Opening Sequence Evaluation

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

When given the task of making a thriller movie opening, we wanted to portray the idea of a real thriller opening as much as possible, so do to this we watched various examples of thriller openings so we could create a believable thriller opening. When watching this, we saw the film Marnie, in which the identity of the main character we appear to be following is kept a secret. We decided that we should use this idea for the stalker so it would create tension and mystery in the product. We then decided that we would develop this idea so that not only do we never see his face, or much of his body really, but we would have him following the other character, using point of view and over the shoulder shots. So the presence of the stalkers character is in almost every shot.

We wanted to make the house that the stalker follows the girl to look as warm and welcoming as possible so it would connote something desirable and show contrast with the grey bleak exterior that we see her walk through to get to the comfort of home. We thought this would be a good way of making the idea of home look violated as the stalker (being part of the bleak exterior) enters the house mixing the bleak and the homely.



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

Our media product is targeted at a large audience, so it would be distributed in cinemas first so it's readily available for people to see it. It would then be distributed on DVD so it's available to see at home. For this to happen we thought it should be released on a popular label that may be well known for it's thriller films, or just generally well known. So this film may be released by someone like Universal. This would also mean it's advertised quite alot also on the internet, on official sites as well as sites such as imdb.com.



How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our media product generally represents the social group of targeted teenagers that this kind of thing may happen to. We generally portrayed a normal 17 year old girl, who has been targeted by someone who clearly likes her, but too much as he's stalking her.



Who would be the audience for your media product?

When thinking about what sort of audience we would cater for in our thriller, we had to consider important aspects that would effect making the thriller for the right audience. For example, if we were to go for an adult audience, the actors we used might be expected to be the age of the people we were going for. So we decided that we'd go for people our age, meaning we could use actors that target our audience perfectly. This also meant that we could come up with a storyline that we think would attract us when looking for a thriller.



How did you attract/address your audience?

As i said, we were aiming for an audience of people our own age, so the main actors are people that we can relate to, just normal 'teenagers' our age. This means that the audience will be more involved in the storyline, as they could imagine them in similar situations. We have made the idea of the films storyline fit so it could be for either genders. We have done this by using both a girl and a boy as the main characters. There isn't a great amount of violence involved, so the film is generally more psycological, which attracts both genders.



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

When starting editing this product, we began using the new version of imovie that comes with the new generation of macs. However, when attempting to use this we realised that we were unable to do and try out various things that we wanted to do, and when we realised our footage was too dark, we decided to move the sequenced footage across to Final Cut Express. Once we had done this, we learnt a lot about how to use Final Cut and we were able to try out alot more effects than we would've if we'd used imovie. This also meant we could use the Final Cut colour corrector, so our footage was useable, and that we could then learn about the programme, which we found was alot more complicated than imovie.



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

Since we started the preliminary task, we feel we've learnt alot about how to use the shots that we learnt for the preliminary to create and build tension, for example we used various point of view shots to portray the stalker. Throughout the filming process of our poduct, we learnt that it's important when relocating for the film to consider any changes that may have to be made in the storyboard. When we relocated, we found that alot of our scenes couldn't be shot because there wasn't anywhere in the new location to shoot them, this meant that we improvised completely for the scenes we shot inside the house. This was generally ok, until we realised that we didn't have as many different shots as we'd like to have, it also meant we wasted time whilst filming rethinking what we would do for the second half of the opening.

Something else we feel we learnt that we really needed to think about more, was the lighting necessary when filming inside. We encountered a problem when editing because the footage shot in a certain part of the house was too dark, this was because the lighting in the room was far too soft. We attempted to remedy this by filming again, but using a spotlight to attempt to make the lighting brighter. This did make us lighter, but still not light enough. We remedied this when editing but we felt if we'd had time we would've attempted to make it lighter yet.

The most important thing we feel we've learnt since the preliminary task is how to use Final Cut, as we feel there's so much more you can do on the programme once you know how to use it. It enabled us to try out changing the colour palette of our product, giving everything a blue tinge, we didn't however decide to use this, because we felt the film was better giving a sense of realism.