Signing-off message!

We've reached the end of this project, and now we're saying GOODBYE!!

Question 1 Evaluation

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

The answer to Question 1 of the Evaluation using Camtasia.

Question 2 Evaluation

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

This wordle I created shows some negative representations from our film.

First of all, what is a representation?

Representation is either the portrayal or description of someone or something in a particular way or certain nature. It is the way people in social groups are characterised and recognised by.  Representations which are used most often are: gender, race, disability and age.  A way of understanding representations is through stereotypes, e.g, women are easy targets, men wearing hoodies are dangerous, etc.

What is a social group?

A social group is people sharing some social relation.

We decided to represent the younger age group through our main character in our thriller film. We did this mainly through the use of mise en scene. Our main character, a young girl,was wearing a lot of make up. This gives the impression that all girls wear too much make up.

In the collages I created on photoscape, it shows social groups represented in mainly negative ways. The positive representation is that men are innocent and good, as the killer is a female. This break general stereotypes and representations. Unlike the majority of films, ours doesn't have many stereotypes because our plot is full of twists and it is unique.

Social groups represented in our opening:

GENDER

Our main character is a girl and that is how the representation of gender comes across in our opening. Our camerawork and shots,like close ups to her face and wide shots showing what she is wearing, clearly show her gender. The make up she is wearing adds to this as it shows her femininity. This is also the stereotype I mentioned earlier.

AGE

Our main character is a young girl. We know she is young through the use of mise en scene- the props. Our main character was holding a teddy bear, associated with children. The close up of her face reveals no wrinkles and that she is quite youthful

DISABILITY

The main character is in a mental asylum and typical stereotypes here are that people who have a mental illness are always confined to a mental asylum and that these people are dark characters hell bent on causing people harm and getting revenge. The setting is a white room, like many asylums, which also gives you a clue about her mental state. An even bigger clue about her mental state is seen when she is circling the name in the book and crossing out her fathers face.

The collages below I created on photoscape show some stereotypes from our film.

Question 3 Evaluation

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Question 4 Evaluation

Who would be the audience for your media product?

WIDER AUDIENCE FOR THRILLER FILMS IN GENERAL

The wider audience for thrillers in general is around 15-25yr olds males. This is due to what the sub genres are and what they contain. Many contain violence and upsetting scenes which is why mainly have a male target audience. Some sub genres are:

• Psychological
• Crime
• Action
• Romantic
• Horror
• Comedy
• Mystery
The pie chart below shows what percentage of age groups mainly watch thrillers. With most of the thrillers being rated15+, those who are below 15 may be interested in watching them online or illegally downloading, etc. 

AUDIENCE FOR OUR SUB GENRE: PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLERS

Usually the target audience for Psychological thrillers is around 18+ males. This is because the films may contain some disturbing characters psychological problems/scars, like ours does. This could be too much for younger viewers to handle, although some viewers may actually be under-age and watching these thrillers without permission. There will probably also be some violence, which is why psychological thrillers are usually aimed at males. Below is pie chart showing the ages that psychological thrillers are aimed at & which age group watches them most.

SPECIFIC AUDIENCE FOR OUR FILM

Our film is a Psychological Thriller so we thought, given all our research before hand, that our target audience would be around the 15-25 male bracket. You could argue that our target audience is for women as we have a female lead, however, we have disturbing shots in our film, including a dead body and self-harming scars, that we didn't feel were appropriate for viewers younger than 15, though younger viewers would probably find a way of watching it through their curiosity, and we also thought the shots might be a bit too much for young women to handle, especially as the lead is a young femal in a mental asylum. Below are a couple of the disturbing shots.

This is a GoAnimate I created for this question.

Help for evaluation by aa63353 on GoAnimate

Animation Software - Powered by GoAnimate.

Question 5 Evaluation

How did you attract/address your audience?

These are some videos answering how we attracted the audience. I interviewed the cast of the film and we got audience feedback as well. 

Question 6 Evaluation

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

This is a short prezi I created answering this question about the different technologies we used and how we used them.

Question 7 Evaluation

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? 

Shireen, Amina and I created this video using Camtasia. We recorded our voices over the video.

Go Animate! Barack Obama LOVES Obsession

Barack loves Obsession!!!! by laladabest01 on GoAnimate

Animation Software - Powered by GoAnimate. Just a little something for our film & this is my first time using GoAnimate. The president of the united states LOVES IT!!!!!

