Evaluation What have you learned about media technologies

Who would be the audience for the media product?

Lifestyle summary of Nathan Francis (typical target audience)
Nathan is a 18 year old mix-race male who attends St Charles Sixth form Colleges. He's currently taking Music, Media, Drama and English, he's aspiring to be a music events manager.

Nathan Francis

On a saturday night you may find the following items in his sidebag.

• His Blackberry
• Juicy fruit chewing gum
• Moped keys
• House keys
• Carmex
• Cigarettes
• Lighter.

On a saturday night Nathan is most likely to be getting ready to go out raving out with his two close friends, Jerome and Tion.

They usually goto IF bar in Ilford, sometimes Nathan performs on stage as in his spare time he raps.

Also in his spare time he likes to see his girlfriend Sasha and her family, most Sundays he goes to her house for sunday dinner. Nathan and Sasha love watching films when together, which are usually rented or at the cinema. The last 5 films they watched at the cinema were:

• The Rite
• Anuvahood
• Unknown
• Number 4
• West is West

The last 5 rented films they watched were:

• Chopper
• Salt
• Im gunna git you sucka
• Grownups
• Friday

Nathan enjoys comedy, actions films, and horrors, however sasha hates horrors so they both watch thrillers together.

Audience Feedback

After the screening of the thrillers I asked 3 people that had watched it at the cinema, and someone who hasn't taken media before. Below is a video of what they thought.

EVALUATION What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? How will you attract your audition?

'Asleep' is a suspense thriller written and directed by Tony Lawson, he founded his cinematography production company FLIKBOX Motion Pictures in 2009 and 'Asleep' was their first official short film. The student film was filmed with a $20 budget (£12.26), and shot on JVC GY-HD110U. It has 23,623 views on youtube where it was first published. Not only did youtube give him constructive feedback it was able to help promote the independent production company.

This gave me the idea to also promote our thriller 'The Other Side' using youtube. Youtube's biggeset advanytage as its available to everyone regardless of age, gender etc, theres no specific audience, and its free. However there are some downfalls such as the idea or actual film can be copied by anyone.

Another type of media institution is Facebook, Facebook is used worldwide by over 500 million people. A lot of people use Facebook to promote or showcase their products/services including for example Adam Deacon used Facebook to promote his film 'Adulthood'; this was the best type of promotion for his film as his target audience was mainly young adults/teenagers and Facebook is widely used by these audiences therefore this made his promotion highly successful. 'The Other Side' could also be promoted via Facebook as its target audience is similar to 'Adulthood'. However, Facebook's disadvantage is that it the actual Facebook group/fanpage  depends largely upon open Facebook users to repost the links in order to make the fanpage popular.

Vimeo is another type of institution. Vimeo was created especially to encouraging individuals with a wide range of video interests; and inspire people to show their creative sides. It is not greatly used, but the people that do use all have similar interests unlike youtube, where the categories are vast.

EVALUATION Representation

STEREOTYPES WITHIN 'THE OTHER SIDE'

   

EVALUATION Forms and Conventions

In what ways do our thriller use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of actual thrillers.


Like most films, our thriller includes a production company ident at the beginning.

This is an example of another Touchstone pictures ident at the beginning of the thriller film, 'The Prestige'  by Christopher Nolan.


Although idents are consistent throughout films. Production companies can choose to change them depending on the genre of film, this helps the audience to understand what to expect from the film. for example in 'The Other Side' the ident of CandiStudios the font and its effects are  . . .  the colours used are red,black and white which connotes that the film is going to be thrilling,lastly the music helps add to ......

Below is our company ident

9 SHOTS FROM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tek8QmKRODw

The Other Side - FINAL CUT

My Experience

On shoot video production

Bloopers

Screenshots of Editing

Using Final Cut Pro

Shots of the Titles. We added dissolves to make it flow and add suspense

We used man different clips, camera shots, and even images.

We aso added a voice over

Soundtrack Screenshots

Our sound track consist of violins fading in and out from each other. 

Also a thrilling music bed that adds action as well aas suspense

This Is the finished soundtrack. There is many fades and cuts. This is an advanced sound track

The beginning of a Thriller

The beginning of a thriller could be seen as the most important part, as it sets the theme for the rest of the film. An effective thriller opening is meant to convince the audience making them wanting to watch more. After analysing the opening scenes of 'The Stepfather' I have a few ideas in how to making our thriller opening a lot stronger.

What is the first thing we see?
A red indent of 'Screen Gems'
Casting
Where do we see the title?
The title appears (SAY) minutes in, discreetly when the male actor is showering.

