Q2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Representations are judgments people make on specific social groups - this is also known as stereotyping. In many films and tv drama's there are lodes of stereotyping in different social groups. Examples of this is that the female protagonist is more likely to be the weaker character; a young male(black - African/Caribbean) is more likely to be seen as a gangster or the one whom causes chaos; a muslim may be stereotyped as a terrorist and so on. Social groups can be split up and based on: sex, ethnicity, religion and so on.

In my film opening the main social group is the female sex however it is also contradicting. The reasons for this is because all of the characters in our film opening are females. We have a female who is having a nightmare allowing her to seem week however we have female bullies making them seem strong and dominating. Throughout the rest of the thriller film I would have thought that we would probably use stereotypes as they are very comon and sometimes appealing however we would also challenge representations to stand out from other films in the market.

Since we represented females in a positive and negative way I think it may lack realism as majority film openings have both genders and if there is a female hero alongside there would be a male hero aswell. By representing females positively aswell as negatively I feel like the audience would relate more as females are not only week.

EVALUATION Q7) Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product

I have recognized that my editing and camera skills have improved immensely; it is more sophisticated now than when I had first commenced the project.

Camera shot

The wide shot of young Ivory in the park is useful for the audience because it presents the environment she is in as well as showing how she is isolated by the other children and left in her own little corner.

Camera angle

When young Mercy and friend bully it is a low angle from Ivory’s perspective, looking up.

This is a low angle, the audience is placed in Ivory’s perspective because as it is from her perspective it is almost as if we can feel the hatred of the children towards her which makes us feel sympathetic towards her.

Camera composition

I have incorporated the rule of thirds when young Ivory sticks her tongue out at the camera. This has been used successfully because, here if the screen was divided into three horizontal and vertical lines her eyes would be above the first horizontal line.

Camera movement

When Camera first focuses on photo and then tilts up to show Ivory’s face.

The tilt upwards is used very well because before the tilt, the camera focused on what Ivory was doing but

Editing

Match on action from young Ivory to old Ivory.

Cross-dissolve.

 From young Mercy’s hands to emphasise that she wants to get her message across. Her emotions.

Parallel editing just before Mercy wakes up to show her fearful feeling.

Sound non-diegetic, sound-mixing, foley

Location

Shows park environment.

Children in uniform

Lighting isn’t consistent throughout the film because not every shoot

Evaluation - Q7 - Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

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

Before we filmed the preliminary task, we researched and studied different types of camera shots in advance so that when we filmed preliminary task, we had some knowledge about the process and work which goes into films. We only used one specific location to film our prelim task which I found a quite difficult location to film certain shots in. We were quite confident with the film that we produced, even though that we could have improved certain conventions like the lighting; unfortunately the lighting was too dark and it was not a standard quality video. In our final task, we had a lot more time to plan everything; we had a little past experience with the preliminary task so we knew what we were doing. We found that we had a lot more knowledge and skills when we were doing the final task rather than the preliminary task; for example, we knew and used more of a variety of camera shots.

Question 7 - Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms of real media products?

