 

Through our research, in which we questioned an equal number of male and female filmgoers, four of the female audience members said they did not enjoy thriller films. This has proved our initial assumption. 

If we have interviewed more people aged 21-30 we reckon this age group would have bigger audience due to how much income these people earn.

 

This is our target audience. The reason people like thriller films is because they enjoy the twists and turns and they like them to be tense also people enjoy trying to guess the ending. On average they earn up to 800 pounds a month so this means we will competing for their money as there are many other activities that they may choose over the cinema, so this why our opening has to be gripping.