AS Media Studies evaluation for '.The Reprisal'

1. Evaluation.

2. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms of conventions of real media products? In our media product, we use flashbacks (in his dreams), similar to ‘What Lies Beneath;’ another thriller, to create a build-up of character and set his past so that the audience can piece together why our actor is so set on revenge in our film. Also our film uses a ‘dark drone’ to create an un-easy feel to the atmosphere so that the audience become wearier, like that featured in ‘Hide and Seek.’ Another generic convention displayed in our film, is the dim lighting, (red light upon the wall) that gives the atmosphere more suspense keeping the audience’s attention glued to the screen featured in a lot of films. Moreover the different camera shots give various effects on the audience, where the character lurches up from bed; we used a side on mid-shot which was very effective because it gave a better flow to the cuts between shots. Because of the wall featured within our film opening, which is quite a main feature I would say our opening would come under ‘crime-thriller’ as the wall may symbolise that our character has elements of being a psychopath, which is reflected on the wall.

3. What Lies Beneath. As you can see there is a red glow. Hide and Seek.

4. How does your media product represent particular social groups? In our opening there appears to be a male middle-aged teenager, but the class is not really distinguished as the there is only one room within our opening, thus making it hard to distinguish if our character comes from an upper or lower class society. I feel that a male character was better suited to this role because, when the man strikes out in anger against the wall, a male normally seems more aggressive and a woman preforming this may have looked out of place. I would say this links to our audience because it is targeted to a similar age that the actor in our opening is, when a lot of people in their teenage years, start to become aggressive as they begin to find themselves.

5. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? Our opening is something that could be produced as a major Hollywood film or a smaller independent company because it has a range of possibilities for the rest of the film; it’s similar to a lot of other thrillers which a vast majority of the audience seem to enjoy. I don’t believe that this would be made as an art-house film because it does not rally have a specialist audience, for example Moulin Rouge is not a well watched film (I know this is not a thriller) but however the film only appeals to a small audience, whereas our film is more publicised at a wider range of preference to each individual. I wouldn’t say that there is franchise possibility within our film because there is not much that could be replicated and sold, because of you look at films like ‘Friday the 13th’ there is a possibility to sell mask replicas to the audience, or other such merchandise like wands from harry potter, because our film is not really set with anything that does not already exist.

6. Moulin Rouge. The images below show that replica’s have been made to sell.

7. Who would be the audience for your media product? The age of the audience we are aiming for is roughly around teenage years being 15 and above; as our film was rated is a 15+, so I would say 15-20 would be a rough age group we were aiming for, however I would not say if we were aiming for a particular gender because it falls down to personal preference and therefore it would be difficult to specify to which gender we aim for, so I would say both genders. I think we chose this particular audience because our plot was based around a teenager of a similar age, making it easier for us to focus on how a teenager may act/feel at this stage in life, but also how they may act at the loss of their family, which some people may relate too whether it’s the age similarity of the family loss. I think that the audience would go and see this film because the opening keeps the audience’s attention, shifting from different shots between our actor writhing in his sleep to his dreams of the day his family died, keeps the viewer interested into what has happened in his past, and what he intends to do in the future about it.

8. How did you attract/address your audience? I do not think that there are any parts of our film opening that may terrify our audience, however I feel that the wall, surrounded with pictures and newspaper clippings, all circled, cross referenced and modified may actually disturb a few people as they may feel un-easy about psychopaths. In our film opening we used some point of view shots so that we could try and involve the audience to what he was thinking at that moment in time, so for this, we took shots of close up’s on what our character appeared to be looking at; in this case newspaper clippings from the accident. We included the point of view shots, to try and make the audience see the character’s perspective of what he feels is right, I believe that the use of this camera work has involved the audience, making them feel like the person, seeing what he is seeing and feeling what he is; thus making the audience participate in the character’s roll.

9. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product? When we got to filming, we discovered that the video camera was dead, and we had half a charger, so we could not use this, however we decided we needed to film giving our last minute decision to make a new better film, therefore we used a normal camera on video mode, which I personally feel meted the requirements of what we expected from the video camera, however the zoom on my camera was very quick and near impossible to zoom in and out at a slow pace, and therefore we had to stay away from these shots, which was the only set back we in counted when filming. As I have only started media this school year, I have never had a chance to film using camera’s and experiment with shot types or techniques used, however I experimented with the camera by filming certain sections, and looking for different effects, like in the original film opening, I tried getting shadows into the shots and also the reflections of people loving to make the film opening seem that bit more creepier, however since ‘.The Reprisal’ was set in a dark room making it difficult to get any reflections into the filming, however Kirsten captured a silhouette of my figure against the wall on camera with Jemma pointing the torch at my back. To edit our films we were instructed and given a quick tuition on how to use ‘iMovie’ on the mac computers, so our group decided iMovie was a simple and effective programme to use, however because Kirsten owns a mac laptop we did it there because this saved us time waiting for other groups to finish their editing before we could begin ours. I found that iMovie was a good programme for editing because we found everything we needed to do, to enhance out film, for example; cropping certain sections, changing the contrast and brightness on some of the shots (like the dream sequel, where the cars drive past). However when it came to adding sound/music to our film opening we decided that we did not want to go through the hassle of finding a song we liked that we were legally allowed to use, so we instead settled on using the ‘sound samples’ which are built into iMovies.

10. Silhouette.

11. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? From the preliminary task, I feel that we have come a long way, as we were using very simple shots, nothing complex and we were not ambiguous enough with the editing. Because we filmed this all in order, it was a lot easier to make our new film opening run smoothly without any glitches or jumps in the shots. We used point of view shots to exploit what our character was looking at, flashing from still shot to still shot as his eyes flickered from one to the other, which was not used in our preliminary. After playing around with the equipment, I feel that I have grown more confident using the technology, because the preliminary prepared me for what to expect in later filming. Sine our new film (.The Reprisal) I feel that there has been a vast improvement compared to our preliminary and original film as they were trying to tell too much and not focusing enough on the editing side, and I believe that the choice we made at re-filming again was the right one, as this time less was more.