THE FINAL THRILLER OPENING - CAPTIVE

EVALUATION QUESTION: 1

IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGEFORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

  

CONVENTIONS OF TITLE SEQUENCES:

These two pictures show some of my previous research on titles sequences. I had to do this because of my thriller so I now know a great deal about the conventions of titles sequences. 

There is a certain order in which the titles should appear in, however there are some exceptions to the conventional order. 

In this image, it shows a title sequence analysis that I completed. In this title sequence, we can see that it follows the conventional order that many, if not most films follow. 

EVALUATION QUESTION: 2

HOW DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT REPRESENT PARTICULAR SOCIAL GROUPS?

Representation is different for different people. They are intentionally composed, written, branded, targeted, and censored by their producers, and that they are entirely artificial versions of the reality we perceive around us. 

This is a collage of the stereotypical 30 year old woman in today's society. In my thriller opening, the main character is a thirty year old woman, but she is completely the opposite of the stereotype. She is mentally disturbed and she commits a crime. However, she does have a job and she does have a house like most thirty year old women would probably have. 

The social group that I have represented is normal working class women who are in their thirties. They work and they own their own household. Normally, these women would have children and a husband. They would probably have a nuclear family and would be part of some type of activity in their community like the gym or dance classes. 

I have presented this stereotypical idea of thirty year old women in a negative way. Although she seems normal at first and she looks like there is nothing wrong with her, when she goes into the house we see that actually she is not normal. It is a negative representation because we are presenting her as being crazy and quite disturbed, which detracts from the normal stereotypical idea of these women. 

EVALUATION QUESTION: 3

WHAT KIND OF MEDIA INSTITUTION MIGHT DISTRIBUTE YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT AND WHY?

If we had to choose, a production company that would distribute our film would probably be screen gems. This is because they distributed 'The stepfather' which was the film that we took our inspiration from. 

EVALUATION QUESTION: 4

WHO WOULD BE THE AUDIENCE FOR YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT?

Our media product was an opening thriller that told the story of a woman who is unable to conceive and becomes obsessed with having children. Because of this, she ends up kidnapping a child and in the opening we see her coming home where we eventually see the child and we know something is not right.

Since our film explores the idea of some people having mental illnesses that lead them to doing things like kidnapping children, we thought that our opening falls well into the psychological thriller sub-genre.

Through research I found out that psychological thriller's target audiences are often 18+ due-to them including quite a lot of violence as well as heavy psychological issues that could be disturbing for people under that age.

 For our thriller opening, we decided to make the target audience people from about 18-30 as that is the age range for people that would usually watch that genre. We also thought that it would catch women over 30's attention as one of the main characters in the story is a thirty year old woman.

FEEDBACK FROM SET 7 AS MEDIA:

This was some of the feedback that we got from our class. Both the students and Marisa gave us valuable feedback which helped us to see that we had chosen an appropriate target audience to aim our opening thriller at. 

This is a screenshot of someone talking about our opening on Facebook. We found it very interesting as well as motivating to see this and it helped us understand that we had once again chosen our target audience well. As the film revolves around females,we thought that it was good to see a girl commenting on how much she enjoyed the opening. 

EVALUATION QUESTION: 5

HOW DID YOU ATTRACT/ADDRESS YOUR AUDIENCE?

In our opening, there were various aspects that appealed to our target audience due-to things such as mise-en-sene, who the protagonists were and the name of the film. 

We used mise-en-scene like a handbag to appeal to the more feminine side of our target audience. We think this worked well as many girls liked the opening. I also think that having Giselle as the protagonist in the opening helped us because her friends will be drawn into seeing the movie and also me and Hermenia's friends will also be drawn into watching our opening. I think the name of the filming is also quite captivating as it is short but it will get someone's attention. The name 'captive' seems quite dangerous and will draw people in that are interested in quite twisted genre's of films. 

The feedback we got from our rough cut really helped us a lot when it came to the final stages of our editing. We were able to change some of the shots and how long they were on screen for. When we went to see the opening in the cinema, I realised that the changes we made really did make it better.

These videos are some of the responses that I got from some of the students after we all got out of the cinema after having finished watching all of the openings. Some students commented on how they thought the opening personally effected them and what made them like the opening.

This video shows all of the media students waiting outside the cinema to be called in. We then walked in, and we sat down and began watching akkl of the thriller openings one by one.

