Evaluation 7

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


In between the process of shooting and editing our preliminary task to then shooting and editing our thriller opening we were able to improve our skills quite drastically. This can be seen in our progress with planning, filming and editing.

While making our preliminary task.
When starting our course we were blank slates we had no previous knowledge about the processes that went into filming and editing a piece of footage. As a result we had to learn from experience making mistakes and noting them in hopes to rectify them in future.This meant that when making our preliminary task we did not have very many skills and as a result our preliminary task was not of that high a quality.

When planning for our preliminary task we did not really put much effort into the plot, setting, props etc. because of this our preliminary task was very simple and put together. We also had to figure out the whole filming process for ourselves like where to position the camera and how to execute techniques like match on action/eyeline match/ shot-reverse-shot. This also meant that our preliminary task was lacking in quality as we did not know to think about things like backlighting which can be seen when I walk through the door in the preliminary task. Also the eyeline matches and shot reverse shots in the preliminary task are pretty badly executed.

Then when it came to editing we were not all tat familiar with the software and as such it was a process of trial and error in order for us to find out what worked and what didn't. This also allowed us to experiment with various different effects, transitions and the effects of fast and slow editing on the sequence. We decided to keep the preliminary task simple with minimal transitions. When it came to exporting we didn't really know the difference between the different formats to which we could export our footage, because of this we did not export it at a very high quality. All together our preliminary task is of quite a poor quality as we didn't really know what we were doing, this task was for us to experiment and make mistakes which we would be able to learn from in future.

What I learned from preliminary
That the planning process is important when making a successful
sequence.
How to effectively use an eyeline match and shot-reverse-shot.
Upload, edit and export footage in premiere pro.
How to use Youtube to upload my videos onto the internet.


Skills I gained from the preliminary

The ability to use film equipment: camera, tripod, mic and boom pole.
The ability to make decisions about camera placement.
The ability to edit footage on premiere pro by cutting footage and adding transitions.
The ability to render footage on premier pro.
The ability to export footage from premiere pro.
The ability to upload footage to youtube.

Preliminary task video

Eyeline match looking of screen at Shelby

Image of Shelby which for eyeline match

Shot reverse shot (1)

Shot reverse shot (2)

Backlighting

Shot reverse shot (3)

Our actual thriller is of a higher quality than our preliminary task. This is because we made detailed plans about what we were going to include in our sequence. Then when it came to filming the thriller we had better knowledge about the process of filming and how to do it successfully. Finally when it came to the editing process we made vast improvements to the basic editing that can be seen in our preliminary task. We also gave more time for the editing process of our thriller opening as we realised this was the area that would make the biggest difference to the overall quality of the final film. Due to the lessons that we learned during the preliminary task it can be seen that there is none of the backlighting problem or the problems with eyeline matches and shot-reverse-shots. Also as we learned from our preliminary task the importance of what format you export your sequence to our thriller opening is of a much higher visual quality.

Shot reverse shot (1)

Shot reverse shot (2)

Shot reverse shot (3)

Shelby looking of screen for eyeline match

What Shelby is looking at eyeline match

Evaluation 6

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

For the question "What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?" I decided to answer in the form of an infographic.

Evaluation 5

How did you attract your audience?


For the question "How did you attract your audience?" I decided to answer in the form of a prezi which can be found below.




I decided to include some pictures to show how I used the different techniques as discussed in my prezi.

This picture is of our thriller opening which is posted on Youtube a form of social media frequently used by our target audience.

This picture shows our female characters which make up 2/3 of our cast this is different to most thrillers which usually have a male dominated cast.
Below is a picture from "North by North West" which shows how most of the on screen cast are male.

This picture shows a scene from "North by North West" the scene clearly shows how the film has a mostly male cast.

This is a picture of our cliffhanger ending which leaves the audience wanting more as they don't know what is going to happen to the rest of the girls. Another reason that we used this is because it was inspired by all the "A" moments in "Pretty Little Liars" when our murderer crosses the girls faced off.  I thought this was similar to the moment in "Pretty Little Liars" when "A" paints over the population sign showing that "A" has been successful in getting rid of one of their targets.

The pictures of this can be seen below. 

These are the pictures of before and after "A" tampered with the population on the sign.

This picture show the character of "Chloe" alone as you can see in this shot there is no one around which creates a sense of isolation for our character which engages the audience by making them empathise and feel fear for our character.

This was our first shot which establishes our setting allowing people from our local area to see that the film was shot in a familiar location.

Evaluation 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

For the question "Who would be the audience for your media product?" I decided to answer in the form of a slide show. 

Evaluation 3

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

In the question "What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?"  we had to consider how our media product would realistically be distributed. We did this by considering all of the pro's and con's of each different production method. This question is being answered in the form of a mind-map.

Evaluation 2

How does your media product represent social groups?


