Our media product is a thriller action movie. Most modern media texts have seemed to mix these two genres together such as the film “Law Abiding Citizen” and “Crash”. However, in historical texts such as “Psycho” by Alfred Hitchcock the format of thrillers are a lot easier to decode. The basic principal is to include mystery and suspense by hiding key details from the viewer/audience. Whereas action films are more stereotypically fast paced stories and scenes that keep the audiences short attention span interested by bombarding them with different visual and audio stimulus. Our film has a mix of these two elements like many movies in modern mainstream film making, from our fast pace kidnap scene to the slow body dump scene. These are two very separate styles of film making but we need to look around for inspiration to create our narrative.
To create an interesting narrative for our short film we looked at the key concepts of making a story. We looked at Vladimir Propp's theory of character types and how he believed that within a story there were 8 character types, the hero, the villain, the false hero, the princess, the donor, the dispatcher, the helper and the father. He said that within a narrative more than one character type can be place upon one person. This worked quiet well for us because we had a very small cast of about 3 people and a camera crew of one. My Character was the villain and the false hero, Andrew was the hero and father and Emma was the princess and the dispatcher as she gave the hero an objective.As a budgetless production we did not have many assets other than thoughts that were given to us by the school such as a HD digital camera. We could not use lighting equipment because we did not have the expertise or gear to do so, as well as make up and costume department.
Our media text challenged conventions of real media products one major way in particular, we didn’t use any or little dialogue in our production to construct meaning and media. However, at the end we used a radio broadcast to help tie up loose ends that the audience couldn’t actively work out.
How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary tasks?
Like wit the main task we started to research how we should construct a complete and well-polished product. We started by looking back at “Law Abiding Citizen” and looked at their poster for guidance and inspiration. The influence from these texts are very strong but allowed us to produce very professional posters and reviews.
(Poster 1 - Law Abiding Citizen)
(Poster 2 - Law Abiding Citizen)
I feel that our choice of a poster and magazine review have reinforced the way that we depict Andrew as the villain. In our poster we edited the picture of Andrew in the top left so that he would on appearance represent an evil character. We did this by darkening his whole face as well as taking the picture at a slight angle which made his eyes overshadowed giving him a creepy look. However, the review was slightly bias because we were the ones who had created the text, to get a more fair representation of our film it would have been better to get a second and third party to review the text.
(Empire Film Review - Internet)
(Final Magazine Review)
The influence that we got for the review can from an “Empire” magazine as well as reviews that we could read on the internet like the empire website and we took elements from that and wrote the review in the style and format that was used. This was quiet easy because the creativity was mostly in the write rather than the appearance of the text.
The poster was more of a challenge, we looked at many different posters but we liked the look and feel of the quiet abstract “Law Abiding Citizen” and as we have already used this film for its style of filming why change now. As you can see we took a lot of influence from the Jamie Foxx poster with the black and white half face with the red lettering. The close up faces on both posters allows the audience to see the actors and connotes that these are the main characters which is useful if the actor/actress is famous, because this will generate more interest in the film. In poster 1 there is an explosion in the background to connote that this film was exciting and an action film. We looked at this and used our own image to create a meaning for the audience to decode. We used the inside of the van which is an iconic figure in our film and the outline and foot of a man/body lying on the floor connoting that he is dead. This created a sense of mystery about the film that would increase tension that would tell the audience that this film is a thriller.
(Final Poster for our production)
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
This process or of questionaries are to obtain quantative data from qualative questions like, "how much did you like the film?" This can give a variable of different answers that will give us an opinion, however not data that we can use in comparision. So we asked these questions in ways that would give it us data we could use like, "on a scale of 1 to 10 how much did you like this film. This narrows the choice of answer that a person may have allowing us to control the result more.
From the first set of results we determined that most people had seen both action and thriller films but enjoyed action genre more than the others. This helped us to aim the direction that we put our film into, but we knew that there would be limits to an action film due to money, special effects, props, etcetera that we didn’t have and to perform stunt that would not be allowed due to health and safety. The questionnaire also told us suspense was one of that best ways to get an audience interested as we asked the question, what makes a narrative engage you?
Pie chart Showing the percentage of people who likw the sample films
The second interaction with out audience that we documented was when we created a facebook group and asked for people to comment and give feed back. although this was a post production questionaire it was useful to hear what people thought of our film.
Amber Olley
Very good film with fast and exciting shots. The lighting was interesting as it gave a sense of reality.
8 / 10
Kate Sophoclides
I liked the film. The narrative was easy to follow yet I like the way there were flash backs to represent the time passed.
9 / 10
Jonathon Shell The film was exciting it was not always easy to undersatnd but it explained inself in the end which was a really cool way to end the film.
9 / 10
How did you use media technologies in the planning, construction, research and evaluation stage?
For the planning and research or our film we used the internet as the greatest source of inspiration and information. We watched trailers of films as well as a horde of short 5 min long films that were produced independently on YouTube and other free video host sites. Once we had an idea we posted them on a blog so that people may comment however, no one commented on anyone’s blog so we decided to start planning where and when we were going to film. Here we got our media equipment from the school, this included a tripod with a mount so that we could capture still shots without the camera shaking and a small HD camera with a SD card so that the film so instantly be uploaded onto an Apple Mac.
To plan filming times and meeting time we used facebook and emailing to discuss when an where we should film. This also allowed us to link films so that our group could watch other films and get inspireation for the use of camera shots and effects.
The raw footage was first uploaded into “iMovie” on the Apple Mac and saved onto the hard drive. Then it was transferred into the editing software “Final Cut Express”. This allowed us to cut the existing footage into an order and the select sections of that footage of any length of time and place it on the time line. Using FCE we were also able to slow and speed up footage as well as change the saturation and choose different transitions that allowed us to create the film that we wanted to. Other technology used was “Garage Band” which was also on the Apple Mac. Here we used the pre-recorded tunes on GB to compose a backing track to the text, once the sound clip was complete it was then exported into “iTunes” and imported into FCE and then we could just drop the sound in where ever we wanted it to be. When the film was complete it was then exhibited on the internet on YouTube.
Throughout the process of creating this text I have been documenting stages and steps that my group and I have taken on “Blogger.com” which is owned by Google. This website allows information to be spread freely all over the world and if my film got enough interest I could use it to advertise other produces that could fund the film. However, as this was just for education purposes and that my blog was not targeted at anyone it did not get many hits.
It was a very easy process by having everything digitally stored when transferring material form camera to Mac, however there was a problem when the Mac was being used by another group because we could not work on our film. Also towards the end we almost ran out of memory space so in the future I would have used a portable hard drive to back up the material and to also beable to move it from Mac to Mac.
