Final Video

Evaluation 7 - Looking Back At Your Preliminary Task, What Do You Feel You Have Learnt In The Progression From It To Full Product?

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

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

Evaluation 6 - What You Learnt About Technologies From The Process Of Constructing This Product?

 We used many different social media websites when producing our thriller. For example we used twitter in a way to gain a fan base like you would with a normal film production company would do. We made regular tweets with things like photos containing images of what we was doing during that time so it varied from doing blogs in lesson or doing blogs while shooting during the day. We followed many people that was either in the film industry or had some sort of connection to people in this industry as it was the sort of audience was trying to gain information and ideas from.

Twitter-We used many different social media websites when producing our thriller. For example we used twitter in a way to gain a fan base like you would with a normal film production company would do. We made regular tweets with things like photos containing images of what we was doing during that time so it varied from doing blogs in lesson or doing blogs while shooting during the day. We followed many people that was either in the film industry or had some sort of connection to people in this industry as it was the sort of audience was trying to gain information and ideas from.

Vine-Twitter wasn’t the only piece of social media we used during our time, we also used vine as well.  We thought this was a good idea as vine is an app were you can do short video clips for 6 seconds, meaning while we was shooting we could do short clips to post onto vine that would build up overtime. This enabled people that followed our account to also gain access to what we was doing and see different idea we was coming up with like trial and error to see what come across well, because on vine people can like your posts this also made us see what ideas were popular and what ideas wasn’t too good so this help us when selecting this for the final thriller!

  

Instagram-Instagram was also an app we used during the time we tried to promote and advertise our production company. it is easy to upload photos  this is why we liked the app because it is then easy for people that follow you to see the photos you have uploaded which is good for promotional reasons. Also another good thing Instagram offers is that if someone likes your photo it instantly goes onto a page were the people they follow can see and then view this.

YouTube-YouTube was a very to our group because It meant we could watch previous thrillers and gain new ideas that we could then bring forward into our thriller when producing it.We also used it to upload new pieces we had done so that it could then be view and people could see what we had been doing! We also used it has a place to store all our finished pieces on one page making it a link though other videos we had posted, so after every video had finished we would then suggest others we had made. 

Evaluation 5 - How Did You Attract/Address Your Audience?

Evalutation 4 - Who Would Be The Audience For Your Media Product?

AUDIENCE

When referring to people may not wanting to watch our thriller, this category of people could be a more adolesent audience. People who are younger and not yet able to fully understand proper conventions and codes of a thriller. This audience may just be plain scared of the given situation and not fully understand the connotations that the story line holds.

Similarily, people of a much older generation may not fully understand these contextual factors as they do not have any knowledge on the connotations.  

Evaluation 3 - What Kind Of Media Institution Might Distribute Your Media Product And Why?

This is a slideshare of our evaluation 3, however due to not having powerpoint the circumstances have changed. If you click the down arrow, it misses out some of our work, so instead you will need to scroll down with your mouse.

Evaluation 2 - How Does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Groups?

Evaluation 1 - In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop Or Challenge Forms And Conventions Of Real Media Products?

The Title of the Film

The title of our thriller develops forms and conventions of a film opening. We chose the title "The Following" as it allows the audience to interpret the film coming up. We also felt that it gives the impression that the film is going to be quite scary and un-easing. Many people suffer traumatic experiences from being followed every year. We have decided to use this to help express the fear people go through. We watched a lot of different types of thrillers, most of which had names specifically about what was going to occur in the film. Taking this into consideration we felt as though we would follow forms and conventions and went with "The Following".

Setting/Location

The location of our opening is split between an empty car park and a dark alley. Both of these locations were chosen to give the audience the impression of loneliness and helpless. After watching other thrillers of followers and stalkers we wanted to use dark and small locations, adding to the loneliness. Switching between locations increased the vibe of loneliness and also helped create a variety of shots available, giving us more ideas and possibilities. The two locations contributes to forms and conventions of a thriller as it is helping the audience to portray their own interpretation of what is going to happen next.