For the question "How does your media product represent social groups?" I decided to answer in the form of a infographic.

Here are some pictures of the characters in our thriller.

Our characters "Chloe" and "Lucy" give us our representation of females, they also represent the working class and youth.  They can be see in this picture that "Chloe" and "Lucy" are gossiping which is immature and frames them as less intelligent.

Again our characters of "Chloe" and "Lucy" can be seen as stereotypical girlie girls as they are discussing make up. This again frames them in quite a negative light suggesting that they may not be all that intelligent. 

In the end  both girls have no power to save  themselves they are helpless and weak and ultimately die because of this. 

When confronted with the hooded guy "Chloe" is helpless to do anything to stop him and has no power to save herself.

Our hooded murderer killing "Chloe" he gives us our representation of males and our ethnic minority, he also represents working class and youth.  When he is first introduced he is stalking the girls  which is predatiorial he is  silently watching his prey which is extremely animalistic. 

When "Chloe" and "Lucy" become aware of the hooded person watching automatic reaction is to run away which portrays them as being rather helpless. Then when the character of "Lucy" trips and the character of "Chloe" keeps on running this present her as cowardly but also as being selfish. 

Our male character is physical violence which conveys the male gender as aggressive and violent and dangerous this is seen as being a very masculine trait and very dominant and powerful. 

Evaluation 1

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

We decided to answer the question "In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?" in the form of a video.

Audience Feedback

After the screening process the audience gave us their feedback on our thriller. They told us what they thought of all of the components of our film and gave us positive and negative feedback. To start our audience pointed out that the opening was suspenseful. Which is one of the main themes of a thriller and one we wanted to get across in our film. So this feedback was brilliant as it meant we had managed to accomplish effectively including one of the key  thriller conventions in our opening. 

The next point made by our audience was that they really enjoyed our cliffhanger ending. They wanted to know what was going to happen next and thought the idea of the unknown for the rest of the girls made them excited to watch more. This is great because it means we were able to entice our audience and achieved an air of mystery as to the outcome for the rest of the film. 

The third point that our audience made was that our film was intriguing. This told us that they thought the story line was interesting enough that they didn't get bored, not only did they not get bored they were interested enough in our opening to find it intriguing that there was the possibility of this psychopath murderer committing more murders.

The only real piece of negative feedback was on the quality of the acting. A vast majority of the time our audience thought that the lack of good acting made the scenes comical rather than serious drama. We were not to discouraged by this as acting is a skill that was just not possessed by us while making this opening and is not something that we can readily come across so the only thing that we can do to improve is to practice our acting skills before the next time we film. 

Screening

Once our thriller was completed we needed to find an audience to screen it for us in order to find out what people would think of it. To maximize the screening opportunities for our thriller we posted our final video on YouTube and Facebook so that people would be able to comment any opinions and give feedback. 

Just in case this didn't work we decided to get some face to face feedback so we approached some of the students at out sixth form and asked them to watch our thriller and give us their honest opinion. This is necessary as we need feedback in order to evaluate whether we did well or not and to help us to see what we did well and any possible criticisms. It is important that we get criticism in order for us to know how to improve because without feedback our work will never get any better.   

The majority of the feedback that we received was positive. The people that we showed enjoyed our film and and pointed out some criticisms that we didn't notice ourselves. Now when we do similar work in future we will take into account the mistakes that we made and try to rectify them. Over all this was a learning experience that we will be able to put to use in future. 

First picture of the screening 

Second picture of the screening

Completed Thriller

This is our final completed version of our thriller video:

Analysis of rough cut

The purpose of a rough cut is to have a simple version of your final product that gives you an idea of what your final product will look like when finished. A rough cut is made without any technical additions such as additional music or transition so that any changes that need to be made can be easily applied without the need of having to redo any off the effects that you have added. 

Our rough cut was successful even though there were a few minor mistakes. This is because even without any effects our rough cut still managed to be suspenseful and exciting. Our mistakes are nothing to worry about at the moment as we already acknowledged that there would be mistakes as we rushed the process of editing our rough cut as some of our group were absent and as such not able to give their input to the editing of the rough cut. So this ended up being quite a rushed process. 

To edit our rough cut all we really did was load the footage onto the computer and imported it into premier pro put our footage in chronological order and delete any unnecessary scenes. Once that was done all we needed to do was cut down footage to approximately the right amount of time it should show. At this point we did not need to add any music or effects as it is only a rough cut. 

When watching trough our rough cut we were fairly happy with how things went, if the rough cut is any reflection of our final thriller then I believe that we will be successful in completing the task effectively. Some things that we picked up on while watching our rough cut were some minor editing hiccups that can easily be rectified when we cary out our final editing process. 

