Evaluation of Main task

Q1 in what ways does your media product USE, DEVELOP, or CHALLENGE real forms and conventions of real media products?

Our opening sequence follows similar forms and conventions of real media products, although we have developed some conventions of the typical psychological thriller genre to make our film more unique. Our film is a psychological thriller and we convey this through our opening sequence. As a group we needed to have a wide understanding of the genre we were creating so we could create out opening sequence. Here are some of the themes that appear throughout our film.

-Neglect: as seen with the toymakers desk and the character of Amy
-Obsession: as seen with the toymakers obsession with toys and Amy
-Revenge: the parents seeking vengeance on the man who takes their daughter

The toymaker is the antagonist of our film in the opening sequence he is seen making a rag doll and taking a lot of care in doing so. The group felt that he should be very intricate and delicate with the doll, and it foreshadows his obsession with little girls and the doll he is creating has a striking resemblance to Amy. The character of the Toymaker is similar to Robin Williams’ character in “One Hour Photo” (2002)

In “One Hour Photo” Robin Williams is a man that develops photos and stalks a family who are his customers he feels a lot of affection for the family making him think that what he does is necessary and harmless. We wanted to used this concept in our film by having a man who is primarily obsessed with doll’s and just wants to show his affection for little girls by taking them and making dolls of them. He doesn’t see what he is doing as wrong, he just does what he wants.

Originally the main focus of our opening sequence was neglect. We wanted to use a little girl to create a defenceless character, we were going to show the little girl walking down the stairs, making her own breakfast, and going down the road by herself to show that she is forced to become independent and we were also going to show her parents ignoring her. We ended up having to change this idea because we decided on a young girl we just had to cast someone for the part, after ruling out all of our possibilities due to booked holidays and our inability to take a child off of timetable, we had to change our entire opening and create it from Amy’s house to the Toymaker’s Workshop. Due to this we had to create a new storyboard and script. Although we had to change our original idea I think it changed for the better and now I prefer our final idea. The main inspiration for the opening was the opening 2 minutes of “Se7en”. A lot of our shots were inspired by the shots used in “Se7en” but we have developed it by changing the props e.g. not having the drawing of the hands on the table but instead using the toymakers hands, and instead of having a book as seen in “se7en” we used a sewing machine and loose bits of paper and drawings.

We developed the idea of a child being neglected in the form of Amy who is not noticed by her parents and is overlooked making her an easy target for the Toymaker. In our film Amy’s parents realise they did not appreciate her while they had her and now she’s gone they regret what they did. We also researched the film “Saw” for inspiration for our film; “Saw” is the story of a man who punishes people who don’t cherish their lives which is developed in our film as the parents are being punished for not paying enough attention to their child. The way that we used the idea from “Saw” is that there are notes on each of the doll’s that the parents find in their search for Amy, the Toymaker is playing a game to show them the error of their ways leading them to a dead end. We then developed it to instead of torturing them physical like in the “Saw” saga, the Toymaker tortures them mentally with false hope.

The film “Changeling” starring Angelina Jolie, is about a woman whose son goes missing and is given another child as a replacement. This is based on a fairytale that we researched about troll’s that replace human children from good families with their own children, so their children get educated and have a good life. The human parents are too busy in their own lives to notice the change in their children.

We used low key green lighting to create an eerie mood on set. This made the feel of our film quite dark and claustrophobic, suggesting that the Toymakers workshop was dusty and dirty. We used this idea from conventional psychological thrillers where the bad guys lair has low key lighting and usually a musty green, we looked at “Jeepers Creepers” where the workshop of the creature at the end of the film is musty and small which shows the simplicity of the bad guys mind and we used this in our film. We did not challenge many forms and conventions of psychological thrillers because we wanted our film to be recognisable within that genre.

Q2 How does your opening sequence represent particular social groups?