Costumes and Props

We created a poster of one of our locations as a prop in our thriller. We managed to put it on to a pillar in the car park and smeared dark lines across the back of it. This was to create fear in the character and tension amongst the audience. We felt as though using the poster by itself did not create the fear and tension we wanted, and so managed to add dark lines to the back of it acting as finger marks. By sticking to the theme we decided to have the "follower" dressed in all black with only his eyes showing so that he cannot be seen. We felt that by doing this we were contributing to forms and conventions of a thriller as it is creating a dark and mysterious vibe.

Camera Work and Editing

At the very beginning of our thriller we had the name of our group appear in an empty alley. Straight away this tells the audience that the oncoming film is going to be spooky. We used iMovie which had a selection of film openings, however there was only one creepy theme which made it easy for us to choose. In the middle of our opening a sequence of flashes occur showing the character wearing full black with only his eyes on show coming closer and closer. This develops to forms and conventions of a thriller as it helps portray that the character is the "bad guy". Throughout our thriller we used a variety of camera shots and angles to help create tension amongst the audience. Due to our chosen locations, we able to use more shots than expected and so changed the way we envisioned our film.

Title Font and Style 

At the beginning of our thriller we introduce our actors on 2 separate sides of the clip. This is based on the opening of cape fear, where the names of the actors playing the "bad" characters appear on the right and the names of the "good" characters appear on the left. We also slightly changed the font of the "bad" character to help the audience distinguish who is who. We felt as though by using the same features as cape fear, a famous and high quality thriller, we are following codes and conventions of a typical thriller.

Story and how the Opening Sets it up

Before we started filming our thriller we decided we wanted to create a tense atmosphere and a sense of loneliness. We also wanted to use two different settings in time, for example using flashbacks, future visions etc. By watching our opening we feel as though we have portrayed this through a variety of key features, the main being our choice of locations. Our location settings gives the audience a sense of loneliness and creates an un-easy vibe. Also when the camera zooms into the poster from the wall the shot goes to a flashback, then returns back to present time and current events.

Genre and how the Opening Suggests it

The genre of our opening scene is a thriller. A key feature of thriller is the unknown and unease and so we wanted to create a never ending atmosphere so the audience felt like there was a risk the whole time. We wanted them to empathise the "follower" throughout our opening and engage the audience to make them feel as though they know what will happen next. Our opening to a thriller starts with an everyday protagonist which is usually seen in a thriller, we also had music playing over the top. This creates an tense atmosphere and it makes the audience feel as though something bad is going to happen to him.

How Characters are Introduced

In the opening of our thriller the audience is introduced to 2 main characters. We introduced the "good" guy first with a point of view shot into a middle shot to show that it is his life being affected. We then switch locations to the dark alley where the "bad" character is introduced. Due to the location and the clothes he is wearing, it is easy for the audience to interpret that he is the villain. When the location is switched back to the car park, both characters are seen, allowing the audience to create a further interpretation of them.

Final BBFC Rating

Our final thriller opening now being complete, we assigned a rating to it that evidently suited the themes and conventions of a thriller it holds.We also took into account that modern and common thrillers are usually rated above a 12a. This is usually due to the frightening and scary nature of them. Therefore we decided to rate it a 15.   

 Our thriller does emcompass many thriller stereotypes. We tried to swerve away from swearing, dialogue and gore so we could maintain a 15 rating. We did not want to venture about a 15, to enable more people to be able to view our thriller and appreciate the contextual connotations our thriller has.

Spell-check

Before publishing our posts we wanted to make sure we spelt everything correctly, and so used spell check to make any changes needed. The above example is for the word moodboard, the dictionary could not find this and so gave us the suggestion of mood-board.

Filming Permission

During the filming stages of our thriller, we had to ask permission to film in a particular place, at a particular time of the day. This meant that the public, and authorities like police were not suspicious about what we were up to. In some circumstances what we were doing looked very mischievous, and we asked for permission to film our scenes by going through the effort to ask, in order to avoid inconvenience and misunderstanding.

