The document discusses how the media product, a psychological thriller film, uses and develops forms and connections of real media products. Specifically, it discusses how the opening titles set an unsettling tone, the costume and portrayal of the main character as a typical teenage girl helps audiences relate, and it incorporates conventions like changing point-of-view during tense moments. The film also represents women and explores themes of isolation, paranoia, and being trapped seen in other psychological thrillers. Feedback was gathered from audiences to refine the product. The learning process involved improving editing skills using software like iMovie and Final Cut Pro.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and connections of real media products?The titles at the start of the thriller are quite neutral and scroll across the screen, this is slightly calming and lulls you into a false sense of security and this is also a popular option that many thriller films use, then make you jump when you least suspect it.The costume our character is wearing is a typical teenage girl’s attire and so it is easy to for people to relate to, especially teenage girls. It also challenges the forms and connections of real media products as it also features another sort of character; however it is not quite real and so this sways away from the norm. The main character 'Poppy' (though her name is not revealed in the opening) fits in best with the reality of the thriller or she appears to be just a normal teenage girl going for a walk in a lonely desolate woods.Another convention we used was the different effect for when the creature was looking at the girl from his point of view; we changed it so it would be clear that something else was watching her. They use this in many other films, not just thrillers. In other psychological thrillers (which is what genre ours is) they often make the victim feel trapped, in cages and various other objects, we used the trees of the woods to create a feeling of closure and like there is so escape from the forest and like the trees are closing in on her.We also included paranoia into this film, The Machinists main topic of the film was paranoia and how it can have a massive influence on people, such as seeing this which is exactly what our character was doing. As well as The Machinist we also looked at other films to help shape our thriller around. Book of Eli is a good example as it uses a wood in the opening scene and the trees appear a metaphorical cage around the subject and in No Country for Old Men long shots are used to display the feeling of loneliness and barren wilderness.2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?‘Guilt Trip’ represents women/teenage girls in this film as the victim, this makes her seem very vulnerable, and she is the only person in the opening so this just adds to the loneliness of it all. Normally, the victim in a film is female so this is a traditional factor of the thriller. It strays away from the stereotypical teenage girl, she is alone walking her dog in some woods with nothing her iPod plugged in (though you cannot see this in the film, it is there), this makes her seem even more cut off from the world and perhaps a bit of an outcast. She is easy for teenage girls to relate to however, and this will make viewers fit in more (and maybe even feel as if it is them who is the woods), she is wearing normal teenage clothes; jeans, hoodie, warm winter jacket and wellingtons– a necessity in the country. Because it is so average you don’t expect anything to happen and that it’s just a normal day to take the dog for a walk.3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?Most media these days is spread around the internet on major social networking sites; YouTube, facebook, blogger, twitter, vimeo, anything you can communicate to people on and it’s a good way to distribute media products. When we were getting people’s opinions on our rough edit of the thriller I put it on my facebook page along with a link to a survey on it, this was a good choice as it targeted people of my own age, the main majority of who the thriller is aimed at, and it helped people answer the survey. If we were working on a bigger scale we could get press and radio stations involved to help raise awareness. There is an independent film company named ‘Coffee Films’ which specializes in thrillers and other genres that relate to this which we could send our thriller too, this would get more viewers who like to watch alternative films; these kind of people would most likely be teenagers or young adults who have internet access, as the main way to find out information on such things is by using the internet.

2. Then as more people see our media product through these sites they could be rated on sites such as ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ and ‘IMDB’ and then if they got high ratings and good comments others would see them as they are quite well known sites and think about watching our product and then spreading it more virally.

3. ‘Blogspot/blogger’ is the site we have used to show a majority of people our work and it is very simple and basic to use; also a very handy aspect of it is labels which allow you to put everything into a group so it’s all very easy to find when you need it.4. Who would be the audience of your media product?A teenager is the leading role in this thriller; teenagers are the target audience. Although it is suitable for anyone this is the age group we would be aiming at most. The lead role is wearing normal clothes, in a normal environment which could be anywhere. The main nationality for this thriller would be British, because its set it quite a British desolate location, but what is good about this opening is that the girl does not say one word throughout, it's all down to expressions and movement to show how she is feeling, so this would open up our potential audience even more as people from all over the world can understand it. But then because of a girl having the lead role this may attract more females than males to go and watch it, but in contrast to this, females are less likely to want to go see a thriller than male. Through terms of sexuality however, the males may wish to see it for the main character. If this had an age rating I would set it as either a 12A so it would get a wider audience, or as a 15 because then you would not have to worry about scaring a younger viewing public too much. However, 18 would be too high as it is aimed at people from about 12-17 and so we worked to keep it to something we would like to see, and used the information gathered from questionnaires we gave to different age groups.Also, the main girl is quite jumpy, nervous and anxious about her surroundings and she keeps looking around to see if she is alone, this is perhaps more a teenage thing than an adult as adults are normally more secure and calmer and think things through; teenagers however are naive and do not generally think things through and go rushing into situations. 5. How did you attract/address your audience?To help attract our audience we sent out questionnaires asking the public what they like to see in a thriller and various other questions on the same topic, we asked a variety of ages and genders to help widen our potential audience. After this first questionnaire and after we had completed our rough edit of the thriller, we then made another questionnaire to hand out during our screening, this was too ask the audience what could be done to make it better and what they would like to see more of; this was very helpful and enabled us to get a clearer image of what the public would like to see. The results were they like psychological, which was a perfect result as that was what we were working on. We also got slight negative feedback; mostly on the choppiness of the music but we soon sorted that out and adjusted the times so they all fitted together better and ran smoothly in-between each event. Another weakness was that the storyline itself was not clear to all the viewers, but we got this feedback too late and by this point there was nothing we could do about it, so if we were to do this again we would defiantly adjust the story to an easier to follow plot. It was the creature people were unsure of and what it was doing lurking around the woods and why exactly it was watching her.

