Evaluation Task 3: What kind of Institution would pick up your film?

I think that our project is a high concept thriller. However I don’t think it is mainstream enough to be picked up by a larger institution, so I think instead a smaller independent institution would pick it up. Looking at the films it has produced already, I would say that Vertigo may produce this film.

 I decided this after looking into the film ‘Monsters’ released by Vertigo in 2010. It is a high concept, low budget film with all the effects done by 1 person. They filmed it in guerrilla style, with no fixed locations decided, they just filmed as they went with a very small crew. It allowed them to discover a lot of interesting and unique locations. I can see my film going this way, with our main character going out on her own and discovering deserted towns on her journey.

I think our film would be advertised virally on the internet in side bars, and with strategically placed posters in places where it is more likely to be successful.
I think it would be target released around the country at first to gage popularity and possibly added to different cinemas depending on demand. I think it would probably make most of its money on DVD and Blu-Ray after cinema release, and also be available on iTunes to download.

Evaluation Task 2: How does your product represent particular social groups?

I would say that our opening sequence represents 2 different social groups.
The first is teenagers between the ages of 14-19, who are living at home. Our main and only character is an older teenage girl, living in a family home. She does not conform to any specific social groups and is free from any accessories which may display her wealth, or lack of it. This opens up the character to a wide teenage audience and doesn't exclude people from different backgrounds. We didn't want this film to focus on her appearance/social life, we want it to look at the concept of being completely abandoned and isolated as a young person.

Submarine,  the 2010 film by Richard Ayoade uses similar techiques. In the house environment it is not very clear, nor is it specifically relevant what the social standing of the family is. The main character (shown top right) doesn't fit into any stereotypes, with no stand out hair or costumes, just normal, average clothes. It focuses more on the problems in his life and the observations he makes as he goes by his day to day activities.

The second social group is the middle/lower class family. It is clear from the external setting that this is an average sized family home, with no obvious geographical location, allowing the audience to span from all over the country. There are a few shots throughout the sequence which hint at family life, such as the babies room, monitor and photo, the paintings of family members in the stairwell, the decor of the kitchen and the family portrait shown in the toaster shot.
It features a lot of normal, monotonous morning events having gone slightly wierd, such as  waking up, cooking toast, having a shower. We chose to represent 'the family environment' as a bit cluttered and messy to add a sense of realism, without taking away from the shot and storyline.

I think that a similarly set up show is Outnumbered, it is set in a messy family home, and the props have been placed to accurately represent a 'lived in' house, which is not unnaturally clean, as they are trying to give a truthful and real feel of family life. Below are some screen shots from the show which I think show the similarities in set up and props.

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

I have taken screen shots from both my piece and the opening sequence from 'I Am Legend'. This is to show the similarities between my product and a real life media product. In both sequences there is one main character, who is the hero of the film.

They have a lot of close ups and reaction shots to put the audience on the side of the character. I have found that there are quite a few parallels between my titles and the openng titles of I Am Legend. I think that my choice of font accurately reflects fonts frequently used in real media product.

In the pictures on the middle left both images are specifically close up on sections of the body to draw focus to key actions in the frame.

Website screenshot...

To create more realism to my product, I created a mock up of a website homepage which people go and look at. I created this file in photoshop from scratch, looking at website elements to make it look authentic. I thought that these were the most important elements of a movie website, and the other pages go off to explain about the movie.

The Downloads and Gallery pages offer screenshots and sneak peaks of the film with downloadable things like screensavers and website buttons.

The About page does what it says, it tells you about the film. On this website it would talk a lot about the people involved in the making of the film, and not so much about the plot as we want to keep the mount known about the film minimal, to create more hype and promise or the audience.

The Buy page would not come into use until the film had stopped being shown at the cinema, and the BluRay/DVD/Digital download became available. Until that point the page would just says approximately say when the BluRay/DVD/Digital download would be available, perhaps have promises of special features and bonus material to keep interest.

Thriller Poster...

I decided to create a poster in conjunction with my thriller opening sequence. I would say that it falls under the category of a teaser poster as it gives no information as to what the film is about or even very much information as to what the film is called.
If this poster was released it would probably need to be around half a year or more before the films actual release date, so it would build up hype and excitement waiting for the film to come out.

I am pleased with the outcome of this poster and I think the phrase 'what if yesterday changed everything' works really well. As the girl is waking up in the morning, she is experiencing the change today, but in reality the events that took place probably happened in the middle of yesterday night.

Shooting our thriller...

The shoot day started at 9 am. We set of in 2 cars, with our kit in the back, to our first location for the interior nursery scene. It took us a while to settle into the process and this first shot was a small lesson on lighting and angling the camera to manipulate the room to our advantage. We discussed light temperature and getting lighting right for it to look natural. It took us about 30 minutes to do this shot before we got back into the cars and moved onto our next location, for the exterior house shots.

These shots involved using a track to create a smooth pan shot which followed our actress out of her house and swung round the corner behind her to reveal the final shot. This was a bit of a challenge to do successfully, as we were pushing the camera on the dolly ourselves, and it was hard to keep the pace consistent with Emma walking. However I think we did manage to get this shot in the end.

We then took a break for lunch and moved on to our final location for the rest of the interior house shots. We chose to do them in chronological order, which we discovered by the end of the day was not such a good idea. We worked our way down from the bedroom to the kitchen; a shot in which we needed to burn some toast. It was a little bit tricky to get the toast to burn and the right time and as we had a limited amount of slices we had to be quite careful. As the toast started burning the right amount we were not fully ready and all had to scramble into position before it set on fire. Fortunately I think this shot worked though.

We were quite lax about speed in the morning, so as 3pm came around we realised how much we still had left to do. We ploughed through the rest of the shots to try and stay within daylight hours, but the sky grew dark and we had to use lights to try and recreate daylight, since we have not gone through the shots yet I don’t know if it has worked but I’m really hoping it has.
Our second to final shot was of the girl going to her front door and discovering it is open, however by this time it was 6pm and pitch black outside, again we had to use a series of lights to create a morning light look and I think we did this quite well. I am looking forwards to editing and seeing how all our footage turns out.