Evaluation Questions 1,2,3,4,5,6 & 7

Question 1:

How we used conventions:
Two of the typical conventions of a thriller that we used in our piece were crosscutting and a reaction shot.
Crosscutting: We used this as we had people walking into the experiment at the same time as Gemma 'Jamie' was running to get to the experiment as she was late. We thought this added quite a lot of tension as the poster demanded a 'prompt start' at the beginning of our piece. if people hadn't taken in the poster properly, they would still wonder why Gemma was running.

Jamie running

Beth entering the experiment room

Another example of crosscutting, in an actual thriller was in the Da Vinci Code. The scene involved

a man running from an unknown figure, the camera flicks from the man running away to the pictuures on the walls of the gallery he is in. This was quite a dramatic scene, the camera focused on the faces and eyes of the paintings and it had an effect like the pictures were watching him. It was quite eerie.

Man running

Staring Painting.

Reaction Shot: We used a reaction shot when Gemma, 'Jamie' comes out of the room of the experiment. We have no idea as a viewer what has happened in the room, we have only heard a scream at this point, we havent even entered the room, but Gemmas expression and body language says everything. She is shocked and half hides her face in her jacket She stumbles on which way to leave the building.

Gemma Leaving the Room

Seriously disturbed and doesn't know where to go.

Another good example of a reaction shot in an actual thriller is in The Silence of the Lambs.The man shows the Clarice the billboard of photos the camera goes infront of her and we see her shocked/surprised reaction. as a viewer 

Clarice's reaction 

Developing Conventions. 

We decided to use our music to develop our conventions, we wrote our own music piece which was totally original, no other group did this. Within our piece we used a crescendo and sped up the music to increase tension in or piece. We also added layers to our music, this also added to the build-up. This was really successful. You could tell that something dramatic was about to happen.

The crescendo starts at 0.37 and pretty much continues through-out the rest of the piece, as there are several layers to the music and more and more are added to it. The music also continues to speed up throughout the piece too.




A good example of a music convention in an actual thriller is  in the Da Vinci Code. He receives a phone-call telling him he is in great danger. The crescendo starts 50 seconds in on this picture!

Another way we decided to develop conventions in our piece was to not have any dialogue. The only sound produced by voice is of one scream. We thought this would be effective as it would require the audience to think more about what is happening and would also help to show that the characters are all individuals in the piece, they don't really know each other well. This is also portrayed in the opening as all of the characters all appear separately and at different times.


Challenging conventions

To challenge conventions we decided we would use a young actor as our lead character, and that we would use bright lighting in our piece.

By having a young person as our main actor we think that we have challenged the conventions. There aren't many examples of this in real thrillers. Having a young person as the lead is almost more scary for the viewer. It's weird to witness any harm being done to a younger person, and is much more scary for them as they mostly lack the life experience to deal with the situations they are faced with.

We used a 'clinical' lighting which is the complete opposite to what the typical thriller films use. Our piece gives off a completely unsuspecting vibe by using the bright light, but the place where the light is brightest, i.e. the corridor is where everything goes wrong in our piece. though the corridor is extremely light, we just used normal outdoor light for when we were filming outside. 

A good example of challenging conventions in an actual thriller is in The Dark Knight. the film is clearly a thriller but you also get a lot of humor within the story. One example of this is the pencil trick. The joker is mimicking the rest of the people in the room, and they threaten to have him killed. he responds by asking to make it up to them with a magic trick, making the pencil disappear. This consists of him smacking someones head onto the pencil on the table.

Question 2:

http://prezi.com/laptzk6-t2zn/edit/#0_9296889

Question 3:

Question 3

This is our Wikispaces account answering question 3

http://nfgsmedia.wikispaces.com/The+Volunteer.

Question 4:

Our ideal audience member:

Our ideal audience member would be female or male, aged approximately 16. They would be middle class and come from a large family, which consists of several younger siblings.

