Evaluation Task 4 - Who would be the audience for your media product?

We wanted to find the best suited audience to view our thriller we decided to interview different people to determined what type of age group and gender would  most likely watch our thriller. We came up with six questions that we could ask to our interviewees we wanted to make sure we interviewed a good range of different people and ages so that we could collect the best and most accurate data. 

Having filmed all our interviews, I then watched all of them through making a table like chart so it is easier to compare results. Having collected the data and laid it out in a chart I then started comparing results. Our results suggest that apart from one women we interviewed who said her favorite genre was horror the other woman’s favorite genre of film was either comedy or Romance and no one said action or thriller. 

Having looked at this I started asking myself if woman would actually sit down and watch our thriller however I was surprised by the results as even though thrillers were not these females top choice our results show that one female between 21-39 actually said “The grimmer the better”. One male said his favorite  genre was comedy but the rest said they liked action or dramas. I would therefore think the more likely audience for our thriller would probably be male although our thriller is suspenseful so would appeal to some females and has lots of action. I found that the younger boys between 15-20 didn’t actually find thrillers as interesting as the older men and actually prefer drama and comedy’s. 

Finally I decided to create a “fake” Facebook profile of someone whom from my results seems to fit the ideal age and gender for wanting to watch my thriller. I created a male called William Green and made a status that he would have written. I discussed the thriller inception which was mentioned by males in my interviews as one of their favorite thrillers. From there I put a picture of the film and discussed how much ‘William’ loved the film and Leonardo DiCaprio acting. I mentioned the acting as I found that when I asked people what makes a good thriller a lot of them mentioned how important the acting was to them. I made his age 41 as the males who were most interested in thrillers and action were the males over 40. I chose a photo of a man who could be of this age of the internet and I made it appear as realistic as possible by showing he is from Manchester and studied at Manchester university  but now lives in London where he is self-employed. I do believe this age group and gender are the best target audience to view our thriller from the research I did.

Evaluation Task 3 - What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation Task 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

How does your media product represent the area of Class and status as well as Ethnicity?

The media extract that we created from the institution that is ‘us’ has the characters mainly adhering with the stereotypes. I am going to look at how camera angles, Mise-en-scene, Editing and Sound help discover how these four things begin to communicate how Class and status as well as ethnicity are portrayed to our audience.

First of all I am going to focus on the variety of camera angles and shots that we used. We are shown an extreme close up of our victim who is attached to the chair; we therefore see the frightened and fearful emotions shown on his face. As an audience we feel sympathy towards him here we have a created a character that is adhering to the stereotype that ‘white middle class’ people are good and almost always innocent in such situations. Through a mid long shot we really see the stereotypical representation that the man working for the Special Forces playing the ‘hero’ role is good as well as middle-class. We see this through his professional gear and serious facial expressions. He is also adhering to the positive stereotype that middle class workingmen are honest and responsible all of the time. In contrast we see how the stereotypical representation of the ‘villain’ is shown through camera angles. As an institution “we represented” him from two different sides to begin with we shot with low angles showing how he has power over our victim, but we adhered to the stereotype that the ‘villain’ never wins and the plot changed when our ‘hero’ special forces man entered. From then on our working class villain was only shot using high angles which portrayed him as smaller therefore of lower status then the middle class men and this had particular significance when he lay dead the audience were ‘looking down on him’ in a negative way. Showing us the negative way in which the media represents lower class people and those of different ethnicity.

I then went on to look at Mise-en-scene and how this helps to reveal ethnicity, class and status in our thriller. I first looked at costume and how this plays a huge role in the representation of the various characters. For instance we represented our villain wearing a costume, which was all black, which connotes death and adheres to the negative stereotype that all villains wear black. In terms of showing his working class background and foreign status we dressed him in rugged, dirty clothes this adheres to the stereotype that foreigners are dirty and may not present themselves as the ‘typical Wight good guy’ would. He also has a black balaclava mask that covers his face for a lot of our thriller therefore we cannot see his emotions and so can’t relate to him, we also feel he is trying to hide his identity as an audience you then feel he is untrustworthy and this makes us feel intimidated and fear the unknown. 

In contrast we have the binary opposite of our innocent victim whom we represented in a white shirt which connotes purity, innocence and heroism with smart black trousers and shoes suggesting he may play an important role in society this adhers to the well known stereotype that middle class men have smart clothes and hold high positions of responsibility in society. His shirt however is covered in red blood suggesting he has been beaten up therefore the audience are aggravated by the negative treatment this man has received which has taken away the purity of the all white shirt. I then looked at another section of Mise-en-scene we tried to represent which were facial expressions. We only see the villains face up close once here we see his anger and therefore feel concerned for our victim and his safety, as he appears to be in serious danger we sympathies with him. Another area of miser-en-scene that plays a large role in our thriller is the prop we chose to have our villain with a big black gun, which immediately acts as a warning for the audience letting them know that there is potential for danger. Here our villain is adhering to the stereotype that all criminals carry weapons on them. The gun connotes violence and because of whom has it unpredictability. Contrasting with our villain we have our hero Special Forces man who also carries a gun. However here the audience does not feel threatened instead we have represented our character to look in power and therefore the audience is actually relived at the sight of the gun as they feel protected going with the stereotype that guns in the hands of ‘honest’ men are nothing to worry about, here we see how the same prop can have such a different impact depending on which character is in contact with it.

