just my school project

1. AS Thriller evaluation
By Richard Flack

2. Context
• 3) = Our clip
• 4/5) = question 1: in what ways does your piece challenge, develop or use
different forms or conventions of real media products /thrillers?
• 6/7) = question 2: how does your main product represent a particular social
group?
• 8 to 10) = what kind of institution may distribute your product / piece and why?
• 11) = who would be the audience for your piece?
• 12) = How did you attract / address your audience?
• 13/14) = what have you learnt about different technologies while constructing
your piece?
• 15) = looking back to your preliminary task what do you feel that you have learnt
leading up to the final product?
• -END

3. Movie (link)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IDhdS2e
DTM&feature=g-
upl&context=G2049f84AUAAAAAAAhAA

4. In what ways does your piece challenge, develop or use different forms or
conventions of real media products /thrillers?
Thrillers consist of a variety of conventions, one of the key ones being that the
majority of them revolve around some sort of crime. In our piece this crime was a
mugging. We are left no reason behind the mugging as we wanted to create an
enigma, a question for the audience along with who are these people?.

5. In what ways does your piece challenge, develop or use different forms or
conventions of real media products /thrillers?
Thrillers normally involve some sort of chase scene, whether this will be a one way
chase or a chase involving both the protagonist and the antagonist. In our case it was
just the antagonists chasing down our protagonist to take her money, during which we
kept Foley sounds in such as the wind and climbing the staircase. Our piece also stuck
to general media conventions shown by the second image. We created our own titles
from fonts such as jailbird Jenna and a logo from Photoshop.

6. how does your main product represent a particular social group?
• Our piece addressed two working
class groups, the first being higher
shown here which is established by:
• Smart clothing
• Expensive phone
• Purse
• Upright posture and other similar
attributes
• Our upper class character is our
protagonist, target to our antagonist
who want her belongings for money.

7. how does your main product represent a particular social group?
• Our antagonist, shown here on the
right, are our lower class people. In
this case, money has become such an
issue that they retorted to crime for
their income. Things that show that
these characters are lower class
muggers are:
• Dark clothing
• Disguised faces
We would have further emphasised their
role with the use of weaponry but
this was too much of a health and
safety factor as we lacked
authorisation within a public area.

8. what kind of institution may distribute your product / piece and why?
• Legendary Pictures
GK Films
Thunder Road Film
• Warner Bros
• Relativity Media
Working Title Films
Blue eyes Productions
• Universal Pictures
• I believe Institutions such as these producers and distributors would help spread
our movie around if it became a full fledged piece as they took part in recent crime
thriller movies such as ‘Contraband’ and ‘The Town’ which both followed some
sort of crime. I further believe they would distribute our piece based on our IMDB
page which are under one of my blogs.

9. who would be the audience for your piece?
• I believe our piece to be suitable for audience members aged 15 or over after
viewing the BBFC age ratings and comparing them to our piece. I feel that 15 is
suitable as our movie contains strong language, fear and violence which would be
too much of a shock to children.
• We aimed our piece at thriller loves, asking them things such as their favourite
thrillers and what they liked best about them.
• Here is the link to the BBFC to show more understanding of why we aimed it at
thriller lovers of 15 and above.
• http://www.bbfc.co.uk/classification/guidelines/15-2/

10. How did you attract / address your audience?
• After doing some research to find out what our thrillers liked by asking questions
such as “what is your favourite thriller?” and “what strikes you the best in a
thriller?”. We started creating our crime thriller about a mugging. Enhancing
moments with music and a variety of camera shots. Upon showing our rough cut
to the group we learnt that our fonts were in the wrong places and certain scenes
should be moved as well as making the music more fast paced. We done these
improvements they work better then what we thought. Our music track fits the
movie well especially when the muggers appear and it changes to give an
impression of approaching danger. We also learnt through some of our responses
that viewers like there to be a few enigmas set up in the opening sequence so that
they can try and guess what the movie is about before being contradicted by a plot
twist. So in our beginning sequence we left enigmas about our characters identity
and the reason behind the mugging along with minor enigmas such as why were
the muggers so frantic etc.

