Evaluation 1; In what ways does your media product use, develop or challange forms and conventions of real media products?

I have chosen to compare my shots with 'A Touch of Evil'. I will use the shots to speak about conventions of a thriller.

The long shots in 'A Touch of Evil' are used to establish the setting which is very conve

ntional of a thriller movie. We used a pan for our establishing shot.

The shot panned around the room until it found Sarah standing doing her makeup. We were careful not to show much

of her, hiding her identity.This would create an

enigma code and arouse suspicion, in the audience, from the start of the film.The shot also starts to tell us about Sarah's character; the room is fairly big and suggests she is from a 'comfortable' background. The cream and baby pink walls have connotations of innocence and are typical of a 'teenage girl'. However apart from this the shots main purpose is to set the scene.

The other establishing

shot we used was a pan from the sky to David's house as

Sarah rings on the doorbell. This establishes the area we is very suburban and allows the audience to familiarize themselves with

it, signifying that something of importance will happen here.

Another convention of a thriller is an iconic item

. In the 'A Touch of Evil' shots above we see a close up of an explosive. In our opening it is drinking glasses. We filmed a close up of the glasses as

David pours Vodka into the glasses. This amount of time this shot is shown for is very long for just watching someone pouring a drink this suggests to the audience

that the drink is significant in the plot. In most thrillers the antagonist has a certain weapon significant to them. In our thriller the drink is David's weapon which he spikes with Rohypnol.

Like ' A touch of Evil' our thriller follows two characters; a antagonist and a prot

agonist. Sarah is shown in a very innocent light with a girly bedroom and clothes. The first sequence of shots focus's on Sarah which builds a relationship between Sarah and the audi

ence making the audience sympathise with her. David however is a dark character the first time we see his character he looks very mysterious as we only see his dark shadow. His facial expressions are misleading and the audience feel uncomfortable watching him as they start to see

the story unravel.

Thriller preview feedback

Skills Audit: Creation Of Titles

When creating out titles we had to make up names for each role. We were told to do this to make the opeing more realistic. The first title say "Candi in association with.." We chose Studio Canal as our production company as we felt our film would be one they would take intrest in. The live type font we used for out titles is a Livetype font. We choose this as it was edgy and fitted our thriller genre. The titles varied in blue and red and when adding them to the shots we were careful to leave them on the screen a long enough time for the audience to read them. We ensured we put the titles in shots of not much significance so not to draw attention from the important shots. When importing the titles Tania had to render the shots as a movie and then import them into final cut. From there she could drag them down from the files onto the timeline. The official title of the film was big and bold on a black background this made it stand out and look striking.

Skills audit: Sound

We found the soundtrack the hardest part of our task. I came up with the first idea and Tania built on these producing our final soundtrack. To start I tried to pick a melody that would fit the first sequence of Sarah getting ready. I wanted to create suspense but not climax the moment with music at the same time. The melody i choose is quite slow and delicate but has a menacing feel to it. We added a ticking sound to build pace in the shots which added to the tension.
When the scene has cut to the pan of the house tense music is introduce, the ticking sound is again introduced and the volume increases. This is played throughout the waiting and fetching of the glasses scenes and continues until David returns to the living room.
The music changes when Sarah drinks her drink where the violin reduces in volume and the only sound we hear is the ticking sound signifying the importance of this shot.
The music then increases as the go upstairs until it is cut and the title appears with a loud drum noise. Following a machine beep the recorded and edited voicemail is played.

Skills audit: Editing

The first stage of editing our rough cut was to put each shot into an indiviual folder and name each one ready for Final Cut Pro. For each part of out Thriller we would import the folder so to start off we imported the sequence of Sarah getting ready. We choose the shots we wanted and dragging them down to the timeline put the in order to achieve the desirable effect. We increased the speed of time in alot of these shots to build pace and maintain Sarah's 'day to day' normal life effectively.
The next scene that used alot of editing was when Sarah waits for David as he gets the drink. Here we focused on two scenes; the first being David going to fetch the drink and the second being Sarah waiting. To do this we cut the footage we had filmed showing a change of time between each shots.
The other method we used to show a change of time was a fade. We used this twice; once after David has poured her drink and second before they go upstairs.
The shot of Sarah drinking her drink was slowed down to show the significance of the shot and build suspence.
Finnaly when editing the last shot we slowed the speed down to create tension and a sense of fear in the audience.

Skills audit: Filming

On the 9th of March the rest of my group came to my house to film our thriller opening. We started straight away consulting our storyboard to look what shots we would take first. Taking various shots of Sarah 'getting ready' to go to Davids house me and Tania who were filming/directing tried to shoot a variety of different types of shots to make sure we made proper use of the camera. Some of these shots included; a extreme close up on Sarah applying mascara to her eyelashes, a pan half way round the room as an establishing shot and a close up on her hand as she opened the door. We also made sure that her face was not fully shown throughout the first sequence of shots creating an enigma code and suspense within the audience.
We then went down stairs and took a panning shot of sarah arriving at the house to show a change of time. Following this we took a match cut of sarah ringing on the doorbell and a shot of David approaching the door through it. We then followed David and Sarah into the living room with the camera directing David to place his hands on Sarahs shoulder slightly pushing her into the room. This made David look dominant and suggested Sarah was the vunrable character in the situation.
Following this we went and took a pan of David entering the kitchen and various shots of him taking the cup out of the cabnet. Focusing on the bottle of Vodka and glasses with closeups we made sure the audience would establish the relevence of them through these choices of shots.
We then shot the most important part of our opening which was David drugging Sarah. We did this taking medium shots and close ups of Sarah and David drinking. Me and Tania directed David to look over at Sarah as she drank at this point to sinify the spiking of her drink. Shooting a birds eye view shot of the two drinking made Sarah look like the prey and highlighted David as the predator as we saw him fake, drinking a drink. We then shot a close up of David clasping hold of Sarah's hand and leading her out which indicated a intimate side to the two.
Finnally we shot them both of them going upstairs with closeups of their feet and another birdseye view showing a change in time. The final shot we took was a upper body shot of David closing the door on the camera. This will create suspense in the audience as Sarah looks vunrable and trapped, sitting on the bed, in the background of the shot.

Evaluation Question 8) Audience feedback and comment

Here are is a wordle of our feedback forms, it shows the words that were most repeated. As you can see many words relate to the theme of our film; drugs, sex i.e. words, party,heels, sexual. Other words such as 'small and production' show that it is clear we aim for niche audience, as it seems like a small production film.