Introduction
The project I have done for coursework was to create the opening of a film to last the maximum of two minutes. All of the material that I used must have been original and produced by me and my group, I worked with Alix Sampford and Aamir Shah. Any music that we were to use was to be copyright free. I helped find the music for the opening sequence by looking through copyright free CDs and looking on internet websites. I was to do posts on the blog as well as the other members in my group, http://c2asampfordejopsonashah.blogspot.com, I was also to cast the actors/actresses to be in the opening sequence and decided who they would play. I helped to edit the footage down into the opening sequence. I was supposed to help film the clips, unfortunately there was heavy snow over Christmas when we were supposed to film, so I did not get the chance to be part of the filming experience.
The project I have done for coursework was to create the opening of a film to last the maximum of two minutes. All of the material that I used must have been original and produced by me and my group, I worked with Alix Sampford and Aamir Shah. Any music that we were to use was to be copyright free. I helped find the music for the opening sequence by looking through copyright free CDs and looking on internet websites. I was to do posts on the blog as well as the other members in my group, http://c2asampfordejopsonashah.blogspot.com, I was also to cast the actors/actresses to be in the opening sequence and decided who they would play. I helped to edit the footage down into the opening sequence. I was supposed to help film the clips, unfortunately there was heavy snow over Christmas when we were supposed to film, so I did not get the chance to be part of the filming experience.
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The genre of our film was to be a horror/thriller because we thought that it would be the easiest genre to make a plot for.
The genre of our film was to be a horror/thriller because we thought that it would be the easiest genre to make a plot for.
The only ones of these things that we did not include in our opening sequence are the blood and use of weapons. It is vital to use typical conventions of a genre so that the audience will know that it is the right type of genre film that they want to see. We did not do anything different apart from not use blood and a weapon, but it would have been good too as horror films need new and exciting things so that horror/thriller films do not get too predictable, N. Lacey said that films were the ‘same but different’. Our choices worked well when it came to our audience testing as people liked that we had the stalker watching the girl from the trees on the other side of the road. However people thought that the clip was too long when she was walking to the party as it was just shots of her walking and nothing else. People also thought that we could have improved the ending by showing her getting killed but others thought that they were supposed to wonder ‘what will happen to the girl?.’
An opening sequence is supposed to tell the audience;
An opening sequence is supposed to tell the audience;
· What type of genre the film is?
· Who made the film?
· Who will star in it?
· What the title of the film is.
I think that we have managed to do this as we have included all of these pieces of information and more including;
· Who found the music?
· Who casted the actors/actresses.
We have managed to include the things that tell the audience that it is a horror/thriller. The trailer to ‘creep’ tells the audience that it is a horror/thriller very well by using the conventions of this genre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZUzM_p6a1k.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
In our opening sequence we have represented teenage people and how much danger they are in when they are out alone at night, we have represented criminals and victims as a person is stabbed by a stalker. We also represented that men are more dominant than men as we have a man being the murderer and stalker and the girl being the innocent defenseless person. We represented the criminal stalker by not seeing him until the title of the film and when he is shown in the clip he is wearing a dark colored hoodie covering his face, he has no facial expressions as we cannot see his face and he has no dialogue which adds to the mystery of the character. He is only shown in low key lighting so that the audience cannot see much of the killer to add tension and mystery.
In our opening sequence we have represented teenage people and how much danger they are in when they are out alone at night, we have represented criminals and victims as a person is stabbed by a stalker. We also represented that men are more dominant than men as we have a man being the murderer and stalker and the girl being the innocent defenseless person. We represented the criminal stalker by not seeing him until the title of the film and when he is shown in the clip he is wearing a dark colored hoodie covering his face, he has no facial expressions as we cannot see his face and he has no dialogue which adds to the mystery of the character. He is only shown in low key lighting so that the audience cannot see much of the killer to add tension and mystery. 