11. what have you learnt about different technologies while constructing your piece?
• Over the past few months my knowledge for media, thrillers and the techniques
behind everything have grown vastly. This is strongly shown in the music piece I
composed in garage band. Using imported sound effects such as the sirens to
create a more realistic piece. In relation to keeping foley and obvious diagetic
sounds in place I muted some so that our music track builds suspense up to the
mugging itself. I believe I used around 5 instruments, mostly guitars, to create a
piece that would show sort of increase in suspense. Starting off with a simple
chord pattern inputted with a bass pluck as our protagonist is introduced. Upon
exit though I used a sound accent such as an elongated beep that are used in
thrillers, this was put in place to show that the event is now going to become more
intense. As the first piece of music fades down another fades up, this consist of a
faster more complex chord pattern that was playing with a deep, loud and equally
fast paced strum rhythm that emphasised the danger these muggers posses.

12. what have you learnt about different technologies while constructing your piece?
• I also learnt how to input certain effects in via final cut programming however we
didn’t have time to use these in our piece. These were going to be split screens for
a more complex and frantic chase moment, high angle shot complemented by a
greyed and broken screen to symbolise cctv footage and using colour blends or
fades in other areas to create a more darker feel for the piece such as when the
muggers appeared we would have changed the brightness so that the shot
becomes darker, emphasising that they are the antagonists.
• Despite not being able to do these things I still believe our piece reflects a good
thriller movie as we met the conventions we wanted and created suspense
through cinematography and music.

13. looking back to your preliminary task what do you feel that you have learnt leading
up to the final product?
• Personally I didn’t have much of a preliminary task due to problems within the
classroom, upon completion of what I did do - which was experiment with a
variety of shots to make sure we know the 180 rule – we started researching into
thrillers. Our main sources of inspiration were Alfred Hitchcock and how he
impacted thriller and what it stands for today. We also looked at snake eyes and
rear window to identify different conventions such as voyeurism which is the act of
seeing something we shouldn’t be watching. For example in rear window this was
made clear from the start as we looked into the neighbours personal lives and
ways of living. Both movies had a crime at their base in which the other
conventions revolved around. Rear window had a murder and snake eyes had an
assassination. Upon seeing these our group liked the idea of keeping with the
crime convention yet felt that a murder would be too generic so we decided to
throw our viewers into a crime plot that if was to continue further would be
complex. This plot was a simple mugging. Our only fears at the time were keeping
the public calm, that’s why we chose the upper floors of the car park where we
knew it would be quiet. However we did face issues with the public none the less.

14. Problems we encountered:
• We encountered problems with the public
as mentioned previously which as a result
left them startled or just plain confused
like this gentlemen on the right. We kept
safe though by giving the public the
respect they deserved and waited until
they passed or moved away before filming
it was only through mid filming did the
public get caught like this which
apologised for.
• We also noticed that within our piece we
have a continuity error, this is when the
muggers appear, they stand to look at the
elevator number before giving chase but
our protagonist gets in afterwards. If we
had time to go back and change this we
would simply swap to the two shots
around.

15. Problems / extra information:
• We also had problems with our
surroundings, shown here on our right. The
example here is that we had to be aware of
reflections, especially with a mirror at the back
of the elevator which could of easily caught the
cameraman on tape but we simply positioned
ourselves correctly to avoid this. Furthermore
the time and weather of the day meant that re
filming shots was inevitably to tricky to do. We
also had terrible wind on the day so in places it
over powered dialogue but we did change the
volumes of some shots so that they could be
heard.
• In our next piece we would consider our
environmental factors to greater detail. Despite
our problems I believe we achieved a well
portrayed thriller.