Next I went on to look at how my media product represents ethnicity, class and status through editing. We used slow motion as our villain turns around to try and shoot the Special Forces man. This helps emphasise and focus on how evil he is, the audience also then immediately side with our special forces man adhering to the stereotype that hero’s always come out better then the villains and often win. We also used fade-to-black at the beginning of our scene when we first see our victims face, showing him looking vulnerable this helps put more meaning on his body language and face that looks scared, this creates the audience to fee concern and realise just how much danger he is in. To represent how ethnicity is shown we used lots of short shot duration for our foreign villain man, this means the audience don’t get long to analyse him therefore they feel like they cannot understand him or his motives and the audience is left feeling distant. This is very important as it adheres to the terribly negative stereotype that people of different spoken language are outcasts, as they cannot be understood in everyday society. We also used longer shot duration in our editing, which help represent social class and status as well as ethnicity. The long shot duration were of our middle class hero and victim, signifying they are more important therefore the camera gives them more time on screen to be watched by the audience in comparison with the working class man. Going with the stereotype that the higher your class position the more recognised and trusted by society you are.

The last way that representation can be showed in my thriller is through sound. Arguably the most important aspect in portraying ethnicity is through the use of diegetic sound such as the dialogue this is when we hear our villain speak and the audience’s suspicions that he is foreign and not English are confirmed when we hear him speak Spanish. This shows how he is ‘different’ as the language he speaks is unrecognisable to the audience they feel intimidated and therefore associate him with a bad and negative image. We purposefully represented him with a Spanish voice as this adheres to the stereotype that foreign people often are the villain in both the media and in real life and automatically because we cannot understand their language we jump to the conclusion they have something to hide.

In contrast both the white men speak English adhering to the stereotype that all white men are decent people whom are clean and have nothing to hide. We also used the diegetic ambient sound of gunshots. We used this as it helps set the violent tone of the thriller and reveal just how dangerous things can get when different ethnicity’s and people of various social class fight.

Overall our video extract uses camera angles, mise-en-scene, 
editing and sound to help explore the representation of class and status as well as ethnicity. I think it is clear how our media product represents these two areas. The end leaves the audience with a clear idea that all the characters in this thriller opening seem to be adhering to their stereotypes, and we do not have any characters that are challenging or subverting to the stereotypes you may see within a thriller. 

EvaluationTask 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation task 1 from Saskia Tarn

I have created a slide share to look at what ways my media product use,develop and or challenge forms and conventions of real media products. Above is the slide share which I created to portray my examples and evidence. 

Video discussing Mise-en-scene in our thriller

For my Mise-en-scene video I paired up with one other student in my group and we wrote a script all about the mise-en-scene we used in our thriller. We decided we wanted to present in a more humorous and casual  way so we presented it as if we had our own “Monday night chat show” and the topic for that particular evening was  mise-en-scene in our thriller. We stated what we had done and why we had chosen to do that particular thing. For example we talked about why we had our victim in makeup with blood running down his face. We stated that this was done to make him look as if he had really been in a fight trying to escape and fight for his life like a real person in this situation would do.

Editing

Having shot our thriller we then had to start the next stage, which is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. We used Adobe premier pro as the software and edited on a Mac computer.

We began by simply watching over all the footage that we had shot we did this because we wanted to see what different shots we had taken giving us an idea of the choice we had in terms of what shots we could use and when. We had clear expectations in our group that we would first edit by picture and shot, and only then would we go on to start doing sounds and the effects.

Once we reviewed our footage we dragged our shots down onto the timeline and did a basic logging order. This enabled us to get a rough idea of what the start would involve then the action scene that takes place in the middle and lastly the ending. We then began the cropping stage it was a lot more simple to do because of the fact we have grouped them together on a linear timeline.

When deciding where the different shots went we had to name and re-name the clips. We did this because it meant we could easily edit and find the different sections without loosing footage or getting confused as to what shots are where.

We then started to crop the shots. We had to do this as some of the footage we had shot entire scenes in one shot but we only wanted to use little sections from that shot therefore we cropped it. We used the blade to cut our clips into two different shots. This was important as it enabled us to create smoother shot transitions making our sequence flow better.

We used the timeline we had to arrange the shots in the correct order. As well as to cut and then make them shorter and overlap shots giving us better transitions. This meant we could duplicate your work making different timelines which means you can test your continuity without disturbing you’re original footage.

As we were doing our editing we found that continuity became a big problem as our shots often didn’t match up and it was hard to get them to link properly.

So far we have used eight layers on our timeline because the more layers you use the smoother the overlaps become. If we were only to use one layer the footage can get cut off to early and therefore seem un-smooth, it can also take away audio footage which can affect the outcome of the shots.

So far we have just used simple cuts, these are particularly good for our action scene as we don’t want slow dissolving or wipe transitions. As an action scene needs to be fast paced and quick so the audience remains on the edge of the seats from all the chaos that the shots provide. So what we have done is changed the pacing throughout our scene transitions, by rapidly taking a series of simple cuts, this mean that we could create an exciting action packed thriller sequence. However to begin the opening of our sequence which is not action we wanted to create and build more tension by drawing out each shot for a bit longer then expected. We did this so that the audience gets an idea of the setting and begins to imagine in their heads what may take place in the following minutes. So far we have attempted to use a match on graphics of some of our props so that the objects in the shot graphically match, we tired to do this as it helps to establish a strong continuity of action in the scenes as well.

Overall our three main decisions that we had to make whilst the editing process to place was what footage we could use and what we couldn’t. Secondly the order of the shots we should show became very important to the success of our thriller. Lastly choosing the right shots to make our thriller clear, this made sure we had no continuity errors. Our aim of the editing process was to develop an opening sequence that creates suspense for the viewer, this needs to be intriguing and action packed keeping the audience on their toes.