In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our task was to produce an opening for a new thriller movie, we had to plan, film and edit the movie opening from scratch. The opening had to be a maximum two minutes, fit the criteria for an age fifteen rating and include elements that are commonly seen in thriller films. The first few minutes of a thriller are used to create a clear narrative but at the same time to create questions that will keep the audience gripped to the film. The thriller opening needed a believable plot with well built characters, well thought out dialogue, sound and settings. Thrillers usually take place in interesting settings such as cities, deserts or American style towns. Heroes in most thrillers are seen to be strong, fearless and accustomed to danger, for instance, soldiers, spies or police officers similar to the one played by Kevin Costner in ‘The Untouchables’. These ‘good guys’ during the film will contend with villains, murderers or terrorist to name a few, up until the end when usually good overcomes bad and the criminal is either killed or arrested. However such conventions have been broken by many films over the years for example in ‘No Country For Old Men’ the audience is left on a cliff-hanger where we see Anton Chigurh, a twisted criminal walk down an American suburb showing no remorse or attempt to flee from the police, implying that he will not be caught. The narrative however normally stays the same. Thrillers have many sub-genres but most focus on a criminal or crime network, rather than the law.
Devices such as cliff-hangers, red herrings and suspense scenes are used repeatedly throughout. The use of these also work along side the low angle and high angle camera angles to create an intimidating feel for the audience. For example we used a low angle shot to show the vulnerability of the character as he goes up the stairs, unknowing of what is about the happen. Sound has a very important role for thrillers as music can build the tension and suspense for the audience, normally this is applied to the footage in editing as non-diegetic sound.
The opening of ‘No Country for Old Men’ is typical of the thriller genre. To set the scene the directors have chosen to use extreme long shots of the American desert. Non-diegetic sound has been used; the narrator tells us a short synopsis of the film while landscape shots are shown. The last shot of this scene is of a police car, the camera is positioned on the floor looking up at the car. Two characters walk into the shot from the left and get into the car and drive off, creating a question with the audience of who they are. A cut to the police station occurs to show time has moved on. The camera is in front of the sheriff while he speaks to someone on the phone. The golden mean has been used in this shot so that we can see the criminal creep up behind him, gradually building tension as the audience watches him get the sheriff by the throat. During the murder scene the camera movements are very smooth and without many cuts, this contrasts against the actions taking place and the normal use of camera movements during these types of scenes, in other films they are more fast paced and jerky for example in ‘Psycho’. The directors have used this so the audience can see everything that is happening in the scene and the emotions on the killer’s face as he calmly kills the police officer.
Along with this narrative the director has to take into consideration camera angles, sound, lighting, mise-en-scene and once the filming has finished, editing. The use of sound and lighting are extremely important in a thriller as this helps to focus attention and manipulate the feelings of the audience, sound can make the audience feel paranoid or physically scared even if the image doesn’t. Our research on a range of thrillers has enabled me to create an effective opening, ‘When a Stranger Calls’ gave me the most influence. While the credits are running there is a conversation over the phone between a man and a girl. As there is no image, all your concentration is on the dialogue. We used this idea, of focusing the attention on one thing, to tell the audience that the couple they are watching have recently married. The phone call then ends as the picture fades in; we are looking up at a bedroom window as if we are spying on "Stacey". We also manipulated this so that we could use it. A few of shots in our opening were from the point of view of the killer as he spies on the couple. Also in ‘When A Stranger Calls” they have used jumpy shots, this is to show the excitement of the fair ground and the suspense of the prank calls. We listen to a number of other phone calls until a light is switched on at the window showing a silhouette of a man, he jumps down toward the ground causing Stacey to scream, this sound is played over the shots of young children on the rides unaware of what is happening, the quickness of the shots combined with the scream makes it almost unbearable to watch but makes you want to keep watching. It all goes quiet as the camera looks up at the red balloon float away. We took inspiration from this opening for ours, for example the way the camera stalks the victims, how the murderer appears behind them and the use of the scream to frighten the audience. The way the woman is killed was interesting, so we decided to adapt it so it would suit our thriller. During our opening we used mainly mid and close-ups, similar to that of ‘No Country for Old Men’ so that we could show the characters emotions and reactions.
We encountered a couple of problems with the narrative, we chose to start with a wedding scene as a flashback and then bring the film back to real time with the killing of the couple, however we realised that the amount of mise-en-scene needed to film a wedding was unrealistic so we chose to use photos of weddings, have them on a side board and then for the camera to pan along them, telling the audience about the wedding without actually needing to film it. We also found that it would be easier to film one person being killed than both of them as realistically the man would try and fend off the villain resulting in a fight, but we didn’t want to film a fight as it wouldn’t look good on screen, so just having a woman that was scared and helpless seemed more believable.
How does your media product represent particular social group?
Our study of the thriller genre and TV drama enabled us to have an understanding on representing specific groups of people. ‘Silent Witness’ a British TV Thriller portray their characters very well with the use of language, costume, physical appearance, body language and through the settings in which the characters live in. Professor Dalton played by William Gaminarais is a pathologist who lost his family in a car accident. He is tough, unemotional and a rule breaker. This is stereotypical of most hard, over worked characters in thriller-crime dramas. His high social class is shown by his occupation, where he lives-London and his use of language.