The girl wears a casual looking outfit as she is going to a house party, we tried to keep her costume as simple as possible as she is not a main character in the film and she is only in the film for the opening sequence, however the audience are invited to relate to her as though she could be a main character, this adds to the chock at the end of the sequence as she has been killed. At the beginning we had her happy and excited as she is getting ready to go to a house party at her friends. To make this clearer we could have had her on the phone to her friend talking about the party. We showed her styling her hair before she left the house, by taking shots of her looking in the mirror touching and styling her hair. After she had left the house we wanted her to look lonely and vulnerable so we picked a quite street to film on so that the killer would be able to follow her without public attention. The girl had a small part of dialogue which she has to say. I personally think that she could have acted the lines better than she did as it did not seem authentic. We decided to shoot the beginning in the girl’s house as there would be no other place for her to get ready. And we picked a quiet street for her to walk along so that she would look isolated. I think that the clip shows the dominant ideologies of victims and criminals. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
The French romantic/ thriller ‘He Loves Me He Loves Me Not’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZsMrRSXD8A was distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment. The 2009 horror/ thriller ‘Tormented’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdJP23OYS1Q was distributed and produced by Pathe pictures, Warner bros, BBC Films, Slingshot and IFC Films. These two films are films that have a similar genre to the project I made. These companies may consider financially backing our project as it is like the films that they have previously produced. It would be good to get a company like BBC Films or Working Title http://www.workingtitlefilms.com/ to financially back and distribute my project as they are British and would support British films. they make commercial/ mainstream British films that appeal to foreign markets.
Who would be the audience for your media product?
Media theories will help me describe our target audience. A demographic way of discussing our target audience is by using gender, race, age and socio-economic status. We will want to attract male and females of any race to watch our film. I think that anyone above the age of 15 would be able to watch this product as it does not have harsh killings, sexual references or bad use of language. We want a cinema going audience who like to watch horror/thriller films to be attracted. The socio-economic status of our audience will be anyone that can afford to buy a ticket to the cinemas or buy a DVD. This is a good target audience as it is a large mass of audience members that will be able to see our project. From our target audience questionnaires we found that people liked the music however people thought that ‘the attack could be longer and could have shown what happened to the girl’.
How did you attract/ address your audience?
We set up an equilibrium by;
Media theories will help me describe our target audience. A demographic way of discussing our target audience is by using gender, race, age and socio-economic status. We will want to attract male and females of any race to watch our film. I think that anyone above the age of 15 would be able to watch this product as it does not have harsh killings, sexual references or bad use of language. We want a cinema going audience who like to watch horror/thriller films to be attracted. The socio-economic status of our audience will be anyone that can afford to buy a ticket to the cinemas or buy a DVD. This is a good target audience as it is a large mass of audience members that will be able to see our project. From our target audience questionnaires we found that people liked the music however people thought that ‘the attack could be longer and could have shown what happened to the girl’.
How did you attract/ address your audience?
We set up an equilibrium by;
· Showing her life in her house and surrounding areas
· Showing her getting ready for a party that she was going to
· Showing the audience what her everyday life is like
We then made a disruption to this equilibrium by;
· Showing he alone and isolated
· Showing her getting scared by her friend
· And showing her friend get stabbed by a scary stalker man
We made a disruption take place when she was walking along the street by herself. However we did make a small disruption through the news report as it was showing that someone had been killed and informing people to not go out alone.
We did not have any flash backs in our project, we kept the opening sequence very chronological with invisible editing so that the audience would not get confused with sense of time so early into the film. A big enigma that we made in the opening sequence was ‘What is going to happen to the girl?’ as the title of the film came up on screen as the girl screamed, the audience will not know what has happened to her. The use of captions in the news report is because we wanted to have the report on mute as the girl is supposed to be blanking the new report out to give the audience more knowledge to what is going on than the girl does. So we used captions over the news report so that the audience could read this. We built up tension using the tensional music that starts when she leaves the house as it tells the audience that something bad is going to happen. A member of our target audience said ‘the background music created a terrifying atmosphere’, we wanted to create this atmosphere as our aim was for this to be a horror/thriller film and in order to do this we had to somehow create a terrifying atmosphere. I think that we managed to create ideologies in this opening sequence as we showed crimes and victims, what can happen to people when they are alone at night in the streets and how women are perceived the weaker sex than men. The use of music gave the opening sequence tension, the sound was realistic. I think that the editing could have been slightly faster as people in our audience testing said that ‘the shots of the girls loneliness when she was walking caused me to lose interest’.
