Question 1

Question 1

• 1.
  1) IN WHATWAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS
• 2.
  We found outthrough our research process and through the creation of our opening that for this film to fit the genre and engage an audience something has to happen to make it exciting within the first couple of minutes. Films that started with an exciting interesting opening scene were more successful and kept the audience watching and wanting to see what happened next. Films such as Pulp Fiction, The Purge, Escape Plan etc. inspired us to want to make our opening scene something to remember.
• 3.
  Our opening isn’tone of the most obvious thriller openings as we failed to include many conventions into the sequence. However this was what we planned to do to make our film stand out from the rest. If we were to make it a cliché thriller film we would include more conventions and forms that the audience would relate to a thriller film, such as, include a big male hero-like character, a suspicious death
• 4.
  However, eventually wedid decide to include a few thriller conventions into our opening such as; we conformed to the convention that girls are vulnerable and the ones to always be attacked, they are helpless and weak and can’t protect themselves which is why there is a female not a male tied up in the back of the car. This stereotype can be seen in films such as in the film ‘Taken’ where the girl gets abducted and is seen as a weak sexual object. To help support this stereotype and cliché in these types of films we had the character continue to look behind her in a panic as if someone was following her. This idea is quite overused in thriller films but we felt that it fit in perfectly with our plot and our plan for our opening.
• 5.
  We mostly includedclose ups and over the shoulder shots to amplify the emotions of the characters and also focus on certain parts of the opening that may be more relevant later on in the film. The film psycho uses many close ups throughout the film as they want the audience to not only focus on certain objects but also not know what's going on in the rest of the scene so this emphasises the fear of the unknown. The over the shoulder shots create mystery as you never see the face of the attacker or most of their body which makes you relate to the character and sympathise for them, where as the close ups show the emotions we want the audience to see through the facial expressions. We took inspiration from the film ‘Halloween’ as for the opening you never know who the killer is which creates suspense. This was effective amongst audiences as it was a shock at the end of the scene when the killer was eventually revealed. We decided to use an over the shoulder shot instead of a point of view shot like in ‘Halloween’ as we wanted the audience to be unaware of when the attack is taking place. As you can’t see where the attacker comes from we feel that this has been accomplished.
• 6.
  We took alot of inspiration from the film P2 for our opening sequence, to start with we liked the idea that there was a person tied up in a car and that the audience doesn’t find out what happens to them until further on in the film. We used the same type of location, however we made some changes so that it wasn’t exactly the same and also gave the audience a backstory so the had an idea of what is going on. For P2 they started off the opening in a car park showing the setting and theme of the film. We found that when we tried this approach the opening didn’t look complete and so we decided that we would use parallel editing to give a back story as to how the person appeared in the car.
• 7.
  After the secondfilming session we realised that the opening was quite short and to recreate it would mean that it wouldn’t be long enough. We also found that our footage was too dark and we would have to re-shoot to get the right lighting, which might mean changing the location, this would be fine as we wanted to include our parallel editing idea anyway. Due to the fact we knew we wouldn’t be using this footage we didn’t add sounds or titles as we were going to re-shoot using a slightly different storyline. After the main titles appear in P2, the setting suddenly changes and it’s now before the car park scene. There’s a woman in an office like environment, we decided that we would film the character getting ready for the day so that you could tell that it was the same day as the clothing was the same as the previous scene.
• 8.
  We looked atthe ratings of films on the website IMDb to see which thriller films were popular among our target audience. This helped our decision process in making our film as we had a better idea of what people liked to watch.
• 9.
  We created asurvey that people answered anonymously online, this helped us understand what would be most effective in our opening. We took great inspiration from this as this is what our audience was telling us they wanted to see within a thriller film. We found the most popular thriller films amongst our target audience which helped us prepare to make our own based on what has previously been successful.
• 10.
  For our titleswe changed them quite a few times throughout our editing process. We first started off with quite a basic font for the first draft that we thought looked quite mysterious but took over the screen. We found from our audience feedback that our target audience thought they were too big and didn’t fit with the genre well enough.When we next looked at titles we chose titles that we thought would stand out and would appeal to our audience. They no longer covered important parts of the story we were trying to create and fitted more with our genre. The main title however didn’t fit the genre and we realised this was something we would have to change for our next draft as it reminded us too much of a romantic film.
• 11.
  As we shotmore footage we looked over our titles again and decided we wanted to find titles that appealed more to people and didn’t look as boring. We finally decided on a font that we agreed fitted our genre and theme of the film. We chose to use a font called ‘Waste of time’ for our main titles as we thought that the slash on the letters implies distortion and that not everything will be ok. It is inspired by the gift which is another stalker themed film that fitted our genre.
• 12.
  We spent alot of time thinking about our music and continuously changed it throughout our editing process. We wanted a soundtrack that created mystery but also suspense and this was hard to find within just one piece of music. We then decided to include two pieces of music and switch between them at one point of the clip, this created the change of atmosphere we wanted as this was now a different time frame. Including the extra piece of music did improve the opening as a whole but we felt there was still something missing. We then added a different piece of music for the scene where the girl starts to realise she is being followed as this changed the mood completely from the calm atmosphere from before and built tension. We based some of our music choice on ‘The purge’ as this film starts of with calm soothing music that puts the audience off the fact that violence is taking place.