1. Discuss the ways in which your thriller incorporates generic conventions, identify specific scenes. We were set to produce an opening to a thriller film, approximately two minutes long. The main objective to a thriller is to keep the audience guessing. This is done by not giving the main storyline at the beginning of a thriller, the opening credits. It acts like game for the audience as hints get dropped. As you can see we have not shown our antagonist face, we have deliberately done this as thrillers often avoid showing faces to create more suspensence. Mise-en-scene is an important aspect for thrillers. props used and clues given signify suspense for the audience as it keeps them guessing and excited to see what the significance of the props are. We really liked the idea of not showing the face of the antagonist as its mysterious and messes with the audiences mind.it has more of a hidden story. creates the knowledge of what the antagonist gets up to as its obvious that the photos are personal to him which he takes.

2. Mise-on-scene – redecorating our room for a realistic storyline. We needed to turn the room into a dark room with realistic red lighting (red gels over existing lighting and lamp). We also needed to include our religious props. Our main character, from what the audience see, is the antagonist who’s hobby is to work in his photographic room. We did this by putting “orren”, the main character, in a lab coat which his white. We chose this as white as the lighting is very dark and he will stand out but also it contradicts him as he is the antagonist but white is normally related as innocent. All thrillers take special care with clothing as they all have significant characters.

3. We were influenced by the film Seven in our thriller. The things which influenced us were the music, scratchy writing, red filter and closeups of writing and hands. As our lighting we used red filter which I thought gave it a great effect. Red indicates blood to the audience and a lot of blood will be classed as a horror. Although our shots have beaten up women and the audience know that the antagonist kills and abuses women, they don’t actually see this happen and its not gory enough to make the audience cringe. Therefore this is how we define our film to be a thriller as people like trying to work out what is going to happen for themselves and we deliberately created tension.

4. We were influenced by The music from seven. We took out a section from a song which we liked and thought went well with out opening. We changed the tempo, cut it down and edited it so there was no lyrics which made it an instrumental sound track.

5. How does your media product represent particular social groups? In our opening the gender mainly is men, which are the antagonist and the protagonist. We decided to have male lead characters because usually men represent power and control and this is what we needed the antagonist to be like as its obvious to the audience that the antagonist hates women, this is because they can see that all the abuses and kills is women, however what they don’t yet know is that its because he got abused when he was younger by his mother. This represents mental illness the past history created by our antagonist in our film. To make the audience aware of his addiction we used many slow and close up camerawork on the photographs. This also creates an image to the audience that the antagonist has a fear of women which shows weakness and he has to physically hurt them in some way to make contact which also implies that he is lonely and cant have a relationship with the opposite sex. Gender is represented in a stereotypical way in our thriller. The men come across very dominant. We have no women characters, however we can show that women are passive and weak later on in the film as they didn’t have control and let the antagonist do what he wanted to do to them.

6. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? The media institution that would distribute our media product would be a Hollywood studio. I think this because of the feed back that we got from the audience that watched it, they thought it was a professional production and didn’t think it was made by sixth form students. It is similar to the film Seven because of the visual style. Our film would be released in a mainstream cinema and would be a one off film, however there is potential for a book or a special edition dvd with uncut scenes which could create a whole new aspect of the film. Visual style... ...religious As the audience can see he was a violent man, not only they could tell by the photos and what he did to women but also from his action of him being mental and holding his head where the camera is used to make it look as if he was spinning round. Normally you don’t associate religious with violence but this man has both sides to him which is unexpected and the audience would find this surprising. We used red filter and this helps to show what the character is like and what his hobby is, to beat women and take photos. It suggests violence.

7. Who would be the audience for your media product? Both men and women will appeal to our thriller opening.We decided this as our film did have beaten up women on photos and if younger people than 15 saw this it could influence them which we don’t want, however our target audience is good as they are old enough to understand and will get the right storyline and mood which we are trying to create for our audience. Our props were quite lethal too, so for a person younger than 15 to watch our thriller and think its right to have props like we used would dangerous.(as per bbfc certification) If our film was to get released and this happened then we would loose our money and the film could get banned. This is why having the right target audience is important for releasing new films. Camerawork also effects target audience as some camerawork is done to make things mysterious- Like not showing the faces.Although to under 15’s this may make them scared. They will find this eerie and wont know what to expect next other than something scary to happen so they wouldn’t no who the person is in the film as they wouldn’t see their face. This will automatically intimidate under 15 year olds as loud noises of the unusual sense can be off putting and uncomfortable.

8. How did you attract/address your audience? The photos shown in our film and skull being used as a prop could be fearful to the younger audience and very disturbing to our target audience and their minds. In our film we convince the audience to put themselves in the position of the beaten up innocent girls and feel sorry for them. They act as witnesses of them being hurt and who is doing it. The impact of this is that the audience can experience what is happening to the them through the point of view of the victims. This links to generic conventions as we have focused on crimes taking place and the audience act like a detective themselves as they work out what’s going on and who’s done it. For the audience to work out the difference between the characters gender and social backgrounds we have portrayed it clearly for them in our film as shown below.. Trapped Disturbing

9. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? In the process of constructing this film we noticed our strengths and our weaknesses as a team. In my opinion I noticed that our camerawork was very clear unless there was a moment we didn’t want it so clear like at the start whilst showing the photos. Our red filter worked a lot better than we thought it would and we managed to get clear pictures as the room was very small and dark. One of our weaknesses was when we decided to try out hand held camera as it was unsteady which we did expect. Luckily one of our hand held camera movements when we circled the Antagonist worked really well as we sped it up so the unsteadiness didn’t really show. Our filming process wasn’t easy. We found that at first we were being too complicated than we needed to be. We had to redecorate the room which we filmed in to make it relevant for our film. This was very time consuming and was quite stressful, however to resolve this problem we just realised we had more time than we thought and gave ourselves a deadline for that part to be done. We also had more time issues as we were only allowed a certain period of time in our location and we needed longer so we had to do three straight hours of filming and getting things together when we found this out. My favourite part to this project was using final cut express. I learnt so much about editing as I had never used it before. I think we found playing around with speed, fade in and writing the credits most useful.

10. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? The planning stage I thought was very useful as we followed it to help us film easier. However even by doing this, different things popped into mind whilst filming. Even planning was quite difficult as we had so many thoughts and ideas. I imagined that if planning was hard then I know that not having one would have made our film very confusing and all muddled up. It helped the process to run smoother. Overall I feel that our end product turned out much better than expected and I am pleased with it. We all took turns and had our own parts to play working as a team. We had lots of fun whilst producing it and learnt a lot at the same time.