Our media product focuses on a certain social groups. This includes the mentally disturbed.Common characters associated with the psychological thriller genre are the Psycho/villain. For example Dr. Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the lambs“, “Hannibal rising“, and “Red Dragon”, In “Silence of the lambs” Lecter is a brilliant minded, talented psychiatrist but also a cannibalistic serial killer. Despite the fact that he only appeared on screen for 24 minutes in the entire “Silence Of The Lambs” film he was voted the “Most Memorable Villain” in film history by the American Film Institute. We wanted to incorporate aspects of “Lector” into our Antagonist “The Toymaker” throughout our opening we chose not to see his face to create mystery this has challenged the portrayal of “Lector” but also developed it instead of seeing the character partially through the film we chose to not see his face in the scenes he was in. We did this to represent the Toymaker as mysterious and creepy also it suits his character because the public don’t see a kidnapper until they are caught and so we reflected this in our film.The

ToymakerCaucasian male aged 47

Occupation: Ex Toy Maker before he gets fired this is shown through his obsession with Doll’s and him being fired is shown by him not working in a factory but in his own little workshop.
Other elements that tell the audience that he is obsessed with doll’s is the sheets posted around the wall behind him of doll’s and newspaper cuttings saying words like “Dead” and “Baby” foreshadowing what could happen in the story.

He is clearly mentally unstable because of the way he caresses the doll throughout our opening sequence this is shown because of the direction we gave our actor to take special care of the doll during the shots when he puts her coat on and strokes the doll’s mouth.

We wanted it to be made obvious that he was the “Bad Guy” we had shown this through lighting, we had a very dimly lit set with green fill lights pointing towards his work desk to create a dank, musky atmosphere like a Basement, which suggests that he is unsociable or doesn’t belong to society because he spends his time alone with inanimate objects.

Trying to find the character of "The Toymaker" was easy because we didn’t have to choose an actor by physical attributes or to have a certain voice because this character isn’t seen facially and isn’t heard. In the end we decided on having Rachel’s brother to play him, I believe we made a good choice by having someone that our director was close with because we didn’t start new with someone and didn’t have any working dynamic or ideas of their capability. Whereas having Rachel’s brother, Rachel knew exactly what he could and couldn’t do and knew how to direct him in a way that would be easier for him and beneficial to the group.The main casting problem we had was casting Amy.

Amy Noble Aged 6

· Independent
· Neglected by her parents
· Over seen
· Pretty and “Doll like”
· Doesn’t have friends at school and likes to be on her own
· Talks to the neighbours cat every morning about her life
· Craves her parents attention
· Likes reading Winnie the pooh
· Her favourite character is Eeyore
· Has no toys of her own

Originally we wanted to see Amy get taken by the Toymaker and watch Amy fend for herself, making her own breakfast and being ignored by her parents. But we couldn’t show this because we had problems casting a girl aged 4-6 the first choice we had was family members of the crew because we knew that if we knew the child beforehand filming them would be easier than if we used a child we didn’t know that well. This was due to living too far away or pre-booked holidays. We were also thinking of using a child from theatre groups that happen at our school but we were not allowed to take a child off of time table so we finally decided to re create our entire opening.

Amy’s Mother aged 30

· Nurse and worked hard to be a doctor
· Had Amy when she was 24 and had to drop out of medical school when pregnant
· Was Married at 23 they were together since they were 14
· In the past 3 years her Mother and Father Died
· Since then she as been in severe depression

We chose to represent the mother as a hard working woman with a stable job. This is shown by her Job as a Nurse. Also she is represented as centred because of her neglecting her daughter because of her own internal problems.

Amy’s Father aged 31

· Lawyer and works late every night
· Sees Amy for only an hour a day and is too tired to really pay attention to her
· Spends any spare time he has with his wife trying to help her with her depression
· He is also fighting hard to keep his job because people from his firm are being laid off
· Growing up he always wanted to have a son

Amy’s father is represented as a business man whose life is positioned around his work, he spends more of his spare time helping his wife than being with his daughter. He is also represented as disappointed that his child is a girl not a boy.


Setting:
Our setting is very simple with a scratched up desk top to suggest that the Toymaker is rough and edgy.
Also we have an old tin button box to show that he isn’t moving with the times also shown by the old sewing machine and messy buttons scattered around his desk.
Stool, Button Box, Photo of Amy, Lamp, Bottle Of Wine, Sewing Machine, Scattered buttons, Cotton Reel, Doll.

Overall I think our Opening sequence went very well considering the problems we had with casting and I believe that we had presented our characters in a very believable way even though the character shown in our opening belongs to the social group of the mentally unstable. This is shown through his obsession with dolls and little girls which is a sign of mental instability and also the way his desk is laid our in organised clutter which is similar to “Jeepers Creepers” because the desk we see at the end is cluttered and rusty, which reflects the mindset of a psychotic villain. I think that knowing that he is mentally unstable is shown clearly because nobody that is mentally stable would be doing the things that he is doing e.g. sketching little girls and making dolls.