Audience feedback on rough cut

When we showed our rough cut to people we received feedback. Most of the feedback we received was positive such as people thought that the idea was really interesting they liked the cliffhanger ending and said that they couldn't wait to see the final opening. However we also received negative feedback which is the whole point of a rough cut to see what people honestly think of your film so far and to get constructive criticism and tips on how to improve when we complete our final course work. 

Points that were brought to our attention were that our editing needed some improvements for example there was a piece of footage which included the director (Louis) speaking. As we start combing through the thriller when editing we will be able to pick up on things like that fairly easily, and so can be avoided when it comes to our actual opening. Some of the other feedback that we received was that the beginning scene was too long and boring as all it consisted of was the girls walking along a path. Although we did this intentionally as this is going to be the time period where we will include the titles so we made sure that nothing relevant was happening as not to distract the audience from the action with titles. 

All together this feedback was really useful as it allowed us to see that an audience was enthusiastic to watch and comment on our rough cut this means that we are now confident about our ability to produce a good final thriller opening. 

Rough cut

We have done a rough cut of the thriller course work. First we made sure that we had all of our footage putting it all order making sure that nothing was missing. Then we made small adjustments cutting out unnecessary filming and shortening anything that was excessively long. After we had finished with our rough cut we uploaded it to youtube.

Editing 2

Once we were sure we were happy with the way our footage fit together and looked when it ran as a whole it was time to start adding the finishing touches. To start we needed to add a section at the very beginning with our candidate information. Then we added out ident and started to put in the titles. We did this by cutting them in between the footage that we already had at the beginning. To make the editing process easier we split the footage into several chunks rather than having it be one huge chunk. So at this stage we needed to put them all together tweaking the footage in places so that everything ran smoothly. 

The first section is not rendered and the media is offline this is because the screenshot was taken on the computer that the footage was originally saved on, rather than the computer we later worked on. 

Screen shot of finished thriller in premier pro

Editing

Louis editing

To start the editing process we loaded the footage onto the computer and imported it into premier pro. Once that was done we deleted any scenes that weren't very good so they wouldn't be confused with any of the final scenes. When that was done we put the footage in order and cut them all down individually so that any unnecessary footage/dialogue would not be included.  Then all completed clips were put together to create our rough cut. This just included the footage in order without any additions such as transitions, leaving just a simple sequence that we exported and put onto our blogs.

 After the rough cut was complete we were able to start adding transitions and editing effects. We added music and decided on changing the order of some of the footage for a better effect. Once all of this was done we were ready to add the titles.

Filming 2

The second part of the our filming process was located at Shelby's house and took up roughly 40% of the opening of our thriller. Because this part was filmed inside there was no issue with weather although there was the issue of background noise. As there were people in the house there was the issue of them speaking which although we asked them to be quite they didn't always listen. Eventually we concluded that if we unplugged the microphone attachment and just used the built in one this would eradicate the problem. As this microphone wasn't strong enough to pick up the background noise but was strong enough to pick up the noise in the room where we were doing the filming. Another minor problem was getting the tripod to fit, there were a lot of tight spaces inside so a lot of the time we had to mess around with the placement of the camera in order for it to fit. 

Again the first shot of this section was establishing the new location, so the first piece of footage that we filmed in this section was of the door outside of Shelby's house. 

Filming outside of Shelby's house

Filming 1

During the first section of our filming process we were located at the chase. The scenes shot in this location make up approximately 60% of the thriller opening. Our filming was successful as the weather stayed clear the whole day and apart from the moderate wind background noise didn't prove that much of a problem.

When we were searching for places to film it took us a while. The location of each scene proved to have it's own unique problem such as the ground not being flat enough for the tripod or it not having the right components for the scene. However after perseverance we eventually found a place for each of our shots that worked.

Below is a picture of  Louis filming the first shot in opening. We decided to have this as our first shot as it introduced the audience to where the filming is situated also this is where our characters start to walk.

Louis filming the first shot

Animatic

An animatic is a moving story board it helps to idea of what your film will look like and allows visualize your finished product. Starting off you take still images of each shot on your storyboard you put them together to form a sequence this give you and idea of how the finished product will flow. Then you can add effects to give the impression of movement. After all of the visuals are arranged and you're happy with them music is added to convey the tone of the film, this helps to get a real idea of what the finished product will be like. When the music is arranged where it needs to go and fits with the visuals the animatic is complete.

This is our animatic for our thriller coursework.

Story board

This is our story board for our thriller. It contains a picture of each shot we plan to do what type of shot that will be, the movement if any that will be in the shot and anything else of note such as the time the shot will last for.

A story board is used in order to lay out our ideas for our thriller in a visual for so that we can get a general basis of where we are going with our final idea.