In a scene when we filmed in a car park opposite a police station, on a weekend night around 7pm, where the protagonist is being pestered and persistently followed by the mysterious character, we made sure we asked across the road and informed the police that the boy dressed in all black with nothing but eyes showing, overlooking the police station was infact part of our media project and to no harm of the public. They were entirely understanding and it enabled us to be able to film effectively without knowing what we are doing is a worry to the police/public. We as a group decided it was best to let the police know, so that none of us were arrested for the night!

By asking for permission it just put our worries at rest, although the property was not private that we filmed on, we did not want passerbys and other users of the car park to be startled in any way.

We also filmed down a public alley which suited our themes and conventions of our thriller. People walking up and down would often need reassurance that we were not going to attack or harm them! If someone was walking by we would stop filming and either discuss the next shot or give a polite smile or short word of consideration that we didn't intend to act in a disturbing way.

Throughout our filming we did not want to upset or pester the public. So we made sure that when we were filming, we were considerate of other people and certain situations. 

Rough Cut

This is our first draft for our final thriller. We felt as though we were ready to hand this in however after asking a few people to watch and tell us what they think about our film, we felt to had to alter it a bit. The main criticism we received was that our film does not have any titles showing the audience who is in the film etc. We wanted our audience to enjoy and rate our film as highly as possible, and so to ensure this we decided to add credits over the top of our film showing who stars in it and also who filmed it. By doing this we were able to make our film to the best of our ability from our second attempt. This saved us a lot of time, instead of having to make 2 or 3 drafts we were able to focus on finishing our blog.

Initial Ideas

This is a mind map of our initial ideas. We created this when first discussing what our thriller should consist. After coming up with ideas as to what we could have included in our film, we decided to think of production names, which are shown in the bottom left hand corner. We had many choices of how to plan our thriller but ended up deciding on a mind map, we felt it was the quickest and most efficient way to put all our ideas together and get them down on paper. We just put "ideas" in the middle and had branches coming off it with a particular theme, we would then expand on that theme for the next branch.

Audience Feedback

This is a voki, it is a virtual character which is speaking what one of our viewers has said about our thriller.

Editing Diary

This is a screenshot of our editing process.

Shooting Schedule

Shooting Schedule:

Date and Time	“Shot” Board	Location/Set	Synopsis	Characters	Props and Special	Lighting and Camera Notes
02/03/14 5.30pm	Preparation-Location	Multi-storey Car park	Prepare by sticking paper to pillar	John	Paper with picture of alley on.	Filming when its dark outside
6.00pm	Opening scene	Multi-storey Car park	Filming John finding the paper	John	Paper with picture of alley on.	Dark, only illumination is cark park lights
6.30pm	Filming	Multi-storey Car park	Skip to when John wakes up in car park	John & George	Mask, all black clothing	Dark, only illumination is cark park lights
7.00pm	Filming in car	Multi-storey Car park	John in front seat, George in back seat	John & George	George’s mums car	Mostly dark, light from car
23/03/14 7.30pm	Filming at alley	Alley	John Walking through alley	John	N/A	All dark apart from street lights
8.00pm	John being chased	In woods	John running away from George	John & George	N/A	All dark apart from Johns illuminated trainers

This is a screenshot of our group chat, showing that we planned when to go filming, and what we should bring.

Diary of a Day Shooting

Diary of a Day Shooting:

We filmed two thirds of our opening on the 2nd March. Overall it was a good day shooting, we got all the clips we needed to get in roughly two hours, we all talked through what we would do before every clip we recorded and then filmed it twice just in case something went wrong with it later on. A lot did go right for us because not many people walked past when we were filming it, we didnt have any access to a tripod so Harry had to keep the camera very steady when he filmed so there are no jerky movements in our opening. We filmed in a multi-storey car park opposite a police station which was good for the sirens that made the opening sound more creepy. But this was also bad for us because a few people called 999 and the police came to talk to us as they thought we were going to perform a robbery, but we soon explained and they allowed us to carry on.