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

Our film "Silent Play" is a low budget student film it could be hard to gain a respective place for viewings in cinema chains. It doesn’t fit in with the conventions of a blockbuster because it doesn’t have the look of a highly budgeted film. It is likely to be distributed on a smaller scale. Without being distributed through cinemas our film would not be highly recognisable or be well heard of. However this could be achieved if we advertise our product in various places like the internet.

Optimum releasing
"The company has enjoyed success with a wide range of films"

Optimum releasing although they mostly distribute documentaries have also been known to distribute fiction films. i think this will be a good place to distribute our film because it has made a good name for itself and will be recognised globally giving our product alot of publicitiy.

Indie
“Dogwoof Indie” believes that filmakers need a better deal.
“Dogwoof” is the leading UK film distributor specialising in social issue films, Documentaries, independent films and world cinema.
"We release our films nationwide, on over 80 cinemas, backing the release with major campaigns. The aim of this approach is to trigger change, and get people to Take action. And the best way to do this, is by making the film available at cinemas and venues around the country, including our record breaking release of The Age of Stupid. Dogwoof acquires all rights for exploitation through theatrical, DVD, TV, Mobile and Online. Our main focus is ethical documentaries, such as The Age of Stupid, Black Gold, Burma VJ, and The End of the Line. We are also contantly trying new technologies, and new business models, which offer endless opportunities for independent distribution. Dogwoof has the freedom and the will to exploit them. The company intends to build on the success of the last six years and its vision is to develop, expand and, above all, innovate. Our approach – Simple – Transparent – Innovative"

Extract from www.dogwoof.com/indie

Distribution is a main factor in creating a film.
Once the film is planned, shot, and edited the distributor determines the release date and strategy. The distributor then shows exhibitors the film who then determine whether they want the film to be shown in cinemas. If the exhibitors agree they start a marketing campaign, they target the films desired audience, distribute posters, adverts, websites so on and then Launch the film.

Our film could also be shown at independent cinemas,Like these

Greenwich Picturehouse
180 Greenwich High Road,
SE10
Tel: 08707 550 065

The recently opened Greenwich Picturehouse has 5 screens and will show a range of mainstream releases, foreign language and independent cinema, special seasons and visiting festivals. They will also programme a wide mix of live music, comedy, artists' film and video work and special film events in their dedicated basement screening room.

Curzon Soho Shaftesbury Avenue,
London
W1D 5DY
Tel: 020 7734 2255

The Curzon Soho show a broad range of art-house and independent films and shorts. Situated in London's Soho district, the cinema has three well equipped screens and there is also a café at street level. Curzon Cinemas also operate Curzon Mayfair. Both cinemas provide a path for independent cinema and also attract other types of audiences as well for example the Greenwich picture house also shows mainstream releases and foreign cinema which means that people that go to this cinema would see our film being advertised hopefully intriguing any fans of the “Psychological Thriller” genre and also will be seen by people that watch independent films e.g. scouts, or media students. Also we could screen our film at a night student film festival just to get the word out and if its popular we could prolong our stay there.

Also we could show our film at film festivals throughout the UK like Screentest and Exposures, the UK’s largest festival of student image work. Screentest is a National Student Film Festival that promotes student films and film-makers from the UK. we could also show our films at these places if we applied.

We could also distribute our film electronically through the use of the internet. For example www.youtube.com which is a well known internet site that is used by almost everyone. Youtube displays videos from all across the world, some are uploaded by independent film makers trying to plug there films.
People upload songs, tv clips, music videos, fanvids etc which means that a lot of people have access to everything posted there. If we posted our film on you tube people would be able to favorite it post it to their blogs or online profiles and comment it, this could provide us with valuable feedback on our film and also a way to show the world what we have created.

Our Production company Is called Phantom Films & would create mostly eery, thriller type independent films.We decided on the name PhantomFilms because it was easily recognisable and not overcomplicated. We also chose this because it was unique as there is no other production company with this name or a name similar to this. We want our work to be distributed on a large scale that is why we want to put our film on the internet so it can be viewed and appreciated by a w i d e r audience.

Q4 what would be the audience for your media product?

