Evaluation

In many ways, our media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products like:

• Having it not focus on crime but trying to build suspense and making the audience feel scared
• Our teachers influenced us not to use clichéd methods e.g. guys in hoodies following girls down the alley, because they’re predictable
  and not original
• Our group also used the shower scene of the thriller movie ‘Psycho’ to create the hand movement Susan used to stab me (image below). This was effective as it emphasised the intertextuality used

• Our class also studied from the thriller movie ‘The Shinning’ to help develop the conventions of our movie. My group used intertextuality from the film, in our last killing scene. In the part where I was lying dead with blood covered on my hand and the knife positioned next to my body, showed the similar act from one of ‘The Shinning’ killing incident (image below). However to show originality instead of showing the view of my body, we filmed only my hand on a camera tilt to illustrate my dead character’s point of view. This helped to create suspense

• Watching previous students’ thriller clips helped us identify what things we should and shouldn’t do when filming e.g. don’t use any dialogue because it looks cheap and too much edit can be exaggerated
• Also watching a documentary in class about film openings helped my group have an idea on how to plan as we acknowledged from it that "a good beginning must make the audience feel that it doesn't know nearly enough yet, and at the same time make sure that it doesn't know too little" because certain amount of information to the audience can limit their interest. This documentary was called ‘Watching’ and was beneficial because it mentioned about the different techniques used in the film industry to create that “instant arousal” of a viewer
• The lesson on how to edit with sound helped me develop my skills to use for ‘Grove Park’ as I was the sound editor. That session was very useful to me because using ‘Casino Royale’s’ clip to practice on, made me expect less on what to do. It also made me notice how including sound in a sequence can create a big effect in what the clip is trying to portray
• Due to our film being about someone who is possessed, our group clearly decided that the character would be a young female, as they’re more vulnerable. Even though this can be showed as a stereotype, it made sense to our film. The people in ‘Grove Park’ are young and black women, and so because of this our target audience is multicultural people from 16-26 years old. This represents an original movie created, as thrillers nowadays are played by white people.
• Our movie would be a big Hollywood Blockbuster distributed mainly around UK and USA because the narrative is very interesting and admired to see in both countries. This reason is because, you do hear many stories of mental individuals in mainly UK and USA news as the countries’ so diverse, a lot is experienced. Another reason why, is due to high popularity rates of other familiar thrillers like Gothika. We would begin by advertising on billboards with the trailer and movie release dates. Then the trailer would be publicized on television mainly during 6pm – 8pm to attract our target audience.

The audience of our media product is aimed at teenagers and adults, who are mainly working class males and females. An example of a viewer is ‘Michelle, 21, works in retail and studies psychology in University. Occasionally goes to the cinema’. Our film would attract both cinema lovers and frequent cinemagoers, as the audience are mainstream people.

I would attract my audience through many ways. One of which would be organising billboards put up in targeted places like shopping centres, popular train stations, on buses etc. This would be effective, as it would continuously remind the public when the cinema release date is. Another method would be to produce a trailer of what I think the audience would want to be influenced to watch. This would be effective as Thomas Sutcliffe said from the documentary we watched previously in class is that "Films need to seduce their audience into long term commitment. While there are many different types of seduction, the temptation to go for instant arousal is almost irresistible". In which, he means a way of attracting the audience's attention by making them want to watch the whole film, and therefore his technique can be used to produce the preview. It would also be shown on the internet to watch as well e.g. on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc.

From the process of constructing ‘Grove Park’, I have learnt the following on a practical hand-on level:

• Using final cut pro to log and capture different clips
• Using soundtrack pro to create our own sound from choosing from other different sounds
• Process of filming and making sure we used different camera movements e.g. pans, camera angles e.g. tilt, camera views e.g. handheld and most importantly capturing a ‘match cut’ view.

Although we didn’t use much of the internet during the making, I did learn how to do the following things:

• Release our film on Vimeo
• Blog each lesson of our thriller practical
• Add attachments to my blog e.g. images and video clips

Looking back at our preliminary task, I learnt that film making isn't as easy as it looks. From watching the films in class, other students thought it was worth watching and the narrative was easy to follow. Other comments also mention the good use of cuts. Within the film making exercise, I have learnt to use handheld views and match cut exercises. You can really tell from our preliminary film to our finish product's progress of camera skills. The planning and storyboard making was very helpful and clearly wasted no time for us. Also having a group plenary at the end of every session help build our team effort in planning what we would do next lesson worked effectively. During editing, I have learned how to make crucial judgements on what clips we didn't need and what was needed to log and capture. As a film opening consists of a short time. I have gained a lot of Mac computer skills that had me involved in sound making and editing.