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

Indent: We used the Universal Studios indent to make our film appear more realistic and to make it clear and keep it basic. Universal Studios is also a well known company for funding and distributing films.

Titles: Our title is very similar to the film title from ‘Mirage’. Both titles have a black background and white writing. The black background makes the writing stand out more and the font is kept basic. Both films are thrillers and the basic font and black background are characteristics of that genre. In other words the main title is what draws the audiences eyes which usually happens in a thriller when a character is about to die, they become the main focus at that particular moment in time.

Location: Our location was set in a classroom from our college. The location was not well established in the opening scene but this was because we wanted to keep the location a mystery. The Lady, our character thought she was in an unknown place and she was lost so by us not giving the location away it meant that the audience could experience what the lady is going through and how she would be feeling.

Costume: Our costume is similar to a character from the film ‘The Ring’. Both characters stare down and hide their face which give them that mysterious look. From the top half of both characters they are wearing a white lose top/dress. Both characters have dark black hair which helped give us the thriller genre look within the character.

Lighting: On all of our shots shown there has been a lot of lighting to represent the character as being friendly. This is why many medium shots and close-ups were used as it made us feel closer to the character. In thriller films as shown in the print screens above there is also a lot of lighting and many close-ups. The difference between both shots is in the shot on the left
we are at a slight tilt/high angle but distant which makes the audience feel like they are in power when they aren't. In our shot shown above on the right we were not aiming for that therefore many close ups and a lot of lighting was used. This meant that the audience would not feel distant or afraid of the lady.

Props: In our film the main prop we used was a modern hourglass hence our film title 'Hourglass'. We had other props such as a pen which was also a main prop. The hourglass was used for its purpose, timing. The pen was more of an importance in the opening sequence because it was used for the lady to write on the wall of the image in her head.

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

I decided to do a prezi on 'How a film is made?' so people knew the stages of making a film before the film gets distributed and the work that goes into doing it.

How to make a film? on Prezi

Many companys that distribute films are:

•Universal Studios
•Warner bros
•Paramount Pictures
•Lions Gate Uk
•20th Century Fox

These are very known distributing companies so they are not likely to distribute my film unless we had personal links to one of the companies. After doing reasearch it is likely for our film to be released by a company such as:

•Shorts International

The above company 'Shorts International' is based in London and they do film festivals and events so people like us can enter our short films. Being based in London means we would have an easy travel to the events or festivals. Shorts international have distributed many short films such as:
•A girl and one gun
•The ballad sandeep

Universal Studios

Universal Studios was founded in 1912 by Carl Buttman, and is a subsidiary of NBCUniversal. NBCUniversal is owned by Comcast(51%) and General Electric(49%).
Universal studios have distributed many recent films such as:

• Safe House - action thriller
• contraband - action thriller
• Big Miracle - drama romance

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

The image shown to the left is of two teenagers from the film 'The Ring'. The storyline of ‘The Ring’ focuses on a video tape and whoever watches it will die within the next 7days. The video tape itself has a girl climbing out of a well and when it reaches 7days the video starts playing and she comes out from the TV and kills the victim. One of the girls in the image was a victim.

With our character (shown to the right) she is not out to kill she is all alone in an empty house where she has to solve puzzles to escape but there is an hourglass timing her, and when time runs out she thinks she is trapped forever. So the process of her trying to solve the puzzles goes on and on and the hourglass is reset by The Lady. However solving these puzzles are not as easy as they seem especially not when things creep on out and make you more delusional.

Both characters shown in the images are young teenagers around 17, 18 who experience things which make them become delusional. As said from the storyline of 'The Ring' the blonde hair girl ends up in a mental institution after seeing her mate Becca, the girl who is standing behind her dead in a cupboard and as stated our character has a mental illness called Schizophrenia. Both characters are wearing similar tops; both the colour white. Using this light colour reflects the innocence in the characters.

