Evaluation - Question 7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in progression from it to the full product?

• we have learnt how to use the software correctly 
• we have developed our camera skills hugely 
• we learnt and developed new shots such as shot reverse shot, match on action and the 180 degree rule 

Evaluation - Question 6

What have you learn about the technologies from the process of constructing this product?

• we have developed our camera skills and precision, editing skills, learnt about new software such as iMovie and Garange band as well as working on blogger

• we have improved immensely since working on our preliminary task and horror trailer at GCSE

Evaluation - Question 5

How do you attract/address your audience?

• We addressed our audience by using a similarly aged protagonist so the teenage viewers could relate to her character  
• We attracted our audience by using social networking sites which many of the viewers will recognise 

Evaluation - Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

• Our target audience is set between 15-30 year olds
• We feel that the teenage age market will enjoy our product the mos as it is relateable to them
• We have rated our opening at the age certificate of 15 classified by the BBFC

Evaluation - Question 3

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

• we chose newline cinema to distrtibute our product because of its previous successful thriller films
• using newline cinema would also help with the distribution of our product to cinemas

Evaluation - Question 2

How does your media product represent a particular social group?

• We feel our product represents the teenage social group as vulnerable 
• It also represents males and dominant,over riding and dangerous

Evaluation - Question 1

In what way does your media product, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

• we have conformed to a typical narrative of a thriller film
• we have followed Todorov's narrative theory 

Camera angles and shots

We used a range of different camera angles and shots to portray characters from different perspectives, create different atmospheres and to enhance different scenes. 

1

Extreme close up of the villains hand to show a vast amount of detail but not too much to reveal the villains identity. 

2

Point of view shot from the villains perspective, the blurred reflection displayed on the computer screen comes across as chilling and creepy as well as suggesting a sense of  secrecy. This also allows the viewer to have a clearer idea of who the villain is.

3

A medium long shot of the female victim walking allows the viewer to see the majority of her body to catch all of her movement.

4

A close up of the male villains fist shows detail and draws the viewers attention to the hand. The clenching of the fist creates a chilling atmosphere and displays a sense of anger as well as the suggestion of plotting and planning something. 

5

A high angled close up shot was used when the villains hand if hovering over the time table he uses to see where and when the victim will be.  This high angled shot was used to present vulnerability not on his behalf but on the victim’s behalf as the timetable is representing her life routine, which would be personified and representing her.

6

A tracking shot was used as the villain’s hand running across the banister to allow the viewer to follow his movement. 

7

A low angled close up was used to not only focus on the movement of the villain but to show his dominance.

8

An over the shoulder from the villains perspective helps to establish the position of the villain and to show a suggestion of who the villain is but not revealing his whole identity. 

9

An establishing shot used to show the audience the main setting in the opening sequence, we have set the camera on a tripod and used a panning shot to show the main setting. 

Final cut

This is our final cut of our thriller opening; we have kept many of the original scenes from out rough but also added a range of new ones. we tried to keep as closely as we could to our rough cut but at the same time ensured we added more interesting and effective shots. We used our feedback sheet as a close guidance for our updated cut, we tried to adapt around if not change the points that we made to us which we were told would improve our opening further.

Audience Feedback

After viewing our opening scene, the audience said various good points and also things that could be changed or improved.

Positive comments:

• The reflexion of the villain in the computer has been mentioned a number of times by the audience, expressing that they thought this shot was effective and successful.  
• It was also said that the closing of the browser which lead to the name of the film appearing on screen was also a really successful shot and was a good end to the credits.
• A number of people said that it was clear what our story line was through the shots and scenes that we used, this was our main priority when filing so we are pleased that the audience picked this up easily.    
• Our use of the credits were commented on also, saying they looked really effective as they were actually being wrote on to the screen as the viewer is watching, which was said to be an interesting way to include the credits. 
• It as mentioned that the opening credits built tension.
• The first shot used (the extreme close up of the hand on the mouse) was said to be really effective.  

