This document summarizes a student's media evaluation project creating a thriller film. It discusses representing a sole female character to create vulnerability. Inspiration was drawn from the opening of Seven including notice boards and crime scene analysis. The intended 15+ audience was researched and flashing images were found to attract without revealing the plot. Distribution options and learning about editing software, equipment, and effects are mentioned.

1. MediaEvaluationMolly Niklas

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups

3. Our character was a female, she was wearing all black. She had a very feminine look about her which we intentionally wanted to highlight because this creates innocence and more of an innocent character.In our Thriller we only had one character representation. We did this because we felt that using one female would create that vulnerability that you often see in Thrillers. The fact that our character was alone represented that females seem to be a lot more prone to being a victim. Even though the character wasn't drawing any attention to herself, the idea of her being alone creates a tense atmosphere for the audience. When we analysed other Thriller films, we noticed that in the opening sequence the silence of the lambs, their is a female character alone in the forest. This gave us inspiration to use a female character in the opening of ours because we wanted to show innocence and the idea that something was going to happen.

4. In what ways does your real media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

5. InspirationOPENING TO SEVENHere you can see that from inspiration from the Thriller opening Seven, we have created our own similar notice board and analysis of a murder scene. We did this because we felt that it was very effective in seven and we wanted to create something similar that we knew would engage our chosen target audience.OUR THRILLER FILM!

7. 4) WHO WOULD BE THE AUDIENCE FOR YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT?

8. How do you feel when you watch a Thriller at the cinema?What do you look for in a Thriller opening?At the beginning of our Thriller we have flashing images of a killer plotting a murder, how and why is this effective of your age group?

9. When we researched different Thriller films, the majority came under the certificate rating of 15. The conventions we used were similar to some of those used in the other Thrillers so we felt that having it at certificate 15 was the best thing to do and most suitable. Our target audience was 15+. We chose this target group because we felt that at this age you would properly understand the topic we wanted to convey. When we researched the classification, there were certain aspects we wanted to include that wouldn't be suitable for under this age group.I think that our Thriller will appeal to other ages outside our target audience. I think this because the scene is quite confusing and the aspects used would confuse an older target audience

10. How did you attract/address your audience?

11. Relate to some real life situations that they have been involved withNervous and anxious to know what’s going to happenQuestioning what’s going on and having to wait for the answerHOW WE WANTED OUR AUDIENCE TO FEEL...Un a where of what’s going to happen next...Make our target audience know the real life situations.Create a tense atmosphere for the audienceMysterious atmosphereThe idea of having to work out what’s happening

12. The audience research was a very important part of the preparation process into making our final piece a success. The rest of the questionnaire results are on my blog with the conclusions as to how the answered questions will help us. We asked this question in our audience research because we wanted to know whether we should reveal some sort of murder at the beginning of our Thriller...As you can see from these results, we knew that having a opening that didn't give away much of the story line would attract the audience we wanted it to.

13. What type of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

14. Mainstream films can best be defined as commercial films that have a wide release and play in first run theatres (A movie theatre that runs primarily mainstream film fare from the major film companies and distributors, during the initial release period of each film). Being sold at popular stores, or more typically, at general stores can also be an indicatorA possible film distribution is called http://www.launchingfilms.com/They have covered a lot of popular films that are now in all the cinemas around the country. This particular film company have distributed films such as ‘The Fighter’ , ‘Little bit of heaven’. I feel that this would be a good company to distribute our film because the films that have been previously distributed are of the same target group as ours. Having our film digitally distributed enables a wider target audience and also would be a lot cheaper than film cinema. The digital film also has a better quality and less likely to get broken or damaged. Our final Thriller obviously isn’t as good a quality as a professional film because the technology is a lot more advanced and they are professionals who are paid to do what they do. However, our film included some qualities that you would find in Thriller openings for example it had background music to, camera angles, and the effects we used weren't as good as professional but they were in keeping with the project criteria.

15. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

16. Handling of the software and equipment...The shots we had already planned were mainly the shots we used when we came to making our final piece, however, there was one shot that we did use in the final piece because we felt that it looked good when we came to piece our whole film together...The days we were filming, we did have a few problem. Because our mise-en—scene is based at a train station, it was very difficult to know when the trains were going to arrive in order to have the cameras ready. The noise of the trains did interfere with the rest of the sounds, we have background music to our Thriller so it did take us a while to make sure the trains didn't over power the background music.

17. I personally found Premier Pro a very hard editing programme to use. I thought there were too many confusing tabs and I didn't understand how to capture my footage at first. However, once you had played about with it and had a few lessons practice, I found it a lot easier and manageable to use. We used various different effects to create our Thriller. We didn’t want titles running through of the producers names because we felt this would take a lot of the mysterious effect away from what we wanted to create. However, instead, we just had a plain black background with the name of the Thriller wrote across it...

18. We did add background music to our Thriller because we felt that this created suspense and tension because the music does gradually build up and create an atmosphere to the audience that something bad is going to happen. I thought this music we found was really effective and when we made our questionnaires, our target audience found the sound very effective. We did add special effects into our Thriller when we came to edit it. We wanted to create the idea that the girl in our Thriller was being followed or acting very secretive. We put an effect on her walking, this effect was called ‘Ghosting’ and it made the camera go fuzzy as if something was following her.

19. Lookingback…