The document provides details about a student's media evaluation project creating an opening title sequence for a film noir thriller. The student researched conventions of the genre and incorporated many of them, such as extreme close-ups, shadows, and a serif title font. Filming presented challenges around lighting, camera stability, and coordinating actors. Editing was also a learning process, particularly removing audio from video and creating a black and white effect with red accents. Based on feedback, the sequence engaged viewers and represented the genre well. The student feels their skills in areas like match cuts, shot variation, and camera operation improved through hands-on experience with the project.

1. AS Media Evaluation
Emily Hardy

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
Throughout making our product we tried to use as many conventions of a film noir as possible.
This way the audience could familiarise with the genre.
Before deciding on creating a film noir, I watched previous thriller texts and analysed them to get
a better understanding of all the sub genres in thriller and the typical codes and conventions. One
thing learned from analysing thrillers is that a common feature is a white font on a black
background which is what we have included for our film name to make it stand out. All the rest of
our opening credits are over the top of our footage which is similar to what se7en does. We chose
a serif font as we thought it fitted more into the theme of film noir unlike most thrillers I analysed
which used a sans serif font.
We were influenced by Sin City as we wanted to have a red tie while everything else
is black and white like in Sin City however, this proved very difficult when editing so
we couldn't carry through with the idea.

3. I also researched the codes and conventions of the film noir genre so we
could try and include as many as possible. I found they use extreme close
ups to make the viewer feel uncomfortable which is something we used quite
a lot.
This being our most significant ECU. This shot
will make the viewer feel very uncomfortable
and it gives them a close up of the murder and
the reason why our film is called 'Forever'. The
name juxtaposes the shot in which it's set
which also adds to the uncertainty and unease
of the audience.
We attempted to create shadows as this was another key feature of a film
noir however, ours isn't very clear. We found it very difficult to film as
positioning the camera and the actors to just get the shadow and not them in
the shot was very tricky and it took a lot of time. Its very dark and its not very
clear that this is the murder scene. Its also very quick so its quite hard to tell
what the action is however the scream helps to make it clear. We could have
made the shot a bit longer or tried to light it differently to make it look more
effective.

4. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
In our media product we represented two social groups. We had white british and
british asian.
For white british we represented both genders. Our women is presented in quite a
stereotypical way. She is quite weak, vulnerable and passive as she does nothing to defend
herself when she is attacked by our male character. This contradicts our british asian
character who is presented as strong and powerful which is an atypical representation of
women but as our femme fatal these are the characteristics she should have. We presented
our male character as dominant and strong which is also a stereotypical representation of
men. Age is represented through costume, we wanted to show they were in their early 20's
which is shown through the short dress Shauna is wearing and the suit Jack is wearing.
These aren't clothes teenagers or older people would typically wear. Another thing their
clothes represent is their class. From their costumes you can infer that they are middle class,
which is also shown through the car that we use and the setting (the piano show). This links
to our target audience as we are aiming our film at middle class people as typically they
would probably enjoy a film noir more.

5. What type media institution might distribute your media product and why?
We are going to have our film distributed on TV through programmes such as Film 4
and we would have it on DVD. Film noir is quite a niche genre so it probably wouldn't
be appealing to a mass audience which is what hollywood films generally aim their
films at. However, as it isn't very similar to existing products people might have been
more interested to go to the cinema and watch something new but we thought people
would be more comfortable watching a new uncommon genre on the TV at home so if
they don't like it they can just change the channel instead of risking their money at the
cinema for something they don't like. We thought our film would suit more of an
independent distributor.
We also don't think it would work as well being distributed via the internet because our
audience is 15 to 45 and we don't think our older demographic will be necessarily be
on the internet and it isn't so much of a wide way to distribute films as people may not
know how to find films on the internet.
We think Film 4 is the best way to distribute our film. We found a presentation on the
channel 4 website about Film 4's sales and distribution. It reaches more people than
cinemas do. The majority of their audience our men so our crime and vilence aspect of
our film will appeal to them.

6. Who would be the audience for your media product?
Our demographic are people aged from 15 onwards. We chose to make our
film have a 15 rating because of the level of violence in our film. We show a
death in the opening with a close up of the slit neck using special effects
which would probably scare a younger audience. We wish to appeal to both
genders. However, our film might lean more towards women as there are
more female characters for them to relate to in our opening. Our
representation of gender is quite stereotypical so they will be able to relate
easily.
Sin City is a film that is very similar to ours. The storyline is very similar to
ours, there appears to be romance between the male and female however,
the male character goes on to kill the female leaving the audience wondering
why as they thought he loved her and had feelings for her. This opening
scene however, was just a conversation between the two people and a
narrative from the male (a convention of film noir we failed to include) carried
out in the same setting whereas there is more action in ours and there isn't as
much dialogue because we wanted the score to help tell the story and show
the characters feelings which is a typical convention of film noir.

7. Target Audience Feedback
We asked: Did you enjoy the film and why? Was it engaging?
“I enjoyed the title sequence very much, the camera angles and editing set the tone well
and made it very gripping. The costumes and set were also very convincing. I would happily
watch the rest of the film, the ending made me want to watch on.” male, 16
We carried out a survey to find out what our target audience thought of our title sequence.
The majority of our target
audience enjoyed our
title sequence and
wanted to carry on
watching the film which
goes to show what we
made appealed to our
demographic.
The majority thought we had used enough camera angles which infers they didn't find it
boring and it flowed well enough. Most people also recognised the genre for being a thriller
and identified it as a film noir which shows we used enough conventions so that you can
tell what genre we were trying to make.

