Hello.

1. In what ways does your media product use,
develop or challenge forms and conventions of
real media products? STOP MOTION
Our media product doesn’t challenge the forms and conventions of real media products. Despite the
growing market of racial minorities as actors and producers there are no significant developments in
stereotypical roles such as ‘the black character always dying first’. We wanted to follow this
convention and keep to dark movie traditions because it has been so successful in the past.
Our villain doesn’t have any deformities and just looks like an ordinary Caucasian male who is usually
starred as the villain in movies. We decided to challenge this to show that anyone can have bad
intentions. We chose for our characters to meet online to relate to the audience and to make them
aware of the dangers that lurk behind a screen.
We made the victim very timid and polite in the interview scenes. This connoted innocence and
purity, we did this to show that the effects of being confined in a forest with a murderer have
monumental impacts on your psychological wellbeing. We tried to make it seem as realistic as
possible to follow our plot.
The reason we haven’t decided to challenge many conventions is because we didn't have enough
time to expand on our plot as it was only an opening for a movie. Had we had time to create a longer
version, we would've challenged more conventions. We wanted everyone to understand our storyline
and characters in the short amount of space we had without overwhelming them with information.

2. How does your media product
represent particular social groups?
STOP MOTIONWe chose our group to star in our media product because we wanted
to aim our product towards everyone and include all social groups. Our
group consists of three Caucasian females, one of which is polish, and
one Afro-Caribbean female. We liked the mix of social groups within
our own media group and decided to add it to our product.
The representation of civil servicemen in modern days are negatively
portrayed because of wrong doings by policemen that have been
publicised and blown out of proportion by the media, for example, the
shooting of Mark Duggan in 2011 which caused major riots. We
decided to make the investigators character kind and sympathetic to
show that they can be trusted and relied on despite what people may
think of them.

3. What kind of media institution might
distribute your media product and
why? NEWS REPORT
The production company that would be suitable for our media product
is Hammer Films. This company is best known for creating gothic
horrors, however they have a series of thrillers that they are known
for. Hammer Films created a series of what are known as “mini-
Hitchcocks”, named after being comparable to films by Alfred
Hitchcock, often nicknamed as the ‘Master of Suspense.’
This mini-series were often black and white and psychological thrillers
with twist endings, which is something that as a group we are wanted
for our product to end with. This why Hammer Films production
company would be so suitable. It would also be good for our product
because it has already established many successful thriller films,
including films about Frankenstein and Dracula to also newly released
successes like Let Me In and The Woman in Black.

4. Who would be the audience for your
media products? COMIC STRIP
• Our media product is aimed at an audience of
15-25 year olds. We chose this age group
because we can relate with the audience
because our ages are so closely related. from
the answers we found out in the
questionnaire we did for our research, the
majority of the audience are under the age of
18 so we were not able to produce anything
that out stands the age 15 rating.

5. How did you attract/address the
audience? COMIC STRIP
• We addressed the audience by our characters
meeting online. This is addressing our audience
group because most of our population is on social
media, and are agreeing to meet up with people
they have met online. We wanted to show the
dangers of this, and to show that even though
people may seem like they are safe and friendly,
can turn into people who want to harm either
you or your self-esteem. We addressed real life-
issues that are affecting everyone.

6. What have you learnt about
technologies from the process of
constructing this product?
WHITEBOARDFor our media product to look so advanced, we needed to learn how to use a few new pieces of equipment. The first new item we had to
learn to use, was the boom mic. It was difficult to connect the boom to the voice recorder as it wasn’t as advanced. We quickly learnt to use
this piece of equipment as it wasn’t very complicated to set up, and was very straightforward to use. During editing, we found that the sound
of the voices in our media product were only just audible and so needed to record addition dialogue to place over the top of our filming.
The next new piece of equipment we learnt to use was the studio lights. We had never had to use something like this before and found it very
tricky to set up as there was lots to do in order to use them. The light bulbs had to be screwed in, the diffuser had to soften the light effect of
the bulb, the umbrella had to be secured, and the stand had to be properly screwed in. It took us a few times to get the hang of it, but once
we knew, it didn’t take us very long at all.
We also used a new editing software, Adobe Premier Pro. We found this a lot more advanced compared to the older editing software, Serif,
we were used to. We found that we could do a lot more on it and made our media product look a lot more professional. We were able to use
a lot of different effects and editing techniques that we had never used before. We asked for help a lot while we were getting used to it, but
are now comfortably able to do most things on our own. We also found that we didn’t have enough shots to keep our product entirely
continuous. This is a major set-back in our work because it doesn’t look as professional as we would have hoped. To avoid this when filming in
the future, we will make sure to film more shots then we need to make sure that there is enough when it comes to editing it and keeping it
continuous. Unfortunately when editing, we discovered that we had a lot of drops in the sound where we had edited it out because the sound
wasn’t needed. We should've recorded a continuous shot of the empty room to play in the background to eliminate the dramatic change in
sound from speaking to silence. This would have made our media product much more professional.
During filming, we found that a lot of the cameras would run out of battery half-way through filming something. This was a major set-back
because we needed all of the cameras we had borrowed to film from different areas. We wasted a lot of time finding new battery's and this
set up back as we only had an hour to film the whole of the interview scene. From this we have learnt that we need to check the cameras
beforehand, and carry spare batteries with us when filming to save time.
Also, we learnt how to do new things with pieces of equipment that we were more familiar with. When using the tripod, we learnt that in
order to have a crane or pan shot, we needed to adjust the tilt handle. This was easy to learn, and helped us when we were filming the forest
shots as we were able to have a variety of different running shots from different angles.

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do
you feel you have learnt in the progression from
it to the full product? REACT VIDEO
 Editing
 Continuityerrors
 Notransitions
 Someshotswerenotusedintherightcontext
 Shotsdidnottake
 Afterwardseveryonesayswhattheywouldhavedonedifferentlyandwhattheyhavelearnt
fromit