  

This is a GIF of screenshots of parts of the feedback videos where the students are talking specifically about what they liked about the thriller opening. 

Drew is talking about the fact that he liked the sound and he also enjoyed the fact that there were close ups. He said it made it really good and interesting to watch. 

Leila is talking about the fact that the poster is good and it made it seem really realistic and more professional looking. 

Farheen mentioned that the setting was very good. She also mentioned the props and the music 

EVALUATION QUESTION: 6

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT ABOUT TECHNOLOGIES FROM THE PROCESS OF CONSTRUCTING THIS PRODUCT? 

The technology that we used was extremely good! We found it very easy to use and we enjoyed using the equipment! However, the technologies were quite difficult to carry around as we only done that two at a time. We did try and in the end everything worked out well and we managed to work well with all of the equipment. 

EVALUATION QUESTION: 7

BACK AT YOUR PRELIMINARY TASK, WHAT DO YOU FEEL YOU HAVE LEARNT IN THE PROGRESSION FROM IT TO THE FUL PRODUCT?

In my preliminary task, I think my group done considerably well and I think it looked acceptable. However, with making the thriller, we have learnt so much more than we did with the prelim. 

Comparing skills between the PRELIM and the THRILLER OPENING:

This is some of my prelim evaluation that i had to complete as one of my blogs. This blog is not very detailed and is not too much depth about how the prelim went and what i thought of it.


Below is the analysis of the prelim. Although it took some work to get all of this done, it did not take half the time that it took my group and I to get the research for the Thriller done.  For the Prelim, we did no have to do much research. In fact, we just got on with the work and we did some analysing (as seen below) after we had done everything. 

Comparing the research and planning that we did for the prelim with the research and planning that we did for the thriller opening is quite hard because the thriller opening was a much bigger project. We spent a lot more time on the thriller which really helped us to improve our research skills but also our overall knowledge on the thriller genre. I spent many weeks getting some research done on thrillers and things like target audiences. I made sure that I knew everything before I went on to making and planning my thriller with my group. 

We had to do a big amount of research in order to make our thriller opening good. These screenshots show some of the planning that I done about thrillers and also some of the initial ideas that my group and I had before we decided on which idea we were going to go for. The research was also in much more depth as we had to think about EVERYTHING!

Also, in the thriller opening, we had to worry about things like what mise-en-scene and props we had to use because we wanted to make it look as realistic as possible. We had to plan out what the characters were going to wear and what the house would have to look like in order to transmit the feelings we wanted.  Whereas in the prelim, it was much easier as we did it in college and we had to work with what we had as opposed to what we wanted to work with. 

This is one of our match cuts from our prelim. At the time, we thought the match cut looked fantastic. The experience we had compared to the experience we have with programmes like Final Cut Pro now was minimal so I think that we actually did quite well. 

The lighting was not the best and the types of shot was also not the best. We used a long shot in order to show the whole of Giselle's body. However, if it was now, we might have used a medium shot that would make it look more professional as well as showing Giselle's face more clearly. 

Also, we have definitely developed our titles. In the prelim, they are very simple and it did not take a very long time to get done. When we were doing these titles, we had recently learnt how to put titles into our work. Since then we have had time to improve on that and the titles in our thriller came out much better. 









This is one of the match cuts from our thriller opening. Immediately, we can see the huge improvement from the match cut in the prelim. 

It looked very effective on the cinema screen and it definitely made our film look much better and diverse shot wise. Because we are now more precise and we have more practise with using all the tools on Final Cut Pro, we were able to make it extremely precise and the timing to be perfect. 


We learnt that the match cuts really help to make it look so much more professional and interesting for the audience because it helps the action to happen faster which is perfect for thrillers. 

By making our thrillers, we also learnt how to film better and what would look better on a screen. In these screenshots above, they look a bit dark and it is very hard to see the characters face, which is crucial. With our thriller, we made sure that the lighting was perfect because we may not have another opportunity to re-shoot it. 

The storyboard for the prelim and the storyboard for our thriller opening are completely different. 

The first storyboard shown above is the one for our prelim.  It is not very detailed and we decided to use real life pictures instead of doing things like drawing out the whole storyboard because we thought that would take more time and concentration. Although this storyboard has the description of each shot, the storyboard for our thriller opening was much more detailed because we decided to draw it out and it took us half of one of our 1 hour 40 minutes lessons to do so whereas we managed to get the other one done very quickly. 