Question 1 - Script

I think our film opening of ‘Karma’ has followed the conventions of a thriller film opening, as well as the conventional order of the title sequence. There is a strict order in which names and jobs appear in the opening credits because it shows the order of importance for who is involved in the film.  The companies involved are shown first of all as they give us the money towards making the film, most significant actors in the film come after this because if they are the most famous it will influence more people to watch the film as they have a high status and are known to be in good films. Then the casting crew, costume designers, music and editing crew, production designer, director of photography, executive producer, the writer(s) and finally the Director. This shows that the main people involved in the making of the film are shown last so their names are the most memorable and they get the most credit for their hard work. An opening that has inspired my thrillers credits is 'se7en', I like the way this sequence has been edited to have black screens with the main titles on and black sections with titles on for the majority of the credits, so they show on top of the film opening. I also like the font used. We did not use this effect on our own title sequence, however we did have a black screen for when the film title was showing. The conventions of a film opening and especially for the genre of a thriller are that there tends to be lots of fast flashing images with cross cut editing, to suggest dramatic events. The background music is usually very dramatic and intense, in the thriller ‘Enemy of the state’ there is non-diegetic music which sound like computer generated noises and sirens, so this hooks the audience to set up questions about what the genre of the film is and what might happen in it. The first scene is of the landscape, to set the scene. I think we achieved this in ‘Karma’ also as we included a wide shot of a playground for the flashback scene. Another optional convention for a thriller is to change the lighting to something possibly darker, more supernatural or to look like CCTV cameras through the use of editing. We also incorporated this on final cut pro with a lighting change video filter, we made the footage a bright white and also made it more black and white but not fully, so there is still some colour. This is to make it look like a flashback. Introducing the main character is an important convention for narrative openings, I would say that our film opening for ‘Karma’ is a mix of a narrative/ stylized opening. Because we introduce the main characters, set the scene and vaguely present their situation. Also like a stylized opening, I feel we have achieved sophisticated editing with lots of transitions and effects.  In a way it is possible that our film opening could be seen as a discrete opening because the majority of it is in flashbacks and therefore separate to the rest of the film, however it is still relevant to the main film. voice over is important because it tells us a bit about the plot, when adding foley sound of voice to our opening, we did not make the plot too clear but I feel with the selection of words we recorded, it gives the audience an idea of the themes of our film, the genre and a bit of back story of the main character. To highlight who the main character is, I learnt from the film ‘Billion Dollar Brain’ that to make it clear to the audience who the main character is, the use of camera for slow panning and zooming in with the focus on Palmer highlights that he is the main character, so this is a useful technique that we took into account when filming ‘Karma’. In this film, a dissolve transition is used to blend the opening prologue scene into the opening credits, we used a lot of dissolve transitions in our opening to make our scene more smooth flowing as we had a wide variety of shots that didn’t always match together so it would have looked like jump cuts without the use of transition effects. When I researched Psychological Thrillers I noticed that they conventionally tend to start off by introducing the main characters in an everyday life situation, as did we similarly by introducing the character in bed, dreaming. They don't go straight into telling us what is wrong with the character, or to give anything away about what might happen later on in the film. I think this creates tension to make it more creepy and dramatic when the audience sees later in the film the thought processes behind these characters. They conventionally introduce part of the genre/ theme of the film in the first few minutes, and also by creating an almost surreal scene of the main character this emphasises the genre because the audience is unsure whether this is reality or her dream. I feel we included these conventions in our film opening successfully. 

Evaluation - Q3 - What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation; Q4 - Who would be the audience for your media product

I have done some research to find the wider audience for thriller films in general. This research has been done over the world wide web as well as a questionnaire in a educational environment. Below are my findings.
There are many sub genres for thriller films and therefore there is a wide audience; some examples of sub genre's may be: comedy thriller; supernatural thriller; conspiracy thriller; disaster thriller; political thriller; action thrillers; horror thrillers and many more. I will go into detail of these examples of thrillers.

Action thrillers would have a younger audience. The reason for this is because it involves props such as guns, bombs and it also involves a lot of chasing( e.g humans or vehicles). Because of these conventions it would appeal more to a male dominated target audience. On the other hand these type of movies usually have an attractive hero which would attract females. Actions films have a mixed gender audience due to these reasons.

Gangster/crime thrillers also tend to have a younger audience. These audiences can be as young as 18. These type of movies usually attract male audiences because the protagonist is usually a very macho-man,therefore they would feel as though the movie is aimed at them. Additionally the movie is more likely to be set in a urban location and therefore it would be seen to be very appealing as the film is more realistic. Also a reason why the younger audience would be appealing to this type of film genre is because they may have experienced what the characters have been experiencing or it may be happening around them as they also live in these types of areas.

Comedy thrillers have a very large audience. These audiences can range from a young age as 15 to an older age group as 50. The reason for this is because comedy is very popular as everyone enjoys a laugh and comedy thrillers also allow audiences to relax instead of being stressed with work and so on. Additionally comedy thrillers are based in urban and sub-urban areas and therefore many people would feel engaged. Comedy thrillers also tend to allow audiences to socially interact about the movie as they remember their favourite lines or scenes.

Karma

07. Andreia Loureiro Cardoso, Esme Worrell, Abida Uddin, Alisha Kaur from 283goswell on Vimeo.

Evaluation - Q6 - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

We used various professional technology and equipment to film our thriller. During the process we have learnt a great deal about how the equipment is used; this had helped us expand our knowledge on the process of creating a product. There are a number of different technologies we used to complete our task including:
- Digital video camera - proffessional equipment like this made the product more realistic and we got experience what it is actally like to use this equipment in a proffessional way.
- Professional camera - taking pictures for proof of the work we were actually doing, props and costumes and the location we were filming in
- Google Chrome
- Final cut pro
- Soundtrack pro
- Blogger
- hard drive
- memory card/(s)
- mac computer
- sound recorder

A number of websites have helped us to research on this project which covered our research which we then put onto the blogs.

