Media Studies
Saturday 16 February 2013
Friday 15 February 2013
Thriller Opening Evaluation
1) In what
ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of
real media products?
Thriller
films usually centre on a central protagonist fighting against insurmountable
odds, be it physical, such as The Expendables, or psychological, such as Black
Swan. There are many variations with their own conventions, but all thrillers
share a common goal; to create tension through the use of fast paced editing,
dramatic camera angles and keeping the storyline as shrouded in mystery as possible
to keep the audience guessing. Thrillers also effectively use lighting to leave
parts of the set or characters in shadow to add to the mystery of certain areas
or characters. This is most prevalent in the film noire sub-genre, most popular
in the early twentieth century, although it has recently made a comeback in the
form of The Artist.
Openings to thrillers usually have their own conventions as they
need to impose a message onto the audience as soon as possible and set the tone
for the rest of the film. This is done through the use of long shots with
captions to distinguish location, as in The Bourne Supremacy, or extreme close
ups to keep the audience interested without giving too much away to what the
subject is, such as Se7en. The use of non-diagetic sound builds tension and
suspense in the opening scenes where very little actually happens. This keeps
the attention of the audience while the opening gives some backstory and an
insight to the main character.
This image shows a collaboration of screenshots from the opening
of Se7en. It uses extreme close ups to disorientate the audience and force them
to think more about what is going on, rather than it being explicitly depicted.
The opening gives an overview to the major themes within Se7en, through the use
of emotive and provocative imagery such as the letter writing and photographs
symbolising memories and the razorblade symbolising violence. We used a close
up to start our thriller to not give away the location of where the film is set
and to give a dark backdrop in which to overlay our credits, much like Se7en.
Films predating the introduction of colour to motion pictures (The
Wizard of Oz, 1939) had to use different methods to get across their message,
and silent films more so. The Artist, released in 2011, chose to film without
diagetic sound and in black and white, rather than technological limitations.
The film looked authentic without mocking the era, as the mise-en-scene
perfectly emulated the 1920’s. It utilises many tricks used by silent film
makers of the time, such as reflections, pantomime and props to bring to keep
the audience interested. It uses intertitles as well as props such as newspaper
headlines to tell its story without spoken words. We planned to do something
similar in our thriller, to have the credits or title appear on a piece of
paper the character threw out of the drawer, but we thought it looked forced
and took away from the action.
The typical poster and opening credits has bold text to draw
attention to the poster as well as to distinguish itself from the action taking
place on the poster. We have emulated this in the titles of our thriller, which
uses bold text to make the text stand out from the background it is on. Thrillers
often have a lone wolf character, which we also have used. We have done this
because we wanted the story to be the focus, rather than distracting the
audience with lots of characters introduced in a short period of time.
These are some posters that demonstrate that need for bold text to distinguish the title from other text or action on the poster.
Here are some credits that overlay the shots in the opening of thrillers. It demonstartes the importance of font and colour of the text to set it apart from the background it is on.
2) How does
your media product represent particular social groups?
We aimed our thriller opening at young boys, between the ages of
12 and 15. This demographic generally like action films with past paced action and simple storylines, as well as films with a BBFC rating of 15 or 18. This is because films of a higher age rating contain more violence and swearing, which young boys like as it makes them feel like they are watching something they shouldn't be allowed to.
Our thriller opening only contains one actor, and as such only
presents one social group, adult males. Chris is presented rather negatively as
he is only shown in darkness or his face is not fully in shot. We did not
intend for Chris' character to represent adult males negatively, but this may
be the way it could be perceived due to him being the only character. We did
not use any violent props and so we are not stereotyping adult males as being
violent, although this decision was made as it was more appropriate to the
story rather than trying to send a message. Chris was also dressed in fairly
smart clothes, which contrasted to the plot of the film, as you would expect
him to be dressed more low-key or look more like a typical criminal. We did
this so the viewer wouldn’t think he was trying to rob the house but was rather
returning.
These are stills from the films The Football Factory, Kidulthood and Green Street. These are the images usually associated with young people in films; violent and involved in gangs. This contrasts with our opening as our character is alone and is not wearing the clothing connected to what is the typical "youth", no hoody, jeans or trainers.
3)
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
I believe that our thriller opening would be best suited to the style of
Twentieth Century Fox. They are known for distributing thrillers as new IP that
have gone on to make successful series, such as Die Hard, Alien, and Taken,
whilst also branching out into other genres such as Home Alone.
Die Hard is one of Twentieth Century Fox's flagship brands, with 5 films released between 1988 and 2013.
Twentieth Century Fox were very active during the Golden Age of Hollywood, and
they are still distributing films to this day. They are considered among the
top six American film studios as of 2011. They were a success from the very
start, as two of their first films, The House of Rothschild (1934), and Les
Misérables (1935) were both nominated for major awards. They are currently
owned by the News Corporation and are based in Los Angeles.
4)
Who would be the audience for your media product?
The audience for my media product would be young teenagers. I think
this because we filmed the opening in a way that it would achieve a rating of
12 from the BBFC. I believe the media product would get a rating of 12 due to the infrequent swearing, the occasional psychological horror scenes and any violence will take place off screen. As the audience is quite young, psychographics did not really come into the targeting of the media product as they are too young to be fitted into those categories due to not having any responsibilities.