Negative comments:

• it was suggested that the credits could be speeded up a bit because they were a little slow and would come across better if they were quicker.
• One viewer said that we had used too many photos.
• It was said that the ending was too sudden and would be better if it was a little longer.
• It was suggested more than once that we could include more camera angles as all the ones we have used were quite similar or the same type of angle repeated.

We have noted all of the positive and negative comments made; the negative comments have helped us immensely allowing us to recognize and change or improve that areas that need it. We plan to cut out the shadow that was noticed by  one of the viewers, speed up the credits, cut down the amount of photos we have used, use some more shots to make the opening longer and more in depth and use a larger range of of camera angles.  

Tittle ideas

We considered a range of other ideas that we could use for our tittle which would link to our chosen narrative and thriller genre, these included:

Lurking
Shadows
Stalked
Behind closed doors 

All of these names did link to our chosen theme, however after some consideration we felt The Pursuer worked best.

If a person is pursuing someone it means they are trying to overtake, chase or capture them, we felt this gave a clear impression of a stalking figure and felt it had a memorable ring to it. 

Soundtrack

Our opening will include both diegetic and non diegetic sound, the diegetic sound will be made by our various surroundings when we are filming, for example cars, dogs barking and footsteps. Our non-diegetic sound will be created on GarageBand which we planned to use in the very beginning of the opening credits and throughout. We aimed to create quite a fast pace, up tempo music piece to build up tension and anticipation. 

We feel we have created a unique, tension building soundtrack which compliments our opening sequence. We have combined a range of sound clips to create one continuous soundtrack, we feel incorporating a variety of clips to create one music piece is more effective as it gives it a more unique feel instead of using just one music piece which might sound quite boring.  

Editing

The editing process we used to edit our entire opening was the iMovie software available on the apple mac computers; we were new to this software and had never used it before, we were advised to use this software by our media teacher because of previous success with other students that have worked on it.

We chose to edit the majority of our shots clean cut to present realism and to make the scenes believable, we used a few fade to black shots and one dissolving shot at the very end of the opening sequence.

As well as using transitions we also edited some brightness, contrast and speed of our shots to enhance certain scenes and create a separate mood for each.

Shot list

Here is our chronological ordered list from the beginning to the end of shots we we have used within our opening sequence:

Extreme close up of a hand on a computer mouse
Point of view shot of the computer screen when the Facebook password is being entered 
Point of view shot of the credits being wrote onto the screen
Point of view shot of the computer screen as the user is logging in
Close up of the stalkers reflection in the computer screen
Point of view shot of the credits being wrote onto the screen
Point of view shot of the computer screen as the photo's are being searched through
Point of view shot of the credits being wrote onto the computer screen
Point of view shot of the computer screen as a photo is being saved
Point of view shot of the computer screen as 'Nottingham' is being searched into Google Maps
Point of view when searching for the area the victim lives in 
Extreme close up of the villains lips
Over the shoulder shot of a hand stroking the computer screen
Point of view shot of the computer screen as the film title appears 

Over the shoulder shot of the villain 
Establishing shot, panning across the garden to the shed 
Tracking shot of a hand running across banister 
Close up of the dripping padlock
Close up of the villain unlocking the door 
High angled shot of the villains timetable
Close up of walking feet
Medium long shot of the victim walking
High angled point of view shot of the grass being walked upon
Close up of a clenching fist
Medium long shot of the victim walking (shot from behind)
Mid shot of the villain (side profile)
Mid shot of the victim looking at her phone
Extreme close up of the phone with a text message reading "I'm watching you" 
Medium long shot of the victim turning her head to look behind her
High angled close up of the villains burning timetable    

Rough Cut

This is the rough cut of our thriller opening; we have tried our best to stick to our storyboards and shot list which we prepared before filming. over all we feel we have portrayed our story line clearly through the shots we have sued but we also know there are a a fair amount of things that we need to do on our final cut to improve the opening.

Mise-en-scene

We plan to use a small variety of props within it our narrative, including:

A set of keys, these keys are used to open the isolated room where the stalker keeps all his guarded information about the victim. 

A timetable, this scrappy timetable is significant because this where the stalker presents his information on where the victim is, when she's there and who she's with. This will be used a few times in the opening sequence. 