It was a good day filming, we don't need to go back and film anymore as we obtained all the images and videos we need for those parts of the opening.

We filmed the last third of our thriller opening on the 16th March. This part was filmed at an alley in Langdon Hills, we felt this was the best location for what we had to film as there was very little illumination and a mysterious long pathway as far as the eye could see. It took us about an hour and a half to complete the filming at the alley, it should have been quicker but we had to film the 'opening' alley scene at least 20 times to get it good enough to put in our thriller. This is because every time Harry turned the camera around I would be too close, too far or you couldn't see me etc. That was one of the only problems we had and was down to the illumination of the alley, but we felt we needed it that bright to create an eery atmosphere.

Props and Costumes

We have decided to have two very different characters within the opening of our thriller - the protagonist and antagonist. They will wear very different clothes to help the audience to very quickly represent who is the villain etc.

The antagonist will be wearing all black clothes - T-shirt, trousers, hoodie, shoes etc. This is so he is easily seen and known as the "bad guy" but also so he can easily be distinguished in the street lights down a dark alley. He will also be wearing a mask or have dark face paint on, to illustrate a "masked mad man". We chose black due to the mysteriousness of the colour, the only thing you can see is the villains eyes, this makes it more creepy as he is just a man trying to hide his identity and this could happen to anyone, that is what we were trying to convey. Also black links directly to darkness, this implies that the villain is dark emotionally and maybe even kills people just to get a thrill. We took into account how dark it would be in the alley but still decided to go with all black, this was to frighten the viewer as you cannot see much of the villain apart from his eyes.

The protagonist will be wearing casual or "normal" clothes so he is also very easily illustrated. The clothes do not have a certain colour scheme, but will differ from the black worn by the villain. However brighter clothes will have to worn to stand out in a dark alley. There were certain pieces of clothing that John owned that would illuminate him in the darkness, e.g. his shoes and the badge on his bodywarmer, we felt this made our thriller more creepy as you could not see anything other than Johns shoes, it also helps the viewer to know where he is. We chose lighter colours for John  because they are opposing  characters in many ways, one is a masked killer and the other is just a normal person, the difference between "good" and "evil".

Settings and Locations

These are two locations we are going to use for our thriller opening. The first two pictures are of a multi-storey car park, where the main character sees a picture of the alley shown in the two pictures below. The second pair of images are where the character will travel to after he looks at the picture of the alley.

We chose these locations as we feel as though they add to codes and conventions of a thriller. After watching many thrillers and other students work we worked out that the typical locations used are isolated. Many thrillers consist of abandoned houses and dark forests, and so we took this in to consideration when choosing our locations. We used an empty car park to shoot the beginning and the end of our thriller opening as feel as though it gives the vibe of isolation and loneliness. We also decided to use a dark alley which is lit up by a few street lights contributing to forms and conventions of a thriller. We had the idea of using a dark woods, as it is seen in many thrillers, however we realised we would have trouble with the lighting and so we felt as though the alley was the perfect location for us to film our thriller.

Music

When decided what music we wanted to play over the top of our thriller we were told that it had to be a copyright free piece of music. This made it bit harder for us to find however we did come come up with a few ideas. First of all we decided to go on YouTube, we simply typed in copyright free music in the search bar. Loads of different types of songs and instrumental pieces came up, so we decided we needed to narrow down our criteria. We found loads of different websites providing copyright free music, however the one we decided to use is called incompetech.com.

The website provides a section on the left which doesn't just allow you to choose the genre of the music you to find, it also allows you choose how you want the music to make you feel. For example we chose the genre "horror" and added "dark, eerie and intense" to the feel. Many pieces of music came up, and we listened intently to find the one which best suits our thriller. The piece of music we decided to use it called "The Dread". http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100048

As well as using incompetech.com, when finding our title piece on iMovie, we noticed the titles had their own copyright free backing tracks. We managed to cut out different parts of the music and add them over the top of our thriller to create a more suspenseful atmosphere.