8. How did you attract your audience?
Our audience can relate to the characters we have used through their
personalities and the way we have presented them. They can also relate to the
dating experience and some could also possibly relate to the love triangle we
begin to introduce just not on such extreme terms.
Our murder scene would probably scare a younger audience, explaining why we
made it a 15. The scream and the close up of Shauna's slit neck is quite
gruesome and graphic meaning it would very likely scare a younger audience.
The audience is asked to put themselves in the position of Jack, they will want to
know why he has murdered the person he was on a date with and who the
woman at the end was. The audience also sympathises a lot with Shauna. We
can see from the way she behaves around Jack that she has strong feeling for
him and then we are shown her death scene in a lot of detail. The audience will
probably be made to dislike Jack from this as they don't understand why he has
done it. This will engage our audience and make them want to carry on watching.
The majority of shots we have used are typical of a film noir. The jumps cuts used
between Tiffany playing the piano and the reaction shots of Jack and Shauna
create tension as it makes the audience feel like it is building up to something.
The black scene of silence when Jack turns off the lights also creates suspense
because the audience doesn't know what is going to happen.

9. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing
your product?
When using the camera equipment I struggled with making sure the camera
was still all the time whilst filming and getting used to assembling the camera
onto the tripod took a lot of time to learn. However, once I had gotten used to
assembling everything together, filming became a much quicker and hassle
free process.
The main problems whilst filming we time efficiency, getting everyone
organised and keeping the camera still. We tended to waste lots of time
setting up and deciding what to film if our initial ideas didn't work out. We
should have referred back to our storyboard more often and we should have
had an idea as to what we were going to film if things went wrong to save
time as it was limited because we were filming within school hours.
Organising everyone proved difficult because we had to make sure our actors
were available at the same time so we could film their parts together, making
sure they all had their costumes was hard as well because they were bringing
them from home. We made timetables so they knew and we knew when we
had time to film in the room and which actors were available, we also had to
film after school some days to keep up with the amount of filming we had to
do. Keeping the camera still was a significant problem for me as I had the
tendency to hold the camera while filming which made it shake which meant I
had to reshoot quite a lot. I had to get into the habit to letting go of the
camera when I pressed the record button to avoid any shaking.

10. Personally editing has been quite a big problem, it has taken a while for me to
understand how to do things such as cutting clips and detaching the video
from its sound as we wanted the music to be the only source of sound for the
majority. We wanted to create the effect of the footage being in black and
white which was quite easy to do as we just had to drag the effect to the video
clip and this proved very effective at making our title sequence look like a
typical film noir but we wanted certain items to be in red however, this proved
very difficult as we could keep the red a consistent colour and keep the same
black and white effect so we had to get rid of this idea as we couldn't figure
out a way to do it that worked effectively.

11. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in
the progression from it to the full product?
The planning stage was very important because it gave us an insight into
everything we needed to create our thriller effectively. The research we did
into genre was important because we learned about all the different sub
genres of thriller there are which helped us to choose one to base our film on.
We choose film noir so then we had to do further research into that to learn
the codes and conventions so we could use them in our opening to make it
look like an effective and realistic film noir. Storyboarding was an important
process to learn as when it comes to filming we have a detailed plan of what
we are going to do so we don't waste time thinking about what to film while
we are on set. We had to redo our storyboard quite a lot as we never made it
quite detailed enough to give us all the information we needed when filming.
Doing the continuity editing task was useful as it gave us an idea of the
filming process and when it came to the real thing it pointed things to improve
such as keeping to the 180 degree rule and making sure we don't cut the tops
of people's head of in shots which we could learn from and avoid doing.
Creating mind maps of our ideas was useful as it gave us lots of choice over
what we were going to film, we had lots of ideas to
discuss so we could choose the best one and we could
adapt all of the ideas and enhance them.

12. Since our continuity task I think that our match on action has improved, we
struggled to do it and in our first cut we didn't include it at all because we
didn't really know how to do it but we managed to do it better in our real thing
as we had more of an idea of how to do it. A shot we had a problem with
were tilts, we struggled to do them without shaking the camera a lot so it
doesn't look smooth. Also from the continuity task we learned to use a more
varied amount of shots as we didn't use that many different shots and they
were quite long, instead we should of changed to different angles or shot
reverse shots for when people are talking.
The continuity task gave us an idea of the camera equipment but I still wasn't
particularly comfortable with setting it up, I got better the more I used it when
filming our real thing when I had chance to use it more.
This was our task 'we have to make the titles and the opening of a new fiction
film that has to last for only 2 minutes. There are four parts we will be
assessed on which are research, planning, filming and post production. All of
the video and audio must be original (produced by myself) apart from if there
is music/audio I can use that is copy right free.' I think our opening sequence
fulfils this well as it is exactly 2 minutes of a sub genre of thriller that isn't
commonly shown anymore which makes it more unique and all of our video
and audio is completely original.