AS Media Coursework Evaluation

AS Media Coursework Evaluation

The short thriller sequence created for media does contain elements that you would find usually in real media products. For example some aspects that are used in big thriller productions were included in our finished product.

Some of the most common conventions of thriller are creating ‘enigma’, this means creating mystery and making the audience puzzled and questioning what is going on. This basically makes the audience want to find out more about what is happening, one film, which does this well, is ‘Seven’. The beginning of the movie with the credits is a short montage of the antagonist making a scrap book with pictures and notes of people he maybe killed or is going to. This undoubtedly gives the audience an idea into the mind of the antagonist and does create enigma surrounding the character. At the beginning of our short sequence there is a voice over of the main antagonist talking to one of the ‘heavies’ just before it cuts to the heavy walking, the voice over is non diegetic sound and cannot be heard by the character running down the alleyway. The name of this main character is Warren Grey, you don’t see this character at all and this is what it would have been like if it were longer creating mystery around the main antagonist probably until the end of the film. This is similar to The Usual Suspects with the character Keyser Soze where it is not revealed to the audience who it is until the very end of the film. So we as a group decided to have a mysterious character who is not revealed to the audience in the sequence.

Restricted narration in thriller movies seems to work well in creating mystery and suspense due to the fact we as the audience do not know much. Again an example of this would be in Seven where we as the audience don’t know much about the antagonist or his motives for the killing. This keeps the audience on edge and creates a very tense atmosphere. Also the features of mise en scene like cinematography which is for example lighting and colour a lot of thriller movies tend to have low key lighting when setting the mood. Our short sequence though did not have low key lighting since it was shot in the day time, although for costume we dressed the ‘heavies’ in the black jackets compared to the our other character who is just dressed in normal clothes. We also included other conventions from the thriller genre like the POV shots from the heavy when he gets punched and POV shots from the other character showing the audience that he is trapped. The setting for our sequence was suitable it was a series of joining alleyways in which the character was trapped and could not escape from. Although it was not a dark alleyway it still gave the feeling that the character was in danger because he had no know where to go.

In our peer evaluation the feedback was that we had good pace to our story line, good setting and the costume was very effective. Our use of sound with images sounds good and builds tension. Also last comment, does it work as an opening to a feature film narrative the answer was that it raises questions. The story could have easily carried on and left a lot to the imagination of the audience.

The three stage narrative structure of the thriller genre is equilibrium, disruption and resolution. Our short sequence definitely included disruption and but the ending didn’t show resolution but left room for a bigger story to unfold which would have a resolution showing clearly the confrontation between the antagonists and protagonists. Our sequence contains a linear narrative with there being no flashbacks but a simple story which is being shown to the audience, there could have been flashbacks if the film was longer and the story could develop more.

Our media product clearly represents two different groups of people, this is represented through the characters with elements of camera work and mise en scene. The gender clearly being represented is male, for age all of the characters are supposed to be adults age 20 plus. For ethnicity it’s white British, the characters represented are clearly of different social groups. The main character, which we could call the protagonist, is clearly different from the heavies. This is represented through what they are wearing e.g. he’s wearing a hoody, jeans and trainers etc. the heavy characters are typically wearing their black jackets. Many films always give the typical representation that the heavy characters in films are always stupid and are just there for show. Through our product and dialogue we didn’t represent these characters in that way or how they usually are in films.
Our audience for this product would probably be typically 16-25 age group because obviously there is some swearing and if it was longer some more action scenes with violence. Also mainly aimed at a male audience due to the fact there wasn’t any female character in it a female audience couldn’t sympathize with so mainly male audience. The characters in the sequence would also attract this kind of audience due to the types of characters represented. These kind of characters are not gentle there is direct competition between characters and has a very male dominated atmosphere to it.

These screen shots show a clear representation of two different character types represented by costume and dialogue. With the villains character being represented as more ‘villainous’ and the other character being represented as more of an ‘everyday’ person.