Evaluation - Q1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challange forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product was intended to use conventions from other media products such as the successful psychological thriller Se7en. In preparation before we filmed our thriller, we researched many different thriller films, looking at the variety of different genres, and we finally decided that it would be best for the sub-genre of the thriller to be psychological. The subgenre of out thriller also consisted of elements from out subgenres such as horror, mystery and supernatural.

For our music consists our conventions from the soft rock genre, although we recorded and created and produced the music ourselves using instruments such as a guitar and a piano. The inspiration behind this was influenced by the reserch of other music from a variety of thriller films. We looked in depths of analysing the other films before using ideas for our own.

We also looked at the lighting of other thrillers; and we found a mixture of light and dark scenes.
We focused on the characters, lighting and features from other psychological thriller films. The opening sequence of our thriller film was influenced by the one of the most successful psychological thriller film, Se7en.

As you can see, the font styles and colours are similar. Originally we were going to use black backgrounds in between the clips for some of the credits. Unfortunately, after some thought we decided it would be best not to as it did not all fit into the right scale and timings of out thriller. We still briefly used the idea, overall and used this as an advantage to explore our own original ideas.

Our product title 'Karma' was influenced hugely by the storyline which revolves around the fact that the main character is trying to seek revenge towards her ex bestfriend, ruining her childhood.
The title 'Karma' is also a distorted like the one shown above, purposely taken the idea from Se7en and interpreted it in our own way.

Question 7 Script

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

When research planning in post production for my prelim film, we did not do very much research into what shots to include, lighting, props or locations. I understood that we should include match cutting and I knew about the 180 degree rule so we did use this a couple of times, I also used match cutting to the other side of the door when the character leaves the room. My group and I did do quite a lot of preparation on the storyboard but in production we didn’t stick to it as much as we should have like we did in ‘karma’, this made us more organised and we knew what we were doing because we followed the storyboard. We organised in the prelim that the ‘psycho’ character would wear white costume, and the ‘officer’ character would have handcuffs to represent their status and profession. Whereas in ‘Karma’ we got the character ‘Ivory’ to wear makeup and more suitable costume such as pyjamas and school uniform. We hadn’t thought about lighting in the prelim, other than to set the filter on the camera but this was not strong enough in most cases when filming.

In production the filming took longer than expected because we had not been very organised in pre-production, we hadn’t organised our time management, when we were filming or how long it would take and the location of filming also. In ‘Karma’ we knew exactly the location we were filming in of the park and my group member Andreia’s bedroom. The mise on scene was very unprofessional and there was camera equipment in the background of some scenes. Also with the camera skills, I realise that my camera skills in the prelim were very shaky and there were some zooms that didn’t work in the film that should have been cut out in post production, my camera skills in ‘Karma’ were much more professional. Also the acting was much worse in the prelim than in ‘Karma’ that we should have cut out in post-production as the actors were smiling in some serious scenes.

In post-production I did not do very much editing as I was only just getting used to working with ‘Final cut pro’. I only included one video filter, of a blur effect on one scene and I also added in a title sequence, however if I had known as much about 'Final cut pro' as I do now I could have made the final prelim much better and more professional looking. In ‘Karma’ I heavily used editing with video filters and transitions in every scene. One of our shots should have been rotated in the prelim but it made the footage warped and too wide. I added sound to the prelim too but it was from Youtube and we created our own soundtrack for ‘Karma’ so it was not copyright. We left in the diegetic sound which was really unclear in the prelim also whereas we muted it in ‘Karma’. We should have used foley sounds. However I think the sound we used from Youtube was very good in setting the tone of the film and it worked really well with our footage to create suspense and tension.

EVALUATION Q6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

EVALUATION Q5) How did you attract/address your audience?

EVALUATION Q2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?





Mixed race teenage girls are represented negatively in wider society, often associated as 'attention seekers'. However, Mercy does not live up to that expectation for the reason being that she is sleeping. And although she is the main character, her role must relate to the psychological thriller genre and not how mixed race girls are considered to be/act.

Ivory and Karma are both Asian girls. Asians are portrayed as intelligent and prudent people in our society and the film industry. Karma totally contrasts that perspective since Ivory appears to be mentally ill and Karma as the spirit in figure. It is not common for Asians to play those roles. For many years, Asians in the film industry are directed to wear their cultural clothes for films that portray their cultural background or modern, formal clothes. Mercy and Ivory do not wear what they are expected to by the wider society, they challenge the stereotypes towards them. 

EVALUATION Q3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

EVALUATION Q1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?