Another Go Animate production for Obsession

I want to see Obsession!! by laladabest01 on GoAnimate

Animated Presentations - Powered by GoAnimate. So now that I have used this once I thought I'd give it another shot. Again it is about Obsession, but with different characters this time. I used speech bubbles instead of voices this time. Enjoy!!

WE'RE FINISHED!!!

We finished producing our thriller film Obsession today! We really enjoyed this process :) Here's the photos that I (Shireen) took of Larah ticking off our group number from the checklist board to make it clear that we are DONE & FINISHED!

Comparing title sequnces and openings

Our title sequence is as follows:

• Production company ident
• Distribution company ident
• Production company title
• Distribution company title
• Actor 1
• Actor 2
• FILM TITLE (OBSESSION)
• Actor 3
• Actor4
• Casting by:
• Music by:
• Edited by:
• Executive producer:
• Film by:
• Directed by:

We have based our title conventions on the other psychological thriller Se7en:

• Production company ident
• Distribution company ident
• Distribution company title
• Production company title
• Actor 1 (major star)
• Actor 2 (major star)
• Film title
• Actor 3
• Actor 4

We decided to add some extra titles such as 'edited by' and 'music by' to give our opening a bit more of a realistic and professional feel. We decided to add sound effects instead of an actual musical soundtrack to create a spooky atmosphere for our film. Unlike Se7en our titles are in blood red to help add to the spooky atmosphere, however just like Se7en, our titles appear in different places on the screen, to help keep our opening interesting.



You can see here how our shots are similar to Se7en.

We found Se7en a really useful film to base our opening on, as it wasn't too complicated and was interesting to watch. They had titles that looked incredibly creepy, which we also found effective for our opening.

Screen Grabs for the editing process

These are some screen grabs showing the editing of the soundtrack and distribution company.

  

Soundtrack Pro

Final Cut Pro

In Final Cut Pro we included flashing effects to make it look distorted and disturbing which reflects on the main character's (the girl) behaviour. We also made some shots faster pace to reflect the thriller genre. 

We used Soundtrack Pro to find the sound effects we needed for our film (e.g eerie/dramatic noises) . Once we got the sounds we then imported them to our film using Final Cut Pro. 

Another thing we did was create a Distribution ident. We did this using Motion and added a couple of effects to go with it.

Screen grabs of film and title sequence

Below are the screen grabs showing how we created the titles and the order they appear in. Like many psychological thrillers we chose to have our titles super imposed as it looks more effective and gets the audience thinking more, similarly to the Se7en titles. We followed the conventional title sequence as we felt it suited our opening. Our real names, along with some that are made up were used in the process as well.

We used a font style that most suited the psychological/horror sub-genre. The font we chose looked distorted, linking back to the girl's behaviour. We used the red colour for our font to connote the blood and killing that happens during the actual film, relating to the horror sub-genre.

Extra Filming

After going back and watching the rough cut again, we decided to do extra filming to make our opening more engaging. Shireen, Larah and Amina did extra filming to get extreme close-ups of the props. Yet again, Quddus wasn't in to film with us! Below are just some pictures we took of the props we are filming. The reason why we did extra filming was because we received feedback saying we should do some of the shots as extreme close-ups to draw in the audience. 

Company Idents for our film

Whilst editing the film, we used/created two company idents. The first was CandiStudios. We used CandiStudios as our Production company.

I then created the Ident for Marsh Media, so that we could use it for our distribution company. I used the software called Motion to do this.

Feedback for our ROUGH CUT

After creating the rough cut of our thriller film, we got some feedback from other people to see whether or not we have to film again or edit some stuff. Above is a short video we took on the feedback we got for our film's rough cut.

Obsession - ROUGH CUT

This is the rough cut version of our thriller film - Obsession:

We got feedback from other people in our class and a couple of points that are worth mentioning are that the title framing for a couple of shots is a bit off. Also the music which was put on at the last minute doesn't exactly go with it. Other than that the general feedback for our rough cut was very positive. ENJOY!!!

Editing of ROUGH CUT Screen Grabs

These are just a couple of screen grabs from the editing process of the rough cut:

We just added and placed all our shots that we filmed roughly in order we thought made sense. We added quick titles as it was only a draft. To do this we use the software Final Cut Pro.

We added in sound on Soundtrack Pro just to show that we will be including non-diegtic sound in the actual film.

Day 2 - Filming Process: Behind the scenes Album