He/she would be at sixth form studying Art, Media Studies, English Literature and Italian. They insisted on having two 'arts related subjects' but took English Literature and Italian to maintain a balanced subject choice. He/she works really hard in school and they therefore find the weekend a breath of fresh air. Though he/she has a part time job on the Saturday, they are usually finished by midday, and are free for the second half of that day and the Sunday. During this time our ideal member really enjoys socializing with friends, which they have a lot of, and also spending time to themselves watching films, or spending quality time with their family, and visitors to their household.

The family is not overly wealthy and have only two flat-screen televisions in the house. There is not a flat-screen for each individual sibling, and there is often arguing over what to watch, though our ideal member isn't usually particularly fussy about what they watch. They particularly enjoy action and thriller films, as they usually require more thinking.

The family shop at Tesco,  as they don't have extreme amounts of money for all of their required products, and as a treat the parents will occasionally come home with a cheap/new DVD (depending) for the whole family to watch. Our ideal member thinks this is one of the best things to do on a day in with his/her family as it gives them all something to talk about, and helps them to relate to film characters and discover their roles within the family. They enjoy visiting sites on the family computer such as

http://twitter.com/ , http://www.facebook.com   and also www.apple.com , www.wikipedia.com and also www.youtube.com

Question 5:

 

Our tagged final piece http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK9sLtS9f80

Question 6:

A list of the Programmes and equipment we used: 


Tripods - Working with the Tripods was quite succesful in our group. Most of our final piece was watching people walk down a corridor, and this helped to keep the tripod still. Also when gemma was running we could capture this much more clearly than if we had done it hand held instead!

Camera - We had only worked with the cameras once for filming our preliminary task. They were quite straightforward to use, and we could easily transfer images and footage to the Macs after we had captured them. We didnt use much handheld camera in our piece, the majority was with the Tripod, but we collected good images of things such as the poster we use in our experiment.

Wiki Spaces – I hadn’t used the programme Wiki-Spaces before, but I found it quite similar to Blogger, in the way that you can add text and images to a blank document. It was a bit different as we couldn’t upload videos and it didn’t seem as well organised as blogger. We wrote out question 3 on wiki spaces which is quite a long piece and we also added images to it. We then posted it on the blogger, with the link which was quite easy.

YouTube – YouTube has been very useful in our tasks. We created a group account and have learnt how to upload films from a Mac onto YouTube, and also how to upload films from YouTube onto blogger.  As well as watching a few other pieces of as work we have managed to use YouTube when we are signed in, to add annotations to our pieces, both in our preliminary and final pieces.

Prezi - At first I found Prezi a very complicated program to use. It was hard to make everything the right size, and to fit the text, pictures, and arrows together. But there is a circle thing on the page which enables you to work quite quickly when you have grasped it. I had only worked with Prezi once before and think I have improved a lot this second time. It is not my favourite programme but is one of the best programmes for presentations as you can see the text out in a certain order which makes it easy to follow for the viewer.

Using the macs - I find Macs quite hard to work with in general, but settled down quickly when i was made aware of what programmes we would need to use, and found it all quite easy to grasp. It was easy to connect cameras and memory sticks to the Macs and to transfer our footage. The mac was also the best place for us to use Final Cut Exress and other programmes similar.

Blogger – Through using blogger I have improved at uploading pictures, videos and writing text. I have tried to add posts regularly, and to write them in depth. I have been able to work well with my group using blogger, and we have been able to share text and images easily in specific tasks. Blogger has some complications, at first I didn’t even know how to upload anything onto it, but after lots of practice I am quite confident at everything it involves. It has also been useful for when we were working as a group as we could tag more than one person in a post, and it shows that we all had some involvement.

Final Cut-Express – We have used Final Cut Express a lot for our coursework. We had some practice from when we were using it for our preliminary tasks, but this further practice was really useful . We learnt how to make and render credits, cut and order clips, add music to our piece, and experimented a lot with the programme.






Question 7:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb9PwLcsdzE