Our target audience were young teenagers around 15 to 21. Many people around this age are intriged by the footage shown in 'The Ring' and like a good freight from time to time and thats what our film was trying to aim for but also for the audience themselves to see things through a schizophrenic mind and we tried to reflect this through the use of the camera movement and angles.

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

Our target audience would be between the ages 15-21. In order to know what our target audience would be interested in to watch and the genre they are likely to watch we asked a group of people around our target audience age what their favourite film was. These are shown below:

• Black Swan - thriller
• Shutter Island – Psychological thriller
• My name is Khan – Bollywood Drama
• The Unborn - Horror/thriller

As seen above most of the targeted audience are interested in the thriller genre. Looking up these films I noticed that a few of the films listed above are to do with a character that has a mental illness.

• Shutter Island – Schizophrenia
• My name is khan – Autistic disorder

After showing the audience our film 'Hourglass' we receieved many good comments. Many of the audience agreed the soundtrack worked well with what was going on in the film and it made it more interesting to watch. They also added sometimes if the soundtrack doesn't fit the film piece then it kinda ruins it a little. Other people commented:
•'The bits that caught my eye were when we lost focus of the character, i thought that was very effective.'
•'I love how the footage was just messed up but clear at the same time with what was going on.'
• 'I felt the character was hiding a secret and i always become intriguid and want to know more about the character themselves.'

We feel we chose the right age limit for our target audience as many young teenagers around those ages are also likely to get mental illnesses which will help them relate to our film. Even if they haven't got a mental illness we all feel lost once in a while or unsure of things we are doing so everyone is able to relate to our film.

Also after uploading it to youtube we were given a positive comment as shown below.

The comment says 'Good use of camera angles and camera movement and i like the soundtrack it goes well with the sequence. I'd probably watch the whole film.'
To see for yourself the link is shown below.
www.youtube.com/embed/rK9glAXOlHw

5.How did you attract/address your audience?

This is the first shot of our opening sequence; a medium long shot of the lady. We didn't want her to appear directly to the camera because we didn't want to reveal the characters appearance straight away. A shot like this has appeared in many horror/thriller films; films such as grave encounter, Orphan etc. The use of not showing their identity straight away means the audience is sat there trying to discover what there is to know about the character and whether they are hiding a secret that would be revealed.

In the second shot, we have a close-up of the lady; we didn't want to keep the audience waiting too long before we revealed the lady’s' identity. The close-up of the lady meant the audience now knows her identity and will see her eyes focused on something and will question themselves 'what is she looking at?, which will help create a tense atmosphere within the shot. Close-ups of the main characters face are in every genre especially thriller and horror. Examples of film these shots appear in are: scream, saw etc.

A medium close-up is shown above of the lady writing on the wall; we see her from a side view to get a sense of feelings through her facial expressions as she draws an hourglass on the wall. In many thrillers when we are shown a side view of a character they tend to be on the floor with a tight posture; usually after something extremely dramatic has happened whether they had just murdered somebody or witnessed an horrific act.

We done a close-up of her work through a point of view shot so the audience can see the drawing through the eyes of the lady. For this particular image we had a panning around the image so the audience saw a better view of the drawing before taking it to a close-up. This shot in other words is similar to a murderer staring back at the victim after they horrificly attacked them.

The final shot is a close-up of the hourglass and a panning is used as the hourglass rolls away from the lady after she let it go. This is the final shot before the title is shown which may reflect the lady’s behaviour of giving up on hope and solving the puzzles or possibly her time is running out.

6.What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Through the making of our film different technologies were involved. We used a Sony VX camera to shoot the image and it was easy to get used to when having to shoot and playback the footage. For the camera to ensure smooth movement with the camera a tripod was used also for steady movement and footage. This would make the film appear more professional and less confusing with an unstable, hand held camera. We used a Mac for editing and we took print screens of our progression through editing our film and making it into a final product.