Target audience profile

Female18-35

Mothers

British speaking

Enjoys thriller movies, puzzles, mysteries, riddles, reading complex crime novels.

Films seen in the last 6 months
Silence of the Lambs,
One Hour Photo,
Dead Silence,
The Night Listener,
Saw,
Hannibal.

Although the main audience for thrillers is males, we think our film would be suitable for a wide range of audiences, we chose to concentrate on making it appeal to an audience of females aged 18-35.

We chose them because our film is about a little girl being taken and we wanted to play on the maternal instinct of our audience to provoke emotion and to forge strong opinions. We thought that women of this age group are very strong minded and protective and are also more likely to have children or be planning to have children. Also their interests would be things like puzzle’s, word searches, and riddles to show that they are smart and calculating. We chose a thriller because we wanted our audience to think and be involved in our film instead of just watching it.
Also women and mens mindsets are different when it comes to thrillers where women want to save the child and keep it safe, men want to catch the bad guy and save the day.

From our market research we found that psychological thrillers are more commonly watched by people of this age group, so we decided to target these people without excluding other ages and personalities in the process.

When we screened our film to other students they liked it but said that it wasn’t the type of film they would watch and that our story was a bit to “Real” and that they wouldn’t like to watch a psychological thriller that could actually happen.


Our secondary target audience Males Aged 18-40
Interests include crime dramas

Other films they might have seen:-

· Silence of the Lambs,
· One Hour Photo,
· Dead Silence,
· The Night Listener,
· Saw


We chose this as our secondary target audience because in our research we found that males of this age group are second most likely to watch psychological thrillers.

Q5 how did you attract/ address your target audience?

To address our target audience we decided to obey the forms and conventions of psychological thrillers and appeal to what the audience enjoy. Also the genre, as we found out, is already popular with the target audience we have chosen. Although we have stayed faithful to most of the conventions of a Psychological thriller we challenged it as well by adding our own twist to the narrative and not making just another conventional psychological thriller. We did this to interest our audience. We also wanted to play on the fears of parents, and also create a story similar to stories seen in the news about abduction.

We aimed to attract our audience by our use of the camera we decided to have CU and ECU’s and captured very intriguing intricate shots from a variety of angles I think this worked well because it absorbed the viewer into the world of our film. Also we took a lot of care in the small details for example the props and setting, we had used an old desk top and scratched it up to make it look like an authentic work desk, and also we had got lots of pictures of children, sketches of dolls and negatives to put on the walls around the desk so that everything looks really busy and unorganised reflecting the mind of the Toymaker.

This addresses our audience because our audience will be looking out for the little details in our film so they can think about what’s happening on screen. We also wanted our opening sequence to be as realistic as possible.

Also we wanted to build up tension throughout our opening sequence so I created a slow eery sound track to be played parallel to our shots this carried on during the whole of scene 1 in the Toymakers workshop the slow movement of the camera and the slow music helped to build suspense which is key to any successful thriller movie, this would attract my target audience because it is a familiar convention of the thriller genre.

In the last ten years, a lot of films relating to abduction have been released for example “Changeling” (2008) and “Along Came a Spider” (2001) so we thought we would adapt this theme because it has a lot of prevalence in today’s society with relations to the Madeline McCann case. I thought our idea of having the doll’s took the traditional story to a new level and overall changed our film from typical to original and therefore would address more people.
The second part of the set that we used was outside an average house down and average road to accentuate the underlying message that it could happen to anyone/anywhere.
In conclusion I believe that our film successfully addresses our audience and attracts them to watch our film.

Q6 what have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During the making of our film I have learnt a lot about the technologies we have used.

SHOOTING

Camera

• Using the tripod, a vinten pro touch, allowed the camera to remain still throughout our shots helping with out continuity of shots also was versatile as all of the shots we needed we could do with the camera and tripod attached. It allowed us to pan the shots and adjust the camera between high angle and low angle shots easily.
• For example when we had the high angle over the shoulder shot of the Toymakers hands scratching along the desk to the next shot of the track along the workshop table.
• we took approximately 2-3 takes of every shot to make sure thate we had a total shot for back up and the shot we had planed for in case the tracks behind the Toymaker when he put the doll on the doorstep this shot didnt turn out great but we had used a master shot/crab shot from across the road showing the Toymaker walking up to the door placing the doll down and walking away from the house with his hood up as back up which was good because without it we would have made a huge mistake.
• The Canon XHAI is fully equipped with zoom, this made framing our shots a lot easier and quicker. The speed of the zoom's was also changeable according to how we wanted the shot to look, this was useful when we had the zoom from the back of the Toymaker's head down to the doll on the doorstep.
• We had a section of shots which required the use of the tracks. the camera had to track towards the door. We had trouble with this shot and rushed it because it was quite late in the day and it was getting darker which would mess up our continuity
• We developed our skills with the camera and filming equipment from out prelim to our main task in various ways
• We got to use the zoom and the filters on the camera and also had a chance to experiment with the tracks because i never used these in my prelim task
• The tracks were reasonably easy to use and was good because we had practise using them in our camera master class
  

