1. Lewis Harvey-Mott’s AS Media Evaluation

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Our thriller opening sequence encompasses generic conventions of the thriller genre. Firstly, our choice of setting, in the woods, is quite cliché, as it’s used frequently in the thriller genre. However we made conscious decisions to alter aspects of our opening to subvert some conventions. For example, although we had a female victim, the typical damsel in distress, we also had a female antagonist too, this challenges the conventions. We also used contrapuntal non-diegetic sound, teddy bears picnic being hummed in the background to juxtapose between the action and the music. Through the use of camera work our thriller falls into different sub-genre such as a psychological thriller because of the use of Point-of-view shots, however it also contains some conventions of a western like Shot-reverse-shots and ECU’s on eyes, the runs in conjunction with the non-diegetic music having a calm, western feel to it, along with the ambient sound of wind, rain and birds.

3. How does your media product represent particular social groups? Both actors in our media product are white young female. However the female standing up throughout was intended to appear older than the other character, so in this case it suggest that age is represented as more dominant in the scene. Although the actors were the same age and the supposedly older female character was wearing a ‘hoodie’, often iconic of youths, her body language and higher status signified her being older. Gender on the other hand, is represented as females being strong, independent and taking matters into their own hands, this reinforces the context of the thriller, suggesting that it is a modern day setting. If I were to compare the social groups represented in our thriller to another film, it’d be kill bill, as both the antagonist and protagonist are female, also there use of SRS implies that it has a western subgenre much like ours

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? One aspect of the camerawork i was particularly strong at was holding the camera still free hand, we had to use this when tracking because we didn’t have a dolly for the camera. A weakness of mine for camera equipment was panning and tilting, luckily the others in my group could do it better than i could. Our first filming day was a bright sunny day in which we got lots of filming done, unfortunately we decided to change our idea slightly. Consequently, we needed to film again, however on this day it was raining, not only did this cause problems for continuity, it made filming problematic because we couldn’t get the camera wet so we needed to film everything under an umbrella. Which not only was awkward for filming, it created an unrealistic sound of rain hitting the umbrella.

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? When doing our continuity task, we tried using the camera’s for the first time, and had to chose a room to shoot it in. unfortunately we couldn’t get the camera to focus and the room was terrible to record in due to the size of it being too small to move and the sound came out poorly. Since then we had practice with steady camera movements and learnt not to trust the microphone on the camera for sound, we used microphones straight into the computer or an edirol Also our editing together the shots on Premiere Pro got a lot smoother for our actual products than in continuity task This was our opening shot to the continuity task. Firstly it was out of focus, we hadn’t yet learnt that you needed to allow the camera to adjust to the setting before starting to film. Also the angle of the camera is marginally crooked so a bit of practice with the tripod helped us there.