What other information our we give?
The man changes his appearance by dying his hair, shaving, changing his eye colour by wearing different contact lenses.

The title 'The Other Side'

As you know to begin with our title was 'deceptus', but we decided to change it after we realised it could be mistaken for 'decieve'. After our pitch we were more focused on making changes to our initial thriller ideas than thinking of a name for it. On the 17th of March after we had finished filming we realised we still had no title. So we all came up with ideas of what would convey are psychological theme effectively. I suggested the name 'The Other Man', as a group we decided it was too obvious and gave away the main motive of our thriller. Michael then put forward 'The Other Side' which we all took to immediately. It was vague yet complementary. It suggested the man in our thriller (Denzel) had two persona's. The word 'side' inside of 'man' suggests his second personality is abnormal and inhuman;  personally I think this compares Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

On Set...Again

As a group we decided 1 or 2 scenes needed to be redone, so on monday the 7th of March Denzel, Samarge and I went back to Denzel's house to re-film. Meanwhile Michael stayed at college to make a start on the music.

Denzel changed into the same costume, and we had to make sure the bathroom was exactly the same as when we first filmed. We filmed the first scene again of Denzel's feet, as the previous clip was lob sided. We filmed the close up of the door handle and Denzel locking the door. The previous clip was more like a mid-shot which wasn't effective at all, as the close up created more of a suspenseful story. Lastly we re- filmed the clip where the camera panned up from Denzel's feet to his shoulders. The previous clip was almost perfect, except the camera was shaky, and because Denzel was facing a mirror a bit of Samarge could be seen.

With these new clips we could now edit properly... Or so we thought. 

First Stages of Editing

After filming, I begun to edit on Wednesday the 23rd of February. As I said in the previous blog 'on set' we were happy with our filming and thought it was a great success, however when we saw some of the clips it was apparent some weren't the high standard clips we once saw, for example some clips were out of focus, some where shaky, and some weren't the right type of shot.
 

This is an example of a blurry image we took, even though it was blurry we were still able to use it, as it  added an effect to our thriller

With this noted I still decided to roughly edit the clips and start piecing them together so we could get an idea of what our opening thriller would look like.

Even though some of the clips we had filmed had a few faults, all was not at loss, as I was able to cut out certain parts and use others, which just added a certain effect of mystery to our thriller.

Our Roles

When it came to deciding on who does what it was an easy task. Firstly we collectively decided Samarge would make a good director/camera man. Denzel would be our actor, Michael would create the sound and I would edit. 

These decisions were all based on our previous filming experience with the bag swap. Samarge filmed all the clips using various shots with the help of his camera knowledge, and was able to direct Denzel and Michael and tell them what he wanted in order to make the short film. Denzel has an acting background which benefited us greatly as it meant his role in our group was effortless to him yet valuable to us. Michael has a music background as he produces and makes music in his spare time, which was another benefit as we knew we could leave the responsibility of music in his hands, also in the making of the bag swap he made the music which was able to compliment the video and set the mood. Lastly I was appointed editor due to my editing skills within the bag swag, and my previous knowledge of editing material at HandE media studios.

Director - Samarge

Actor - Denzel

Music producer - Michael

Evaluation of 'The Other Side' Rough Cut

It could be said our thriller rough cut had to yet to undergo many changes as there were quite a few imperfections; such as the lack of music, title sequence and we still had to add more scenes to it. 

As a collective we all had similar ideas for the music. We wanted the beginning to be eerie and then lead into a strong climax, as we thought this would add to the suspense within the scenes. Bellow I have included three exemplary thrillers that have strong climax's.

This is from the horror film 'Friday the 13th' by Sean S. Cunningham, Although this doesn't count as a thriller, i still think the sound used is a good representation of what we would like to use.

This is from the thriller 'The Unborn' by David S. Goyer. I like the use of instruments in the beginning which help make it mysterious yet creepy.

Lastly I chose 'Black Swan' by Darren Aronofsky, the theme of this thriller is the same as our own (psychological) and the music helps incorporate this, which is what we would like our music to do.

As for fonts we had no initial ideas, all we knew is that we wanted to portray the name of our thriller (The Other Side) in our font, and somehow simulate the idea of two people (in the case of font, two fonts) that differ from each other.

For example

This font is thin and narrow

whilst this font is broad and wide

However as a rough cut it was a great help; it showed us as a group what else we needed to achieve in order to make our opening thriller portray all our thoughts we had on paper and in our heads to an audience.

Final Changes

Changed Storyboard

These scenes differ from our first storyboard

The scenes differ

These scenes differ

All the storyboards highlighted in pink are the scenes that have been changed, edited or added