final product

Final product

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

What we have learnt

To begin with we learnt a lot from the mistakes in the pleminary task. Our pleminary task was really bad, but had signs of great potential. We were not very good with the camera shot, the acting was bad and the camera man had no idea of what he was doing. Once we finished the pleminary task we had learnt how to avoid these problems and how to actually create a piece that would impress not only the examiner but our class. As seen in the pictures below we had made some mistakes with the 180 degree rule, but also pulled off an excellent match-on-action shot. 

Our biggest problem however, was the camera shaking our camera man even with the tripod couldn't stop the camera from shaking, this was a massive problem this was something that couldn't happen in our actual task and thanfully with more practice and a shot we found very handy the POV. Also the pleminary task allowed us to find out new things about imovie like how to mute all sound in the movie and manipulate the visuals to look darker or brighter. The most important thing we learnt was how to piece together a movie that would make sense to the audience, by this I mean where a sequence of events are pieced together in a logical order. 

 

Another shot that again worked well for us and this was all thanks to the practice that we had when doing the pleminary task. Without that experience are movie wouldn't be very successful at all. Once we asked for a better tripod and managed to figure out how the camera worked and sorted out what mode the camera should be on, we finally had the confidence to go on and film our opening scene. 

our reaction video

How did you attract/address your audience?

 Audience

We wanted our movie to be an action/thriller that would surprise our audience. We wanted to target a young audience between 15-25 a large age gap, but we believed that this age group of people would want to watch our movie. Also females and males would both be up for watching our movie. We also did secondary research and found that many people between that age group liked the genre of our movie. We also believe that at the age mentioned above many people like doing things that give them a thrill. We also looked at movies that were massive successes such as The Dark Knight Rises and figured out what made the movie such a success. We also looked at Shutter Island and how the mysterious theme in the movie made it such a success. We had to avoid anything that wasn't serious enough in our movie we couldn't have our characters smiling sarcastically or anything of that nature. 

 

 

Here we have our directors cut of our movie. We explain what is occurring in each scene and it makes a more sense about what is occurring. One thing I realised is that our opening scene focused on 'surprising' the audience too much and might have  not made sense to them. However if we were to carry on with our movie it would have made sense to our audience as the narrative would have been similar to Shutter Island, but not as in depth ours would have a more blunt narrative but it would still give the audience an explanation of what is going on in our narrative

what type of media institution would distrubute our media product

The media institution we chose

The media institution we would have produce and distribute our media product is Cipher films. This is because the company isn't a massive Hollywood production company. Our movie would also not have a massive international release it would be a national UK release only. Cipher films is also known for releasing small independent releases such as Kidulthood and adULThood.  We would prefer if our movie was released through major cinemas such as Odeon. I would prefer Cipher films to distribute my media product as they have got experience with distributing action/thriller genres as seen it the example above with adULThood. Also the company is familiar with smaller national releases of movies and this would make it suitable for us.

Another company that could distribute our movie very well is Film4. This company is famous for many UK release only movies. the company has released movies such as; 12 Years A Slave, 127 Hours and The inbetweeners. These movies have been some of the best success stories. If we have the right company distributing our production we could make it a success. Film4 has had experience with selling almost every genre movie that is around whereas Cipher films hasn't got this experience. To conclude Film4 is also more established than Cipher films and this makes it a more desirable choice for us.

technologies during the process of constructing the opening scene

technologies during the process of constructing the opening scene

I see that the use of cut of dialogue gains more attention from the audience as it brings more confusion to the audience and they really want to know what happens therefore they carry on watching. At first, we had dialogue in and it just practically explained what happened so we thought we'd cut the dialogue to get the audiences attention.

We learnt that using a P.O.V shot of the person being tortured gets the audiences attention, because it makes you feel like the character, therefore we used it to make the audience feel like they are being tortured and they enjoyed it.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our final product and media conventions

The music in our movie was quiet and goes against the conventions surrounding action/thriller movies. Instead of going for fast upbeat music we preferred slow-beat music that kept up the continuity effect of mystery surrounding our opening scene. For example the movie Transporter has fast upbeat music in almost every scene, but this movie would need fast beat music as a lot of action is seen in the movie, whereas our movie has a lot of mystery and a surprise element to it. We needed eerie music for this reason.

Our costumes were also very different to many main stream major action/thrillers. Going back to our example of 2 Fast 2 Furious where their characters had shirts and smart trousers on, our characters had hoodies and jeans on. This is something that is not usually seen in a torture scene, but our scene was not designed to be gruesome it was there to let the audience know that this movie is going to be full of twists and surprises in the story. We had the characters in hoodies and jeans to show that they are at the bottom of the hierarchy.

The characterization of our characters can go against action/thriller conventions as our characters don't look like the typical professional criminals that you get in action/thrillers. Our characters are not like the professional/crazy depicted characters like in the movie Casino. In our movie our characters are more like characters from the movie Adulthood. We have young characters that have been characterized to act as if they grew up on a rough estate, and that they didn't have much hope.

Our movie also didn't keep up with the film style conventions as we had problems with the lighting. We couldn't have much lighting in our scene as then too much of the mise en scene would be given away to the audience so we decided to have low key lighting with only POV, close-ups and mid-shots as our preferred camera shot. In the movie Casino Royal the lighting is similar as it is low-key but it is also has a wide range of camera shots in it's torture scene from close-ups to long-shots and over-head shots, they had a wide variety of different shots but then again, they had the budget for more and
better equipment.