Changes

For our thriller we had many ideas, but we decided we wanted to start in a multistory car park. We had many car parks in our chosen area we could have used, and all of them had different characteristics and effects making them individual. We originally wanted to use the East Gate car park in Basildon (shown in the pictures above), however when we went out filming it was closed. We found a different car park (shown in the picture below) which we felt had different characteristics to the others making a bit more spooky.

Social Media

Creating different social network accounts have made it easier for us to spread the word about our film and our progress. Advertising films are usually very expensive, however by using social media such as Twitter, we have been able to advertise for free. This technique has been used by very famous artists such as Beyonce and Katy Perry, to advertise their upcoming songs and albums etc.

We decided to create 3 accounts in particular; Instagram, Twitter and Vine, gaining different followers on each site. We wanted to use these accounts as we feel as though we can show our audience our progress easiest. We will create short 6 second videos on vine showing how we actually go about filming our thriller, showing the troubles we face when finding locations ect. We will also post pictures on to Instagram to show our followers where we have been and what we have been up to in class. By using Twitter we are able to post pictures as well as tweets to keep everyone up to date. Due to the fact that we have the most followers on Twitter, we will post on more pictures and tweets to keep our larger audience up to date.

Marketing

We decided to create a teaser trailer to help marketise our thriller. We used a template from iMovie to help us with the layout, and we simply added short clips from our film to the allocated spaces and changed the writing in-between the clips. We did not want to use the whole trailer provided as well felt it was too long to be a teaser trailer, and so we imported it onto Final Cut Pro and cropped out the bits we didn't need. By doing this we felt that it would help promote our thriller, as it shows exciting and tense moments, hopefully drawing in audience and making them want to watch the whole thing.

We also created a film poster, after researching horror film posters on the internet we recognized a common theme throughout, it had to show the threat in the poster. Whether it was only the threat or the main character as well, it had to be in there. So we picked out what we thought was the best frame in our thriller opening and cropped it down to the shape a professional film poster would be and added writing. We used 'The Return' (pictured below) as a basic template, with the actors and the name of the film at the bottom, and a catchy slogan at the top. This draws in the public and makes them want to watch our thriller.

Influences

Paranormal Activity influenced our thriller opening the most. Many similar shots are used to create suspense, the main being the night vision camera . This type of shot shows the whole room in the picture allowing the audience to witness everything that occurs, leaving them tense and on the edge of their seats. Different features within the film have helped us come up with parts of our film. The feature we like the most is the time shown in the bottom right corner of the image above. This allows the directors to focus their ideas on the times most allocated with danger and crime.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS4sc8OZ6Ug

MAMA had a strong effect on us. We have used this video as one of our influences, in a particular scene near the climax of the storyline, a man is alone, scared in a cabin. His torch 'miraculously' stops working a begins to flash. The torch light is flashing slowly continuously, creating an uneasy presence. Flashes dart around the room from the light and the woman appears and begins to get gradually closer to the camera, this promotes fear into the viewer because it leaves them wondering what is going to come up next every time the light turns off. We were strongly influenced by this and therefore decided to adopt a similar approach in part of our clip.

Risk Assessment

Health and Safety assessment

Hazards	Who’s exposed	Risk at stake	Control measures	Risk high or low
Debris on the floor in the woods	Actors and staff	Tripping over and getting injured	We will clear our path before shooting	Low
Be careful  by the edge of the multi-story car park	Actors and staff/camera staff	Slipping and falling from height	Make sure the surface is dry and keep well away from edge	High/medium
Sharp props	Actors	Lacerations on skin	Make sure they are handled with care	Low
Sufficient lighting in dark areas	Actors, staff and camera staff	No having enough lights and not seeing hazards	Bring sufficient lighting like touches and lamps	Medium
Ask permission for places of filming	Everyone	Not being able to film somewhere	Ask permission	Low
Cars in the car park	Everyone	Getting knock over by a car	Be aware of your surroundings	Low
Stunts	Actors	Injuring yourself	Only do things to your limitations	Low