Planning documents For thriller coursework

Location Visit Sheet Programme Title: The Chase Client: Writer: Sarah, Shelby and Louis Producer: Sarah, Shelby and Louis Director: Louis Date: 09/01/2016

Rough Sketch/Explanation of location and key points to note: The Chase Country Park is a large park reserve for wildlife and nature. Full of trees and some lakes and hills, the park is accessible to the public with pathways leading throughout the park so there is easy access to all parts of the chase. Access to location via: Main road Path through central park Name and number of location contact: The Chase Nature Park Reserve: 02082272332

Health and Safety Issues to note: ●      Steep hills ●      Drowning ●      Wildlife ●      Body parts found in lake

Potential Filming Problems : ●      Weather (rain, wind) ●      Lighting ●      Pedestrians and animals ●      Uneven ground ●      Disruptive sounds

Additional Notes:  (map of area/weather forecast etc)

Costumes and Props

Character Name: Lucy     Actress: Sarah
Costume: Lucy wears a top a skirt and boots, her hair style is natural and straight.	Props: Lipstick and blood
Character Name: Chloe Actress: Shelby
Costume: Chloe wears jeans and a casual top, and her hair is natural and straight.	Props: Keys , bag and blood.
Character Name: Billy       Actor: Kelvin
Costume: Billy wears a hoodie and black jeans with black gloves.	Props: Knife, picture and blood.

Treatment

Group Roles Cinematography: Louis Mise-en-scene: Louis Sound: Shelby Editing: Sarah

Title:  The Chase  Tag Line: You can run but you cant hide

Synopsis: This a thriller based on a serial killer targeting a group girls his aim is to wipe them all out one by one. But why?

Key Genre Conventions: Thriller  Action The antagonist is revealed in opening  Suspenseful  Crime  Blood Kinfe Murder

Risk Assessment

Group Members: Shelby , Sarah and Louis    Location: The chase and Shelby’s house

Hazard	Person(s) at Risk	Likelihood of Hazard 1 – Extremely Unlikely 5 – Extremely Likely	Severity of Hazard Outcomes 1 – Very Low Risk 5 – Very High Risk	Risk Level (Likelihood + Severity) 2	Measures to Take to Manage Risk	Risk Managed? Y/N
Knife injury	Shelby	3	5	4	Make sure the knife is as blunt as possible and that distance is kept between the two people.	Yes
Drowning	Shelby, Sarah, Louis	1	5	3	Stay clear of the lake and be careful with your footing	Yes
Tripping	Sarah, Shelby and Louis	3	2	2.5	Keep pathway clear and be aware of surroundings	Yes

Contacts

Emergency Service:    999 and 111
Robert Clack School:  02082704222 

Shot List
Scene	Shot Number	Description
One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelve Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen	One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten  Eleven Twelve Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen	A Pan shot of the Chase nature park sign with no dialogue. Straight shot of Sarah and Shelby walking in the chase nature park with no dialogue. Straight shot of Sarah and Shelby walk down the chase to sit on a bench no dialogue. Over the shoulder shot of Shelby and Sarah talking dialogue. Sarah notices guy in the hoodie but Shelby does not believe her. A medium shot of guy in bushes watching Sarah and Shelby. Shelby notices the hooded man and gets paranoid. Shelby and Sarah start running away and hooded guy starts chasing them. Sarah trips and Shelby don't realize and carry's on running however when she realizes she gets scared and just carries on running anyway. Close up a graphic match of Shelby's hand exiting the chase park. Graphic match close up of Shelby's hand unlocking her front door. Cut to Shelby walking into her bedroom and turning light on seeing Sarah dead on the floor and Shelby screams. Then the hooded guy comes out of nowhere with a knife and stabs Shelby and murders her. A medium shot of Shelby and Sarah  both dead in the bedroom with knife wounds in their chests Close up of a picture of a group of girls including Shelby and Sarah and the hooded guy crosses Shelby and Sarah's faces out with blood on the knife he just killed with.

Shooting Schedule

Day	Scene	Location	Equipment	Costumes	Props	Cast +Crew
17/1/16 17/1/16	1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, 11. 12,13,14,15,16	The Chase Shelby's (Chloe's) house	Tripod, Camera, The boom pole and the sound system   Tripod, Camera, The boom pole and the sound system	Shelby's costume  Jeans, top and trainers basic outfit  Sarah's costume  tights, skirt , top and boots.  Kelvin  black hood, black gloves, black jeans and black trainers   Shelby's costume  Jeans, top and trainers basic outfit  Sarah's costume  tights, skirt , top and boots.  Kelvin  black hood, black gloves, black jeans and black trainers	A lipstick and a bag A bag a knife, keys a picture and blood.	Shelby Playing Chloe  Sarah  Playing Lucy  Kelvin  Playing Hooded guy  Louis  Directing  Shelby Playing Chloe  Sarah  Playing Lucy  Kelvin  Playing Hooded guy  Louis  Direcgtin