4. Audience feedback is a very significant part of the media, as without we wouldn't know what to base our thriller on. As a general rule men normally prefer thrillers to women, but of course this does not always apply.

5. The POV we used attract our audience but making it feel to them as though they are actually in the film and looking around as if they are the creature, they are spying on the main lead and following her around the woods as though they are stalking her. To help boost this effect we gave it a shaky effect as if they were walking through the woods a little disorientated.We looked at other thrillers to base our own characters on, Donnie Darko was one of these; though a female version and less psychotic. Fight Club contributes to this as well as the narrator is suffering from paranoia and seeing things, the same as our lead role. Brick is another film we watched the intro of to see what a thriller was like, the main character was quite isolated from the world and is never seen physically talking to another person, just like our character. These are all quite popular films so to follow their guidance is a good way to gain an audience. 6. What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing your products?The main things I have learnt from constructing my product were learning how to edit and the software we used for it. iMovie was good and very simple to use, but then we wanted to use a software that was more precise and a little more challenging, so we used ‘Final Cut’, this is very good software but a quite a bit harder to use and we were used to the setup of iMovie, we soon enough picked it up though and agreed it was a lot better and because it was more precise meant the editing would be a lot more effective and we had many more options to explore and use, whereas iMovie did not. We adjusted the music a lot more, lowering and raising the sound is certain parts, something which we couldn’t do in iMovie. As well as the editing side of things, the filming part was quite tricky in places, we needed to get all the timings precise and it was harder than it sounded! We ended up with quite a lot of footage and even when we put it all into place it was still much too long, so we needed to cut parts out and shorten a lot of the clips for it to be around 2 minutes long.Aspects which we used on Final Cut were we could adjust the music easier, a more varied array of slide transitions, a wider range of fonts, more ways to set out the credits across the screen, and the speed of everything. An important part we did ourselves was that the starting song we put at the end, but put it in reverse so it sound like a whole new song, but really quite creepy and chilling. This reflects the start and the finish together and almost mirrors one another.

6. An awkward thing about the music we have to use for the thriller was that it has to be copyright free, and so we spent a good deal of time trawling through copyright free music sites looking for something fitting, ideally we wanted something chilling and haunting, but we kept getting ‘romance’, in the end we found just what we were looking for and thought it suited what was going on perfectly and were happy with the result.

7. 7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?Since the preliminary task I have learnt a lot. The task was quite simple got me used to the equipment we would be using and basic software (iMovie). But since then we have learnt a lot more, we’ve used different camera angles and some of it we did not use the tripod but hand-held the camera to give those shots a more dramatic effect.We used iMovie again for the rough edit as it is a lot simpler and quicker, but for our final edit we used ‘Final Cut’.

8. My group got on really well and we shared ideas together easily and overall we all seemed to have the same plan on what we wanted to do which was useful. We each had our own idea at first, then decided on mine as it was the most realistic and easiest to do in a sense; and from that idea we progressed into a whole story and most importantly the thriller opening. We had many ideas for the overall opening, so many we had to cut a lot of them out.

9. Unlike in the prelim task we were working away from college and so had to bring in any props we needed and as we filmed it over 2-3 days we had to make sure our main character was always wearing the same clothing and had the same hairstyle in order for the continuity to match up or it would look very would of place. Also our main worry throughout was the timing, to keep it around 2minutes, we had a lot of extra footage and throughout the editing we kept skimming off a few seconds from odd bits which were unnecessary and even whole scenes that were there just to add effect and had no real meaning to the film.

10. We each allotted different roles for us to take during filming; Daisy was the actress; then Alana and I took turns in directing. Alana was also the main editor when the filming was finished, we each took turns but this was Alana’s strength.