Mac- editing
The image shown to the left is where we did all our editing. Shown in the picture is a Mac which after editing our preliminary task made it easier to get to grips with the software, final cut express. The advantages of using a mac is:
• not likely to crash
• very stable
• easy to use
With the macs being stable and not likely to crash meant that we didn't have to worry about losing our work incase of it crashing and we forgot to save our work.

Sony VX
The camera we used to shoot our footage was a 'SonyVX' shown to the left. This camera could have been used as either a hand-held camera or onto a tripod and to make the footage more professional and stable we used a tripod. The camera itself was very easy to use, quick and easy to set up so time was not wasted on the equipment.

Final cut pro
Final cut pro was the software we used and it offered a lot for us in order to professionlize our film. The software comes with soundtrack pro and soundtrack editing software and has multi-camera editing for combining videos. Final cut pro also has a manual 3-way color correction filter so we were able to change the lighting/color of our shots and due to this it made our shots appear more like a thriller and professional.

Youtube
We needed a way which would publish our film for audiences of our target age limit to see. We decided to upload our film onto youtube because it is a free way to publish our film. Although people of all ages have access to youtube therefore can watch our film but this means that comments from anybody will be given and give us more of an idea of what ages really do prefer films such as ours.

Blogs
Other technology used was computers, to update our bloggers during our time in planning and shooting the film. We used several websites for the scripting, storyboaring and shotlist and after uploaded them to our blogs. After uploading our film to youtube we embedded the link and uploaded it onto our blogs. Using blogs was a much more easier way because it meant our film was accessable with our other work and we didn't have to worry about losing paperwork, it also meant spelling mistakes could be corrected and work could be presentable.

We used 2 soundtracks from the website http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free
We clicked on the genre horror and searched through and found two soundtracks that worked well together. One soundtrack was called Pop goes the weasel and the other Right behind you. The website done many genres of sound but after searching through the soundtracks we found one soundtrack was not enough and we needed a background sound to enhance the thriller.

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




Above are our preliminary task and our final product Hourglass.
Through making the preliminary task it helped build our knowledge on what is involved in order to make a film. How a script has to be written up, the planning behind it all and most of all the editing that goes into making it a final product. Below is a list of issues we noticed with our preliminary task and the improvements made on our final product.

Preliminary task issues
• Continuity did not flow very well
• Not enough footage


Final product improvements
• To ensure we had enough footage we planned our shooting days before we started shooting and after planning we found we had plenty of footage to make an opening scene.
• To enusre there was a good flow of continuity we kept the footage simple; in the preliminary task the continuity problem was with opening the door but in our final product we did not use an opening of a door so that also helped.

Overall we have improved on several skills; these are shown below in a wordle:

Through the use of script writing, shotlists and a storybord it helped planning our idea less complex and it meant that we knew which shots were needed, what we was getting ready to shoot and a rough idea what we was aiming for our final product to look like.
When writing the script for our film we used a website which helped us create a professional script. Shown below is the link.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/81042755/Scripting
It taught us all what we needed to know about writing a script and it was very useful to use. After the script was finished we published it onto the site; this is shown below.

Using the macs for our preliminary task meant that we could get used to the software and it would make editing our film that more easier. Also it showed us how much footage would be needed in order to make a 2minute opening scene because through editing our preliminary task we found from the footage we had taken only 12seconds were useful. This meant we had to plan and use time wisely for getting enough footage. The less mistakes made meant the easier it would be for editing.

Hourglass

Day 3 of Editing

On Day 3 of editing we added the titles, sountracks, the indent and we changed the lighting in the shots. The titles consisted of names which were involved in the production; the editor, director, actors/actresses, producers and many more. The soundtracks which were added were from a website called incompetech. The section we choose our soundtrack from was the horror as our film is a horror/thriller. We searched through the site to find the best soundtracks for us and came to a conclusion to have two soundtracks becaue it was more effective. Here is a link to the website if you want to find out more: http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/index.html?genre=horror
For the indent we kept it to a known company; Universal Studios and once we had found Universal Studios logo we uploaded onto final cut pro.
After both the indent and soundtrack was added we changed the lighting in the shots and added the titles.