A phone, the phone is held by the girl being stalked, Lucy, and is used toward the end of the opening credits where she receives a text from an unknown number.  

The costume we plan to use is normal, casual clothes for the victim to allow the audience to relate to her and create a sense of realism.

The villain will not be shown completely in the opening sequence however parts of the villain will be shown; we aim to dress the villain in dark clothing to create a sense of mystery and to create a clear contrast between the victim (coloured, casual dress) and the villain (dark, obscure dress).

We have also created a contrast between the two protagonists by using a vary of lighting depending on which character is being shot; 

When the victim is being shot we have used bright, natural lighting to allow the viewer see and recognise her with ease, this sharp lighting doesn't give her any opportunity to hide away or blend in to the background of the shot. Giving the suggestion that if she cannot hide from the  viewer she definitely cannot hide from the stalker. 

Where as all shots of the villain are darker and clouded making it more difficult to see the villain, this links to his secretive persona and suggesting that if the viewer finds it difficult to see him and hardly know what he looks like the victim has no chance of suspecting that he is stalking her.    

Anamatic

We created a story board to display our camera shots we aim to use in our opening sequence; this enabled us to have a rough idea of what our final opening sequence will look like. We then took pictures of each box in the story boards and selected them all together, ran them on a loop, added zooms and fades  which eventually lead to us creating a short anamatic. Creating this anamatic gave us a clearer idea of what our rough cut will look like, helped us arrange the order of our shots and let us experiment with different angles that we could incorporate into our opening sequence.    

Narrative

Our narrative consists of a teenage girl called Lucy being stalked and molested by an anonymous character close to her, this person collects numerous photos, items and information about Lucy and builds up his own personal fact file about her and her life. In our narrative we have two main characters involved: 

• The Anonymous stalker - an anonymous character who we know is stalking Lucy, but we are unaware of who he/she is.
•  Lucy Jackson - Lucy is a middle class teenage girl attending college, who is the character being stalked. 

The reason we chose to base our storyline on a stalker is because its a typical thriller based type of narrative which we feel we could create successfully with the help of other previous and similar style stalked based films.

In our opening credits we plan to give the suggestion of there being a stalker by filming shots of someone gathering information and images of a teenage girl and working over them, we aim to include shots of him reading over previous recorded notes, forming new notes, scanning through written texts and flicking through images of this girl and others close to her. We then plan film the stalker watching Lucy walking home from college. We plan to show elements of the stalker including close ups of hands, feet and the side profile of the face/back of the head, we feel this would be effective as it gives an insight of the stalker but still allows this person to be an unknown figure, which creates mystery.

Credits

We originally planned to involve our credits by setting them on objects within the room at the begging of the opening, for example the directors names would be wrote in chalk on the wall of the stalkers isolated room, the actors starring within the sequence typed on a document, the film company spelt out in objects on the floor also within the room and the name of the film printed on the face of the scrapbook the stalker uses to collect his information.  

However we tried some of these methods of presenting our credits and didn't feel they looked professional enough, after some consideration and plenty of trial and error practice we found an effective way to display our credits. 

We used a text displaying application on windows paint to write the credits and filmed this from the computer screen as it was being written on to the black background, we purposely filmed these section of the sequence in a shaky, distorted manor to add to the creepy, chilling effect we aimed to create. 

Setting

For our location we aim to set the teenage girl, Lucy, in an ordinary house hold environment in an urban setting to create realism, but we plan for the stalker to be mostly shot in an old rustic shed in a rural setting to create the sense that he is isolated suggesting secrecy.

We have captured some images of some of the places we plan to use; we have chosen this dull, worn, eerie shed located at the bottom end of a long garden, we felt this was perfect for our stalkers base where he does all his secret work and keeps all his closely guarded information.

We also chose this long, thin pathway leading up to the shed to film the stalker when he is walking at the beginning of the credits.

     

We also plan to film the parts where the victim is being stalked in this park; we chose a park because we though it was would appear to be a natural environment which we felt would create verisimilitude.