In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The media has constructed many genres and sub genres over the decades; especially with relevance to action thrillers, purely through the shier quantity of this genre of film being made in this period. Whichever side of the mass media theory one takes, be it John Fiske’s side or Theodore Adorno’s view, everyone walks away from an action thrilling film with something different, there will be a little aspect of the film that tingles a synapse in each persons brain and that is what triggers their interest, or as some may say, imagination. This is why as a group; we all had a large interest in the genre of action thriller, because we all had the most experience in watching them in the cinema. The countless classics: James Bond,
s of the thriller genre, and change them using a convention normally used in Sci-fi films.
As a group we decided that the content of the action thriller would remain the same as the stereotype, however the way in which it was shown to the audience would be unconventional for this genre; we did this by showing the penultimate scene of the film first. This has been done in many films, most recently “The Hangover” where a scene near the end of the film in the Dessert showed how things had gone wrong. By doing this it makes the viewer think of their own conclusions whilst watching the film of how they got to that particular point in the story,and so makes the audience more concentrated on the film. With back up from research that we had carried out on pupils from our school, there seemed to be no objection to the enjoyment that the audience would have in watching our film
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By challenging the conventions through order of the scenes it meant that; even though this was a kidnapping thriller, we did not have to stretch the boundaries of gore or fright to gain the audiences attention. This meant that we could rate our film as a 12A meaning that all the family could come to watch. Extensively we analysed the film “Law Abiding Citizen” because we were fascinated by how seriously it got the point across to the viewer of the severity of the situation. We tried to develop our conventions from watching this, hence why we asked Olli whether it was possible to use this van. The van was not only incredibly practical in shooting the Kidnapping scene, but the fact that it was bright red, gave it a sense of identity. An identity that was so necessary to the film, because it allowed the repetition of scenes to run smoothly. This was possible because it gave the audience something to decode, after seeing the van in the first scene with the original van, it gave them something to immediately recognise and decode when it came to the scene being played the second time, it meant all the pieces of the puzzle could be put together at that moment, and that is exactly what we wanted, because it is unlike action thrillers to have such a complex moment in the film where everything comes together, in this way we believe once more that we challenged the conventions.
The clearest way in which we used media conventions was; in the construction of the flashback, and the use of the music. The music that we used had a very fast tempo, and gets your heart pumping asyou watch it, because you want to know what is going to happen next. This is a very well known technique in media, all in the hope of getting the audience to enjoy the film as much as possible. Unfortunately,a drawback that we had that has, perhaps, held the film back slightly from what we wanted it to be is the media syllabus requiring that if we used commercial music that we had to have signed permission from the producer. If this was not the case we could have used perhaps more suitable music, instead of spending hours creatingwhat we could in ‘Garage band’.
How effective is the combination of your main project and ancillary tasks?
Other than our thriller, we decided to produce both a poster for our film and a magazine article. we had been studying both the use of advertising and magazines in gender and how the media used these to create collective identities. so the knowledge that we had gained form these studies has been translated into imagination for the article and magazine. As for the poster we felt that there had to be an eery feel from what the photo portrayed for people to gain a real feeling for what the film contained. Although much tweeking was necessary on photoshop, this was still, due to the skills base of our group, relatively straight forward. this was also because we wanted the poster to be simple and stand out, following the stereotypical conventions, even though the film does not. this was the same for our poster, we gainedmost of our ideas from visiting websites such as empire.co.uk.
Of course our knowledge alone was not enough to create the poster that we made, and since we had gained a lot of inspiration from the film ‘Law abiding citizen’ we decided to have a look at posters which they had released for their film. From this is where the main concepts for our font came from. The dark red and thick righting we felt portrayed the bloodshed that the film contained, in a mysterious way.
Of course our poster was not a one hit wonder and we did try many other posters first, because we wanted to see what we could achieve, the one below was one of our earliest attempts and is shown in the border of photo shop to show what we had to do.
The process for our ancillary tasks was really difficult because the most practical way of doing them was to collect information whilst filming and cutting our main film. We had to take stills on scene, so it became an issue that we had to think about filming whilst thinking of when and where we wanted to take the stills for the poster an article too. It is most normal for there to be a consistency between the main media text and the promotional materials that help to raise audience awareness.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the beginning of the project, much of the primary research was carried out on large referencing sites such as YouTube and online blogs. We used YouTube to measure the popularity of certain genres of films, and then used the film blogs to see what comments people had made on certain films, to decide which genre to use, and then take the advice from the blogs of what people did, and did not like. In a broader form of research we used Google to search for the blogs and example posters from what previous, blockbuster films had produced.