When distributing media products like ours which is a thriller it would be very important for us or anyone to choose a distribution company that would have the best interests for the product. For example it probably wouldn’t be best to get Hammer Horrors to distribute it as they distribute horror movies or even an international distribution company which deals with mainstream products. More like a small time distribution company which likes to deal with more low budget films. For example Icon film distributors they specialize in mainstream and independent releases. So this means that they would be able to distribute and would be a good company to do so as they also do mainstream releases so they are most likely to be a good, reliable and professional company.
There are three main stages for distributing products the first stage is licensing where the distributor will need to get licensing to acquire the legal rights to exploit a film. This means paying the producer for this right for theatrical, DVD and then TV release.
The second stage would be marketing the film, this would be done to coincide effectively with competition so releasing a thriller product like this it would be good to do so when there aren’t as many other movies from this genre to compete with so it has the best chance for success.
Step three would be printing and advertising, examples of ways in which it could be advertised would be using different kinds of billboards like for example at bus stops and on the sides of buses so the public are made aware of your product. Also other media aspects like radio, magazine and chat shows where there is an audience paying attention to you talking about your product and try to make it as appealing as possible to it’s audiences. Also if it is a mainstream product you could use merchandising e.g. children’s movies getting deals with fast food restaurants like McDonalds where there are toys being made to get children interested in the movie. Although this would not be suitable as suitable for a thriller product, the best way to advertise this would probably be to have trailers in arthouse cinemas and launching a billboard campaign at bus stops etc.

Also another good company would be Optimum Releasing who have distributed a well known Shane Meadow’s movie Somers Town. So this would be good as they have distributed products that you have heard so again they must be interested in releasing independent movies and are not concentrated on one genre of movie in particular.

Based on what our sequence is about the gender that it would mainly appeal to would be male due to what the whole film would have been about. Also the strong male characters being represented.
The audience we would be attracting with our product would have enjoyed
Many other media products like for example thriller features like The Usual Suspects and Seven. These types of movies are very good in creating enigma and both use restricted narration in the story line to keep the audience interested in what is going on and makes them want to know more. Similar with our story line there is a villain that would be kept a secret from the audience so if audiences that liked the plot to films like these would have been interested in what was going on in our plot.
The screen shots below show some of the aspects from other similar movies like the British ‘gangster’ movies with the heavies typically wearing the big black jackets and also the fight scenes showing the character being punched

There are many reasons why an audience who enjoys thriller movies would enjoy this due to the fact it does include key conventions that you would find in most thriller movies. For example it raises a lot of questions and would have the audience wanting to know the answers to these questions like for example the evil villain talking in the beginning of the sequence. Also the different types of camera work included like all the different long shots, low angle shots and the quick whip pan which is the POV shot after one of the characters gets punched. It is very much subjective camera work, which is, used throughout the sequence to really give the audience a sense of what the characters are feeling. also some of the elements of mise en scene like the costume which was tried to made to look as real as possible for the heavies wearing there black jackets like you would usually find in a Guy Ritchie movie. Throughout the sequence we tried to create a sense of panic amongst the character who is running at the beginning also along with the fast pace editing to create a sense of panic with one of the characters. Also other key themes of a ‘gangster’ movie shown in the screenshots also mixed in with the thriller conventions of there being a secret villain with the screenshot of the character running away from the villains henchman.

The technologies we used was the camera, tripod, Apple Mac computers and the software to edit all our footage together. I learned all the procedures you need to go through before you even begin filming for example setting the white balance on the camera so the camera can recognize different colors. Also the editing software for example uploading all the shots from the camera onto the computer. Although I didn’t gain as much skill as I would of liked to when using the editing suite I mainly put in my input into what shots were to be included and what shots were not to be included. This I was mentioned in about the editing by our peer evaluation when one of the credits comes in to early in the sequence this should have been changed but was overlooked as there was a deadline.

I feel I have progressed greatly from our preliminary task which I felt was not up to it’s full potential. In the preliminary task there was no real plot or story to what was going on. Now that we are now aware of thriller conventions and conventions of other genres it is easier to make it a lot more appealing to the audience. For example restricted narration was not used or enough types of different shots to make it more interesting for the audience. also the editing was significantly better which was probably due to the fact we had a lot more footage to use in the editing suite, like for example the shot reverse shoot in the alley is a lot more sophisticated than what was previously done in the preliminary task. Before we would have OTS shots from a character which was talking and looking back it would have been better to have the point of view from the character who was being spoken to. So details like this is what was greatly improved on and what made it that much better. Also continuity editing was improved upon when the character is running through the alley and then turns the corner it looks good on camera. But in the preliminary task the continuity was not as good as we tried to do match on action with a character walking up to a door and then a shot from inside the room and the character walking in but this did not work. Also construction of characters was greatly improved e.g. by the costume that gets them into character so the audience know and are aware of different character types whereas before we just kept our characters in normal clothes. So these are all the aspects that have been greatly improved upon since the preliminary task although there are still certain areas of this task which could have gone a lot better and will know what to improve for next time.

By Tom Cox