Sound

• During filming we used a Sennheiser micro phone. The sensitive microphone was attached to the Canon XHAI via and XLR lead.
• Although our film had no dialogue we still wanted to capture some diegetic sounds for example the Toymaker's hands scratching the desk and the buttons rattling as they are pushed away.
• we had trouble recording with the Sennheiser microphone because we couldn't find the right setting on the camera so we ended up using the microphone attached to the top of the camera.
• I was in charge of sound in my group and created a soundtrack for our opening sequence i used Cubase4.0 for this, I composed a slower, Higher, more repetitive version of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" for our soundtrack i think this worked well but it did have to be cut during editing.

Editing

• When Editing we used the software Adobe Premier pro
• we had practise using Adobe Premier in our preliminary task
• we found out how to use the razor tool which we used to cut all of our shots to create cutaways within our sequence for example the cut between the shot of the Toymakers hands to him pushing the buttons.
• Digitize our rushes and discarding shots that were not useful
• Create titles and choose fnots to display the names of the cast and crew we used
• Add soundtrack to our sequence which we learnt to do during our main task as our prelim had no reason for a soudntrack
• set the in and out points of our rushes
• select transitions and effects we chose the cross fade for most of our rushes but used an additive dissolve for our titles.
• How to mute and raise the volume of our shots which we had to do because some of our shots like the shot of the photo developing we could hear the words "action" and "cut" so we muted the rushes with unnecessary sound
• How to dim and brighten our shots
• we used a lacie drive to store our project on, a LaCie is a portable memory device. We also used a LaCie to store our prelim task so we were familiar with how it worked
• We also usd a fire wire to connect the computer to the Canon HAI
  

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

Preliminary Brief: Film and edit a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character. A couple of lines of dialogue must then exchanged between characters & match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule should be demonstrated.

Main Task: The titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes (all video and audio material must be original, produced by candidates, with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source)

In our preliminary task I only had a basic knowledge of camera use and continuity,
What went wrong:

• We recorded our shots with sound but when it came to digitising we didn’t digitise our rushes with the sound on the camera on
• This was a problem because when we completed our assemble we didn’t have any dialogue in our film

What I learnt:

• I learnt to check the equipment we use twice during filming and during editing
• I do this so that I can ensure nothing will go wrong

I was in a pair with Noriane.

Brief

When I heard the brief we thought that it would be easy and started to find ways to make it more interesting so we chose to give the characters more depth Iman and Esther were our original cast but due to Esther’s absence we had to use Rachel instead.
Our idea was to have Rachel walking down a corridor alone holding a briefcase and looking shifty and then cut to Iman looking anxious and ragged. Our original story was to have Rachel as “dealer” of sorts and have her delivering the briefcase to Iman who was the “Junkie” we developed this idea to give it a more humorous twist with Rachel instead of dealing drugs, dealing sweets.

Planning and pre production

We had to create a storyboard for our shots, write a script and make a shooting schedule. Although I was more excited about filming and editing the planning stages were vital to our task because without them it wouldn’t run smoothly and we wouldn’t be organised. Once we got into planning I found that making the storyboard was actually enjoyable and a good way to keep me and Noriane on the same page and seeing the same thing.

Filming

Filming went really well for us as it only took us an hour to shoot the entire sequence. We got the props we needed from home or borrowed things like the suitcase which actually was a flute case I borrowed from a music student because we couldn’t get hold of a suitcase.

Overall I think that our Preliminary task was a lot more challenge than I thought it would be and I’m glad we had that practise before we went out to start our Main task I think that the dynamic between me and Noriane worked well and I took with me aspects of how our partnership worked well into my Main task group.