We produced a questionnaire to ascertain our target demographic. We gave the questionnaire to as a wide of range of people as possible, from all ages and genders, although we mainly gave them to younger people due to that age being more readily available to us. We asked about age, gender, the age rating they most like, their favourite type of film and their favourite film as well as what they expect from a thriller opening. The questionnaire revealed that most people that answered were under the age of 18 and they wanted to be kept in suspense during the opening.
As the film would be distributed mainly within England, I feel the
main audience specifically would be white males between the ages of 12-15. I
say these because the themes in the film would be most relatable to that
demographic, and people that are older than 15 may find that they want more
visceral on-screen action to keep them entertained. I think the audience is of
a lower class as the theme of betrayal is most relatable to this group of
people. I believe that the main audience is white as since the film is made by
me and Jack, two white people, and so our cultural influences may come through
in the film.
The audience expect to be kept in the dark in terms of the story, as our age rating and budget/time constraints do not allow us to film anything visually impressive in terms of effects.
5)
How did you attract/address your audience?
The audience probably expected an actor that was older than 17 as not many thrillers use actors of that age, especially as main characters, but due to the time we were filming, we had to use Chris. Our audience also wanted to be kept in suspense, and we did that through the use of only getting clear shots of Chris' back and reflections. This is a technique also used in No Country For Old Men. It keeps the character shrouded in mystery as his details are left unshown to the audience.
The actor in our film is a 17 year old male, and so we thought that males aged
12-15 would find him relatable but would see Chris as a authoritative figure,
and so they would feel the tension when he dies, rather than finding the
situation funny as if it was someone so relatable that it could be one of their
friends. Research has shown that the age group of our audience generally have a short
attention span, we used cutaways to keep the action fast paced and the time
between cuts short. This ensures that the audience remain attentive towards the
film, rather than not really paying attention. It starts with low angle shot types, and ends with high angle shot types. This shows the transition of him being more and more under control of the killer upstairs.
There is some off-screen violence which keeps the age rating down and makes the
opening having an almost superficial cliff-hanger, where the audience have to
imagine what happened rather than having it explained to them. A similar film which keeps tension and has lots of off screen action yet keeps it's 12 BBFC rating is The Woman in Black. It targets a simlar audience to our media product and attracts them through the use of darkness and shadows.
6) What have you learnt about
technologies from the process of making this product?
I learnt about the "golden rules" of cinematogrophy, the 180 degree rule, match on action, shot-reverse-shot and the rule of thirds. The 180 degree rule states that between two people opposite each other, the camera must remain on one side of their shoulders in order to not disorientate the audience about where the characters are in relation to each other. Match on action is two shots transitioning naturally onto each other when there is an action taking place, such as a door being opened. Shot-reverse-shot is the process of shooting over the shoulder at the person who is talking to give the illusion that the audience is involved in the conversation. The rules of thirds states that something must be happening on the four points where the lines cross if the screen was split vertically and horizontally.
This is an illustartion of how the 180 degree rule works.
This is how we used match-on-action in our thriller. Chris opens the door in one shot, and then walks through it in the next.
This is an example of shot-reverse-shot.
This is how the rule of thirds works. The focus of the shot lies upon the points where the lines cross.
I also learnt how to use a Mac as it’s
built in software, iMovie, is simple and efficient to edit together simple
movies such as the thriller opening. We then used iDVD to burn the finished
thriller onto a DVD. We learnt how to use transitions between shots to make the shots appear more natural.
I used PowerPoint to create our ideas pitch.
I used Paint to edit together a
stereotypical poster for a thriller film to put up on my blog.
I also uploaded my finished thriller
onto YouTube so that I could embed it on my blog.
We used iMovie to edit together the thriller opening as well as the preliminary task.
We used iTunes to get a soundtrack for the thriller.
7.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the
progression from it to the full product?
One of the main issues we faced when editing our preliminary task
piece together was that we didn't film enough cutaway shots. This made the
finished preliminary quite jarring to watch as the different shots didn't quite
flow together as well as we would have liked, as the timing of the shots didn't
correlate correctly with one another. As such, when we filmed the thriller
opening, we made sure to film many cutaway shots from as many angles as
possible to mitigate any issues we could face in editing the final piece
together.
Since the preliminary task lacked any sort of sound, I felt that
it didn't quite feel finished. The inclusion of diagetic sound, such as the
sound of footsteps, and the non-diagetic sound, the soundtrack, added to the
ambiance of the scene. The sound added an extra layer of complexity to an
otherwise dull scene.
In our preliminary, we filmed each scene over and over until we
had one clip that we were happy with and discarded the rest. The issue we faced
from that was in one of the shots, background noise was quite audible which we
did not notice at the time, and since we only filmed one clip of that scene, we
had to work around the issue which took some time. We fixed this problem in the
final piece by filming each scene several times so we had two copies of each scene
that we were happy with so that if a similar problem arises, we would be able
to use either clip.
Since we didn't use storyboards in the preliminary, we found that
we had to re-film certain scenes as we didn't realise what we would need to
make our storyline make sense. Apart from the obvious time constraints, we
could have had problems with continuity (in the weather, clothing and the
availability of the actors on another day). Since we made a storyboard for the
thriller, we knew what shots we needed and where they would fit together so
there would be no need to re-film anything.
We tried to encompass a larger range of shot types into our final
piece as our preliminary was limited to mostly mid-shots, mainly due to the
small area in which we had to film. The location of where we filmed the final
piece allowed us to film at different angles, and so our final piece uses a
wider range of shot types than our preliminary, as well as panning and
different types of transitions.
High angle
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