Wednesday 28 March 2012

Josh Brown evaluation for Thriller coursework

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

The idea of a thriller is to raise questions for the audience. They keep the audience watching because they want to their questions answered. A good thriller should keep up suspense and tension. Although our media production will never challenge the quality of a real media product intended for public viewing, i do think that we have accomplished the basic and some advanced structures and conventions of a good thriller. We tried to stick to original ideas of this film gendre. For example, we decided to set our thriller in a run down garage and the identity of our victim is not revealed for a while.

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?


I think that if our movie opening was a full feature length movie, it would attract social groups interested in action movies. Audiences who prefer to be sitting on the edge of their seat instead of watching an affectionate romantic love story.

3) What kind of media institution might descibre your media product and why?


If our movie was a full feature length film, we could choose to distribute our movie. There are many media institutions to chose from. However, various institutions are dedicated to selling different types or movies. Some aim for bigger budget movies that have taken vast amounts of time to produce with well-known actors. For our movie, we had a very small budget and no famous actors. Therefore, no big institutions would be interested in distributing our movie. Two distributors that might consider to work with our movie could be Dolby or Warner Bros inc. Dolby were responsible for promoting and distributing the movie Cloverfield, a horror/mystery which received a 10/10. Warner Bros inc are hugely famous and have promoted smaller movie such as Eight Legged Freaks to massive world-wide sell-outs such as the Harry Potter franchise. This shows that they have a wide selection of various budgets and genres in which they work within.

4) Who would be the audience for your media product?


In my mind, our product was aimed at both genders over the age of 15. I think we have achieved this because our movie was based around a gambling theme with little explicit language, no nudity and some violence. Therefore, i concluded that it would not have been suitable for persons under the age of 15. I estimate that people over the age of 40 would not be very interested in our movie because audiences tend not to watch violent movie at that age.

5) How did you attract/address your audience?


To promote our thriller opening, we uploaded social networking sites and posted it for all our friends to see. This way we were able to get feedback and how we could have improved. For a full feature length movie, the same approach can be used. In the present day, i have observed that movie distributors are using social networking sites to get their movie heard of. This is a very clever method as it is quick to view and anyone can see it. Other popular methods include trailers in cinemas, in DVD's and on television. Television advertising is very popular as most of the population of the world have televisions in the present time, this way, millions of people will instantly be aware of the movie. Advertising on posters has been used for a long time. However, with advancements in technology, people do not need to leave their house as much because most things are now online. Therefore, advertising posters are seen less.

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

During the production of this film, i was introduced to a dolly for a tracking shot we planned to shoot. We mounted the camera onto the dolly so we were able to move the camera around without the wobble of doing it by hand. Another technology i learnt about during this project was more advanced features of the movie editing software we used. We used a cropping feature to hide the outside parts of a picture so only the center of the image was shown. This gave off a more professional effect.

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


Since our preliminary task, i feel that i have learned a greater understanding of why particular shots are used to emphasize, back-up or reveal a significant point within the plot of a moving picture. Why, when all the different factors of a shot have been put together, do they suit the scene or theme of the movie. I have also learnt the significance of opening titles of a movie. How they are positioned and why. In our movie, we had not focused on the opening titles. For better quality we should have created a plan of how they were going to appear.

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