In our thriller opening we took into consideration the use of mise-en-scene in other films and TV programmes to build our character profiles and to show certain stereotypes and representations of people. For example our killer was dressed in black wearing a hooded top that covered his face. The audience would instantly recognise him as the killer and become wary of him. We represented our married couple as innocent, unsuspecting people through the use of body language, costume and age. For example the couple were in their twenties and were happy that they will spend the rest of their lives together. They were wearing normal fashionable clothes showing there was nothing unusual about them. We also used lighting to represent these people; the use of dark, shaded light around the killer added a sense of mystery and danger to the character, while having bright light around the couple showed them as guiltless.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
There are many film institutions that would be able to distribute our film, most of them come from America. Institutions like Warner Bros., Universal and DreamWorks are three of the biggest film companies, each of which has their genre that they specialise in. During my research I found that New Line Cinema would be a suitable institution to distribute our film, they have been involved in films such as ‘Seven’, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. New Line Cinema was founded in 1967 as an independent film studio in America but has now been taken over by Times Warner, one of the worlds largest conglomerates of entertainment and media. I believe New Line Cinema would be a good institution to produce, distribute and market our thriller because of its past experience in all film genres and the directors which they have employed like Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro. I believe Del Toro to be such a good director because he is able to create an atmosphere by using all of the techniques and conventions correctly and affectively in his films such as “Pan’s Labyrinth”.
Who would be the audience for your media product?
At the start of the course we got thirty people to fill out a questionnaire that we had put together to identify what they wanted to see and what they would expect to see in the opening. Along with questions like ‘what type of setting?’ or ‘what characters would you expect to see in a thriller?’ we also asked for demographical information like their gender, age and occupation so that we could find and target a specific group of people. Our conclusion was that the majority of people asked were single male and female students around the age of 16. However we believed that this was not a true represented of our potential audience as it was a limited view. Their most favourite type of films was horror with comedy and romance films coming second. They expect to see a villain of some type with a defenceless victim, preferably young and female. From the questionnaire we also found out that the setting that they expect. They wanted an empty house or a setting like a forest. We addressed their request by having it set in an empty, quiet and darkened house. The victim was a woman and the villain a mysterious and violent character. We also addressed their opinion on what sound they would like by included screams, daunting music and silence.
How did you attract/address your audience?
To attract our audience we had to include conventions typically seen in thrillers. One we used was to create peaks and falls in the tension by using loud fast paced music when we wanted to build tension and use slower quiet music to lower the tension. This helped to keep the audience watching the film, so that they could see what will happen next. Furthermore we used certain camera angles to hide parts of the scenes from the audience creating a sense of mystery as they could not see what or who is about to appear on screen, such as, when the victim was doing her make-up we hid that the killer was standing behind her until she looked back into the mirror. We wanted our audience to feel uneasy and nervous for the characters in the film, we also wanted them to feel that the story was believable and could happen in real life to anyone. We did this by simply not having an extravagant storyline like films such as ‘Mission Impossible’ or ‘James Bond’. We also tried to include certain things that our audience wanted to see, we found this information out from the questionnaire that we had given out. The majority of votes were for murder, violence, suspense, screams and silence in the scene, we included the majority of these near the end of the opening when we had built the tension to a high enough point. As we rated the film as a fifteen along side with the BBFC guidelines, this allowed our target audience to view the film, if we had put to much violence and strong language in we would have had to of put it in the eighteen category. To see if we met our audiences expectations we held a viewing of the film to the same people that we asked at the beginning of the course and requested them to fill out another questionnaire to evaluate the film. We got mainly positive reviews back; however the problems that were seen were the same in each evaluation. The biggest flaw in our opening was a small jump cut that occurs when the character sees someone in the mirror and looks round, we had this problem because we only filmed that scene once and had very little film to edit, limiting us to what we could do with the footage. If we had the opportunity again we would definitely film each scene twice and film at least five seconds of footage before saying ‘action’. One thing that the audience liked was the end scene of how the killer appears behind the woman, one person said “ you build the tension well and it reaches it peak at the right time, the scream at the end is chilling especially with the sound effects.” Overall I believe that we did meet our audiences expectations.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
During the production of the film I have learnt a wide range of skills in filming and editing. In the filming process we learnt how certain camera angles represented things differently for example a low angle shot would show that person or object to be of major importance and powerful while a high angle shot would show them to be venerable, weak or scared like the victim in our opening. Or using an extreme close up would intensely focus the audiences attention on that thing. We also learnt how to frame shots using the golden mean rule and the rule of thirds, meaning that the object or person was the centre of attention or not as case the be. During filming of our preliminary task we began to take into account the use of lighting to represent a certain mood or type of person. Before we could start editing we had to learn how to use Adobe Premier Pro, our media teachers organised for a media student from Stamford College to come in to teach us the basics of cutting scenes, adding sound and fading shots together as a way of transition. Once we got used to Premier Pro we were able to get more technical with the editing for example we changed the images opacity and over imposing them to represent a flashback, also we slowed the speed of the clip to emphasise the action.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
Over the past six months I feel I have developed my skills and understanding in the field of media. I can now film and edit a short movie within a two day time frame successfully. Since my preliminary task I believe I have excelled in editing as I struggled the first time however in the final task I was able to program technical transitions and fades. From my preliminary task I learnt that you needed to film a wide range of different shots for each scene as the angle you intended might not work with the rest of the scenes or show what you intended it to. I feel that the planning of the film could have been more detailed and the story board more in depth as we struggled to know what we had and hadn’t filmed. Overall I feel our group worked very well as we were committed, we didn’t have any major disagreements and discussed everything we were doing.