The editing process for our thriller opening was also much better compared to the editing we did for our prelim. Although we took much longer, it was much more precise and we made sure everything was perfect. The editing was also easier when we were editing our thriller although it was more nerve racking. We were already very accustomed to the equipment and the programmes so it made it easier to get what we wanted done. 

TEAMWORK:

When we were filming the prelim, we were not as comfortable with each other as we were when we were filming the thriller opening. This is mainly because we had spent more time with eachother. Also, when we filmed the prelim, it only took us a lesson to film it, whereas it took us three days of filming together to get the thriller opening done.

We made sure we had a schedule to make sure that everyone had fair work and that a certain person was not doing more work compared to other people in the group. 

 This was our production schedule. We created this for our thriller opening filming times so that we were organised. We worked as a team to come up with this schedule and we wanted to make sure that everyone in the group was happy with it. 


On certain days of filming, two of us would take the equipment back to college, and then we would swap. We done this and it helped our group to get stronger because we knew we could depend on each other. 

 My specific skills in team work improved a lot because I was able to share my ideas more freely. Also, we were all more comfortable with each other which allowed us to communicate more often through other means of technology like mobile phones. Also, I have learnt to use the camera very well so if any of my team mates needed any help with the camera, I would help them.

I really enjoyed working with Hermenia and Giselle and I think we made a very good group and we worked really well with each other. 

FINISHED !

The final touches we had to make on our Thriller was adding in the last set of Titles and ensuring that the music matched the clips being shown. We finished editing before the deadline and we had more than enough time look over our final product. The very last thing we had to do was marked the words finished next to our group number to make it official.

Vlog About Our Idea

This is a vlog we made shortly after we were put into a group and given the task. In the vlog we discuss our Initial Ideas for our Thriller.
This vlog will help you see how our idea evolved as time went by and other ideas we had for thrillers.

EDITING: Final Stages

EDITING:

EDITING: Evidence of Titles Research

Before we started coming up with ideas for our thriller or even talking about it, we had to learn the conventional order of titles. We done this by looking at a few clips in class and we then had to write down the conventional order on a timeline. 

The picture above shows the blog I done about the conventional order of title sequences a while ago. I done two different timelines of title orders. I learnt that there are some cases where the actor can come before something like the film title if they are very important and will help to market the film. In addition to this I learnt that if there is a big actor or actress they can also go last with an 'and' or with a 'with' before their name. 

This is a screen shot of our titles already in the opening of our thriller. We wanted to put the quite close together and we tried to make them roughly the same size. The only titles that are up there for the longest is the actual title, and the two production companies which are 'Candi Studios' and 'CGH ENTERTAINMENT' as they are the most important people.

EDITING: Constructing the timeline

When we were constructing our timeline, it took us a while to get it running smoothly as we were learning how to do certain things along the way as we were editing.

These screen shots show various phases of our editing process. We were extremely keen on getting to the end of our thriller opening so we stayed behind a few times to make sure that it got done to the best of our ability. Our timeline was edited and changed a few times as we sometimes changed what we wanted it to be like on the computer. 

Also because we edited seperately sometimes, each person would change some things on the timeline according to what they think looked good.  

Adding titles.

These are some screen prints of the titles we were adding. As seen, we tried to make the titles contrast to the background. We also followed the conventions of a typical thriller opening as we have put all of our titles in the correct order. This shows our understanding of how and why titles are placed in certain places, for example, the main actors/actresses always are put one after the other, with about 4 seconds showing each. Then actors that have smaller roles, are shown for less time, and often put together.

We can also see that we have put the first names and first words larger and in bold. This catches the audience attentions. We added fades to smooth out the look of the titles. And it also created a more professional look.

EDITING: Adding effects

In our opening, we decided not to have any major effects like colour effects because we thought that it looked quite strange. However, we did include effects like fade in's and fade out's to in places like our titles to make them appear on the screen in a more natural way. This made it seem more professional which was what were ultimately aiming for.

EDITING: The Process

When we began editing, we had to choose out the clips that were going to be used. We done that straight away so that we did not have to worry about it when we were editing, which really helped us and made it quicker when we started getting to work. 

When we started editing, we had a few ideas already but as we were editing, those ideas changed. We initially wanted to put the little girl only at the end, however, we then began to think about the feedback that Micky had given us about making the opening more about her and we thought of putting quick shots of her between certain shots. When we tried it, it did not look very good so we had to change it back to the end.