Evaluation: Video Interviews

To show what we have learnt we decided to video myself and Jess being interviewed to answer a few of the questions involved in the evaluation, below is the video of the interviews that we answered;

In the video above, I stated that our film stuck to the traditional conventions of the thriller genre as it showed signs of suspense, shock and voyeurism. I compared it to other films that have been released such as What I did Last Summer due to the teenage element and Social Network to the involvement of social networking site Facebook which is used in the film. I have also stated that the unfair representation is what has motivated us to make this film.

I have also spoke and compared our film to when we filmed our preliminary exercise and how we have improved our skill with certain technologies and how the group's media work has improved on a general level. I stated that I believe the camera work of Jess has improved a lot and the shots and the zoom that we have used in the film reflect much better in comparison to the preliminary exercise. I also stated for amateur acting, the characters in the film had done a sufficient job in order to make the film look realistic.

Jess then explained what technologies we have used in order to enhance and construct our film. Jess mentions the use of the video camera, the blackberry, the blogger, survey monkey and youtube in order to research and plan and make our thriller film. Jess explains the skills we have used in order to improve our ability in these programmes and how we have used them effectively to make our film possible.

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

Preliminary Task;

http://www.youtube.com/user/mediagees2010#p/u/5/HOcQ6eA2IlE

Final Draft

http://www.youtube.com/user/mediagees2010#p/u/0/UHPQaNlPNMk

Since our thriller, I believe we have progressed and learnt a lot, I think a major improvement has been the editing. I felt that with our preliminary task we were quite raw and seemed to dwell on footage to long creating long and tedious cuts. I felt in our actual thriller, we increased the pace of the scenes dramatically and created more suspense and tension this way.

I believe another improvement we made was with the expressionism, I felt that in our first task I was not used to having the camera on me all the time and struggled whereas in the film I seemed to not notice it as much and just try to make the scene look as real as possible. I feel my only error was when I was meant to be acting 'dead', my eye appears to move but this was not too noticable thankfully.

I think major improvements were also made from Jess with the camera work who seemed to make the film seem a bit more 'real' with the way she followed the action well. In our preliminary exercise you will notice that the zoom is pretty poor but we worked around this and the film seems to run smoothy in our actual thriller.

6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this project?

What have you learnt about technologies from the

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5) How did I attract my audience?

After planning and researching how we wanted our film to look, I feel that our film can hold the audience's attention as the characters in themselves are interesting and would definatly attract the audience to keep watching the film to see what would happen next. The film engages with the audience because the way the characters in the film come across will be easy for the our target audience of the younger generation to relate to. We have also used certain techniques such as cliffhangers when both characters are killed at the start to intrigue the audience to find out more and the reasons in why the killer has done this. The use of the young actors is definatly an intergal part in making the film accessible to the younger generation as we feel it is more of a fair representation into how the younger generation actually act compared to the media's perception.

Below are examples of younger actors in other media productions;

Our film also uses the technique of confusion and leaves the film on a cliffhanger, the killer Louise seems to have no real motive to kill me or Shelby which leaves the viewer intrigued to find out what happens next. This is our main ploy to get the viewer to watch on further and see how Louise and the use of Facebook relates to the film. Below is comments we got from people who watched the opening of the film;

Josh Craske age 17: "I found the film rather confusing at the start but found the suspense was built up enough and the killing at the end is rather exciting and makes me want to watch more."

Joe Barwick Age 16; "I didn't really get what was going on and I wouldn't watch on, I wanted to see more of the killer as she was secretly quite attractive instead of the rather unappealing main actors who were not that good on the eye"

Sophie Barwick Age 22: "I rather enjoyed the film and found the actors very attractive, this alone would be a reason why I would watch on. I also found the way suspense was built up and the way facebook was used was another bonus into why I would continue to watch. Quality film !"

Liam Fritzl Age 14; "I found the film okay but not sure I would want to watch on as the actors are a bit mature and don't act like typical teenagers. However, I do like the use of facebook as it is easy to understand for someone like me as I'm absolutely obsessed by facebook. 

Sent - Final Draft

This is our final draft of our film Send, we have uploaded it onto youtube and it has been downloaded to be graded. We have also uploaded it onto our facebook profiles to see what our fellow class mates think.

4) Who would be my audience for my media project?

Before starting my thriller, I decided to do some background research on what my audience wanted to see, to do this I created a survey on a website called surveymonkey which helped me require what my target audience would want me to produce in my film.

After I had a discussion with my group, we decided that our target audience would be mainly young adults and teenagers so this is who we aimed our survey at my posting the survey on our Facebook and twitter pages. My results showed me various reasons why the teenage generation enjoyed thrillers and also expressed their preference to be physiological thrillers. We also got a mixture of answers from both genders to help us represent both genders equally in our thriller film. Below is a screenshot of some survey monkey results I acquired.

We also asked some of our fellow students what came to mind when they thought of a physcological thriller, we then used the responses to make a wordle using another new piece of equipment to show what responses we got from our target audience;

Thinking about our target audience, I would predict that the teenage generation would be the most likely to watch our film as they would be intrigued to how they were represented as our film relates mainly to their generation. It also uses the social network site Facebook which most teenagers can relate to and understand. I also think that teenagers would want to watch our film as they would recognise the dress sense and understand what was happening in the film better than an adult might be able to.

3) What kind of media institution might distribute my media project and why?

As I had little knowledge on the media institutions and companies, I had to do some research into finding out what film companies would perhaps be interested into producing physiological thrillers. Below are my findings;

My first findings was a rather famous production company called Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. This film company produce many successful films each year and has done for consecutive years now, they have excellent advertising schemes and are well respected in the media industry.

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation have produced many hit films recently such as 'Avatar' and the 'Simpsons Movie'. On the other hand, while this film production are very successful, they are realistically too big for us and are known for producing high budget films with lots of complex special effects and would probably not want to produce a low budget film like ours.

Another well known film production team I found was Universal Studios who have produced physiological thrillers in the past. Again, they may be too big but have shot a few low budget films before so there would be a little more hope then Twentieth Century Fox.

Universal Studios have produced many good films also such as 'Frankenstein' and 'Drag Me to Hell' which would obviously give our film an incentive to see if it was produced by a big company such as Universal however they are known to be tight with funding and I predict our film would probably be too much of a 'risk' to fund.

A more realistic film company that might produce our film would be 'Dimension Films' who only formed in 1992 which means they are more recent on the scene and doesn't have such a high reputation. They are known for making franchises of films to make a mockery of the original film, they may want to use our film as they are in connection with two companies which helps our film massively being funded by two companies.

Marketing

Other ways that production companies get their films are out are by advertisements such as trailers to give their target audience a glimpse of the film in the hope that this will draw them in to watch the rest of the film. They also use posters and billet boards in order so that everyone sees their film wherever they go. Below are examples of how production companies do this;

Here is the trailer to Pirates of the Carribean 2;