Thriller Evaluation

Evaluation of our thriller

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

We thought very carefully about the many conventions of thrillers and we took these into consideration and decided that to get a good idea of what a thriller should really be like, we should try, for the main part, to adhere to the conventional style of thrillers.

For costumes this was especially present because we decided to adopt the conventions of colours indicating characters. So we had our ‘victim’ all in white, and our killer in mostly black.  This is important because it indicates, without dialogue, to our viewers just what role the characters are to play. We needed this because we had decided that dialogue wouldn’t suit our production at all and would distract from the intensity of the chase. 

The location was also very important to our production because we wanted to convey a sense of isolation (which incidentally is what our film is called) and we felt that a forest would be ideal for this, and the location was probably one of the first things decided on in our group discussions. We decided that a conventional chase in a conventional location would work well. Usually chases are conducted in forests and spooky atmospheres so we all discussed possible locations that we knew, and could use for our production. The location was vital to many aspects, particularly the shots and storyboard; we had to decide on the shots with close reference to the location.

The soundtrack was actually rather difficult to implement because we wanted it to be just right, the tone of it, the intensity, the beat. We decided that to make one would be take far too long so we decided that we would search for a pre-made, un-copyrighted soundtrack. This took us a fair amount of time because we found several which were alright, but eventually found one that fitted perfectly. 

The lighting was also used to develop conventions of thrillers because we, as a group, have watched many different thrillers and we noticed that generally thrillers were set in dark lighting scenarios so we decided to adopt this aspect, particularly as dark scenes are especially prevalent in scenes such as chases, like in our opening. 

The plot was the very first decision that we made, and all our other aspects of production were based on the plot. We decided on a plot in a group discussion and we basically brainstormed for a couple of hours and eventually decided on some sort of chase, because we felt this developed and used the usual thriller convention of having a tense chase, usually with much suspense. We were tempted to dip into the sub-genre of horror but we decided that the special effects needed for such a project were beyond our resources if they were to work effectively.

Our title was the last thing to be decided on because we had extreme difficulty in deciding on the title as we all had conflicting ideas on what our production meant to us, and thus we wanted the title to reflect what our production was really about. We looked at concepts of thrillers such as running water and bars and tried to explore these and we collated some ideas but eventually decided that we would, in our feedback session, ask what the film should be called, and pluck some ideas from this. We got the name 'Isolation' from this session and we all decided that this reflected our production better than any other names we had thought of so we decided on that one.

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

We only have two characters in our production and they both conform to thriller conventions pretty solidly. Our first character, the victim, is a typical thriller victim. Having watched several thrillers we decided that it would be easier for our audience to stereotype and identify the victim. The first part of this was the fact that the victim was female. It is classic in thrillers for the victim to appear as an innocent female and we played on this concept. Another concept with the victim that we used is that she is wearing white. This is very important to he audience, because they usually associate people in white as being innocent and good. Race wasn't really taken into consideration that much because we didn't want to cause things such as subliminal racism. Social class isn't really shown too much in the victim, as there is little indication given of this. These conventions help the audience to quickly profile the victim as just that. 

We also decided that it would be a good idea to follow up this victim stereotyping with the chasing 'killer'. Our killer was all suited up in black, except for his mask, and we decided that the mask should be whit so it contrasted with his costume. The killer is wearing all black to show the audience immediately that he's a bad guy, although from the first shot of him holding a bloody knife this is quite clear. Gender isn't particularly clear from the shots of the killer, but the general manner hopefully leads the audience to believe it's a male character. Race and social class are also hidden, and it is left to the audience to stereotype the killer and to decide what the killer is like. These usual conventions in thrillers that the audience have previously viewed make their minds up for them with gentle help from our representations.

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

We actually distributed our production on YouTube, and we decided to do this because of the huge potential audience that we could attract from placing it on there. YouTube has the largest potential audience possible and as such it would be widely distributed. Another key feature of YouTube is that it is absolutely free to upload our production to it and as such will not require any kind of budgeting. 

We also decided to upload our production to facebook because we thought that on facebook, our target audience was very similar to the people that would be viewing it so we thought that it would be a good idea to distribute it on there and once again the audience would be relatively large. And another thing was that it would be free once again to upload it to facebook, reducing our costs of distributing our production. However, this will not generate any profit and so distributing it via the medium of mp3 players because if we could get it onto iTunes or a similar website then we could generate plenty of revenue, again it would have a large target audience. Getting the film into cinema as a feature film would be difficult due to the expenses of such distribution and also are film doesn't particularly challenge conventions of thrillers so it isn't particularly unique but we feel that it is effective in what it does so releasing it on DVD would be a better alternative, also we would generate higher revenue from releasing it on DVD format. 

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

We aimed to target people of a similar age and demographics because we felt that we would be able to target them more effectively because we have expert knowledge in that certain area. Our audience research showed that 90% would be 15-17, showing that we needed to aim for that age group to attract the largest audience. We researched their favourite genre of films and found thriller to attract only 15% but also that 20% enjoyed action and 20% enjoyed horror films so if we could create a thriller with sub-genres of horror and action involved we could attract a much larger audience. The audience that we aimed for would enjoy thrillers such as I Am Legend because this involves all three of our genres (thriller, action and horror). Unfortunately 80% of our audience researched preferred to watch films in cinema as opposed to 20% preferred DVD's. However, people generally watch more DVD's as opposed to cinema trips due to convenience and price. 

So we decided to aim for an audience of around our age, with interests in thrillers, action films and horror films because this fitted our criteria and catered for a large proportion of the audience. 

5) How did you attract/ address your audience?

We encouraged audiences to make the assumptions about our film, but we carefully directed them so that they would be shown the particular assumptions that would be correct. We made our opening with the intention that the audience would be enthralled and willing to watch the rest of the film. We gave them subtle clues, such as the flashes of the guy in the bedroom, so that they would be left wondering what was going on, but giving them indications that would tease them and make them wish to watch the rest of the film, because if we failed to capture the audience with the opening scene, we may lose them as audience, because first impressions are the ones that last, as well as the last ones.