On approaching the stage of promoting our film, we decided that social networking sites such as Facebook were a great form of free advertising to the correct target audience. Not only this we used it both to spread the word on exactly what we were doing, and gather pointers from people. So Facebook was very helpful for us not only in the production stages but also in the promotional stages. The reason we chose Facebook is that every member of our group was registered to it, as was many of our friends, so as previously mentioned it contained the target audience which we needed. And because everyone was a member we could use the messaging service on Facebook as well as the school Google mail accounts that we had.
We filmed the video using a Sony digital High Definition video camera, which allowed for higher quality footage to use in our video. Despite using cameras that would capture footage at a greater resolution, some of the shots, as viewed on YouTube, became relatively blurry and hard to make out. I would put this down to fast paced scene changes rather than a lacking in quality in our equipment, though. To a certain extent, however, this ‘blurriness’ could be seen as a contribution to the scene order change.
The video footage was originally imported into iMovie, though this proved to be of too low a quality to use for editing. With this considered, we then imported the footage into Final Cut Express, and we were able to add effects and edit audio accordingly. These effects would prove to be very beneficial for the general aesthetic of the video.
Post-production media technologies used included YouTube once more, in order to upload the video for public view, as a source of gathering even more information on our production thanks to YouTube’s helpful ‘Video Information’ menu. The most recent technology used was Google Docs, with which we created a post-production questionnaire. Throughout the project we have documented our progress and research using Google’s Blogspot. We have also used Blogspot to refer to our Facebook page among various other websites used throughout the production.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
There were two main methods which we used to gain audience feedback, one through Facebook, and another was questionnaires that we handed out to people. However what was key about both of these is that we provided pre and post production questionnaires to compare the feedback that we received and see if what we made was what people actually wanted.
To begin with Facebook, we ran links through all of our statuses on Facebook asking people if they wouldn’t mind filling in a online questionnaire that we had made. This was easy for us to analyse because we could digitally see the results and did not have to quantify them ourselves, whereas the questionnaires that we handed out, we had to quantify ourselves which was time consuming, and not what we wanted when we had so much cutting to do.
Names | Comments | Out of 10 |
Amber Olley | Very good film with fast and exciting shots. The lighting was interesting as it gave a sense of reality. | 8 / 10 |
Kate Sophoclides | I liked the film. The narrative was easy to follow yet I like the way there were flash backs to represent the time passed. | 9 / 10 |
Jonathon Shell | The film was exciting and easy to understand. | 9 / 10 |
Having said this, by handing out questionnaires before our production started it really did help. They showed that people had mainly watched both actions and thrillers. We had only one person who said that they hadn’t seen both, but the majority said that they had enjoyed action more than thrillers. However even having this feedback and deciding that we wanted to make an action films, there were large drawbacks, not only budget, seeing as we didn’t have one and most action films require lots of special affects which are expensive, but also the basic filming equipment, which during filming showed a good picture, but once uploaded to Google lost all of its quality. Not only this, if we decided that we did want to make a stunt ourselves, not only would we be hampered by a budget, but also health and safety would not allow through the risk assessment that we had to follow.
the information that we gathered was helpfull because it pointed us into the right direction to make something that people actually wanted to see, and not over complicate things like we almost did from the start. on originally embarking on doing this we had many elaborate ideas of making drug baron films and things that we would have been unable to pull off, however through analysing our research we were able to make something look the best we could possibly make it without OVER complicating things, as our film is still rather complicated for some people to follow.
Although the post production questionnaire could be seen as less helpful, it was more satisfying than helpful, because we could see what people thought of our film that we had spent hours and hours filming and cutting. This was mainly because it was just when we showed it to friends and family. However the Facebook side was far more analytical. We sent the same questionnaire around afterwards with an additional link to our film, and left space at the bottom of the questionnaire to see how people would rate and genre our film to see what they thought it was, and whether they enjoyed it. We could then compare this against the original data. However, a problem that we noticed by the end is that numerous people classified our film as a thriller, whereas it is meant to be an action film, with thrilling parts in it. So in this case it showed that some of the information we gathered in the original pre production questionnaires, may have actually lead us in the wrong direction.