Below are print screens of our editing and our progress on our film throughout that day until we had finally finished and produced our own film.

Day 1 and 2 of Editing

Day 1 and 2 of editing:
The first step to editing our footage was to only have footage we wanted in our opening scene; this took us 2 days to do. We spent these two days on editing it to ensure we had enough footage, the footage we wanted and to also give us time to upload other things such as sound, titles, indents etc. To edit our film we used film cut pro and after the first couple of days of editing the image shown above is a printscreen of our edited footage. In this shot particular it is of our finished piece of footage. No soundtrack nor titles or indent have been added just yet.

Editing

When editing both our preliminary task and final product hourglass we used the software final cut pro on a mac. After research on macs or also known as macintosh they have developed over several years making the macs more modern and up to date.

one of the first mactonish models

available from 1989 to 1991

early 1990's

laptop mac

1998

2006

Under each picture are the dates they were introduced or released. Shown below is the mac we used to edit on.

Final cut pro vs Avid

Final cut pro was the software we used to edit both our preliminary task and final product. Both final cut pro and avid are the top selling softwares for editing but what are the advantages and disadvantages for final cut pro to avid. The advantages of final cut pro are:
• Comes with soundtrack pro and soundtrack editing programme
• more codecs
• Easy access to media files

Disadvantages:
• collaborating editing - not enough flexibility
• limited amount of collaborative editing
• costs more

Although final cut pro was the only software available for us, it had all what we needed to have in order to complete our film.

Costume

For our main charcters costume we used a white long loose top, dark blue jeans and no shoes nor socks. No footwear reflects her mental illness; usually when people have schizophrenia they are likely to have an anxiety disorder and this would be reflected through her having no footwear. For the ladys costume we were aiming something similar to the images shown below.
Both girls are wearing long white tops/dresses and this is the clothing that we have choosen for our character to wear. As the light colour enhances the innocence within the character.

Can you guess which thriller film the cartoon is talking about?

Answers:
1: Alien Vs. Predators
2: The Ring
3: Case 39

Interested in thriller films?

Below is a link of recent thriller films released in 2010, 2011 and 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thriller_films_of_the_2010s

Whats your favourite part of a thriller film?

Mental Disorders

I decided to put a link to lists of mental disorders as schizophrenia is one of many.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mental_disorders

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUl4TN8pONXRZiqFxnuRHYDN4ncq8a9CwwvRuzOmp9oTXJ9dPHd8quxz750gmvCgnNqZnD529nDzxPKukSkTV67cFKzf_To457vAiNXLIhmafBR9-R4TTyKqRVdcHdIy-0Lnw2hN-2oBM/s320/Disorders.jpg
Above is a wordle of some mental disorders.

Pie chart of genres

Shown above is a pie chart of the type of genre the audience prefer to watch. It has came to our attention that the audience are least likely to watch a western and from our findings we came to the conclusion to do our film within the thriller genre because it is the audiences most favourite shown by the results in the pie chart above.

Wordle

This a wordle which consists of different types of genres and will be used to make my blog look more appealing.

Planning our film 'Hourglass'

Our main concern when planning our shooting of the film was the location. In our minds we pictured the lady being in an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere.

The image on the left was something similar to what we had in mind. The appearnance of the house has a thriller genre look and many abondened houses are used in thrillers and horrors or houses which appear to be abondoned and desolate are used. After days of disscusions we came to a conclusion to shoot our opening scene in an empty room so it would give the same affect. After searching for rooms to shoot it in, we decided a room from our college would give the thriller look we was going for.
In films such as 'Human Centipede' they dont't use an abandoned house but the look of the house gives some people the creeps. The house is in the middle of nowhere and the look of the house reflects the owners personality because what happens inside the house it not what would be expected. We too were hoping the location would reflect our main characters mind as her feeling alone and afraid.

Audience Survey

Click here to take survey

Storyboard 'Hourglass'