We did not have any flash backs in our project, we kept the opening sequence very chronological with invisible editing so that the audience would not get confused with sense of time so early into the film. A big enigma that we made in the opening sequence was ‘What is going to happen to the girl?’ as the title of the film came up on screen as the girl screamed, the audience will not know what has happened to her. The use of captions in the news report is because we wanted to have the report on mute as the girl is supposed to be blanking the new report out to give the audience more knowledge to what is going on than the girl does. So we used captions over the news report so that the audience could read this. We built up tension using the tensional music that starts when she leaves the house as it tells the audience that something bad is going to happen. A member of our target audience said ‘the background music created a terrifying atmosphere’, we wanted to create this atmosphere as our aim was for this to be a horror/thriller film and in order to do this we had to somehow create a terrifying atmosphere. I think that we managed to create ideologies in this opening sequence as we showed crimes and victims, what can happen to people when they are alone at night in the streets and how women are perceived the weaker sex than men. The use of music gave the opening sequence tension, the sound was realistic. I think that the editing could have been slightly faster as people in our audience testing said that ‘the shots of the girls loneliness when she was walking caused me to lose interest’.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Whilst in the process of completing this project I have learnt to use;
· A digital video camera
· Tripod
· Imac computer
· Imovie
· Digital camera stills
· External hard drives
I have used the internet to help me with research whist writing posts on the blog, I have used www.youtube.com many times to look at other types of horror/thriller films. I just www.google.co.uk to look on websites like www.jamendo.com to find music for the opening sequence. The cameras have helped us film the opening sequence, the Imac and Imovie have allowed us to edit our footage and blogger has allowed us to write about our project. All of these things helped us to achieve our finished project. However we did have to ask for help on certain things like how to upload music onto the opening sequence so that we could edit the clips to the music. There was a problem with the music as I listened to many copyright free CDs with music on however we did not realize that a track that we had used was not copyright free. Fortunately someone did and we had to change this track to another that was copyright free. The technologies allowed us to film an audience viewing that we posted on the blog http://c2asampfordejopsonashah.blogspot.com/2010/01/audience-viewing.html , it allowed us to edit the clips so that we would be able to just see a small part of them watching it and all of what they had to say about the opening sequence including the questions that went with the questions.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full project?
Looking back at our preliminary task http://c2asampfordejopsonashah.blogspot.com/2009/11/preliminary-task.html that I quite liked I have realized that setting is very important when filming something. I think that the editing is better in our main task than in our preliminary. I quite liked the track that we used in our preliminary task because it suited the clip well, but the music in our main project has made me realize that it is quite hard to find copyright free music. I think that we have improved on the lighting as in our preliminary task it was quite hard to see faces as the lighting was back-lighting which created a silhouette around the person which made it hard to see the persons facial expressions.
Conclusion
I think that as a group we have managed to do a lot without opening sequence however, I still think that the story line of our project could have been better and that we could have shown the girl getting stabbed at the end before the title of the film came up on screen. http://c2asampfordejopsonashah.blogspot.com/2010/01/main-task.html
Looking back at our preliminary task http://c2asampfordejopsonashah.blogspot.com/2009/11/preliminary-task.html that I quite liked I have realized that setting is very important when filming something. I think that the editing is better in our main task than in our preliminary. I quite liked the track that we used in our preliminary task because it suited the clip well, but the music in our main project has made me realize that it is quite hard to find copyright free music. I think that we have improved on the lighting as in our preliminary task it was quite hard to see faces as the lighting was back-lighting which created a silhouette around the person which made it hard to see the persons facial expressions.
Conclusion
I think that as a group we have managed to do a lot without opening sequence however, I still think that the story line of our project could have been better and that we could have shown the girl getting stabbed at the end before the title of the film came up on screen. http://c2asampfordejopsonashah.blogspot.com/2010/01/main-task.html
Emma Jopson
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