Hostage Evaluation

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

While planning our thriller opening sequence we tried to include generic thriller conventions so the audience can understand our sub genre of a crime thriller. One of the first conventions that we portrayed is the narrative which centres around a theme or crime, which in our case we had a kidnapping. We also included a protagonist and built up many enigmas during the whole opening sequence, to reveal the kidnapper right at the end of the 2 minutes leaving the audience wondering if this may escalate to a murder which is also another frequent convention used. We have researched into professional films such as reservoir dogs where we conducted a 9 shot analysis gaining new ideas of how we can develop or challenge the conventions. From doing this we were able to take advice on how the lighting should be high key at certain points and low key in others to look realistic while still building tension. We then used this in our opening where we were able to colour correct the section while the female is lying docile on the bed. We made the lighting more high key to see the make up features on her face better. We have also looked at Panic room in which we took notes on how the opening credits were displayed. They had a large 3d effect to the writing and were presented at different angles over the top of the images of New York City. From the use of our generic conventions the audience should be able to tell what sub genre our opening sequence is as we have made the conventions very clear and some much more detailed than others to emphasis our thriller sub genre. We also feel by doing this the audience will be able to recognise similar features that are in other movies such as panic room, while investigating panic room we saw how the music built up in sound levels and with tension so we developed this idea in our opening sequence and also built up our sound levels going quiet at certain points to make the audience question what is going to happen.

Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In terms of representing social groups, we have two characters of opposite genders; the antagonist being male and the protagonist being female.  However, we think this is representing females in a stereotypical way, as the girl is in the footage for the majority of the shots and it is showing what could potentially happen to young females. The female’s clothes were stereotypical for her age as she was wearing hunter wellies and an army style jacket. Also, she is vulnerable, passive and in a very dangerous situation. We are also representing the male gender in a stereotypical way as a middle aged man is more likely to act this way rather than an old man or a young teenager. The representation of gender and age in our opening sequence is portrayed in a stereotypical way, as the kidnapping is done by a middle aged man. If we had decided to use a fragile old man or a young teenager, this may have been unrealistic as they may not have the strength or ability to kidnap a young female. Also, we decided it was best to use a young, female character as women are stereotypically vulnerable and weak. The age and gender of the characters in our opening sequence helps relate to the target audience as it is targeted for people aged 15-45. The antagonist is a middle-aged man and the protagonist is a young female character. We think our opening sequence links well with our target audience as we are using both male and female characters of which our target audience can relate to.

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

Looking into professional crime thriller movies we were able to establish distribution companies that would be likely to distribute our film. We looked at Reservoir Dogs which was distributed by Miramax films which is an American entertainment company known for distributing independent films. We then looked Memento which is another crime thriller the distributors of this were Pathe, which is a French business and soon became the largest film equipment and production company. The third film we looked at was Oceans Twelve which was distributed by Warner Bros Pictures which is one of the biggest American film companies. All these films are similar to ours in the sense of all being crime thrillers, this is why both big and small companies might distribute our product.  Due to our movie being quite main steam we don’t think this would be just an internet release, we think it would be a cinema release, therefore due to it being aimed at a larger audience our movie would be a TV movie. To promote our product we would have a varies of different merchandises one being a T-shirt as this can be for both sexes and all different ages, spreading the word of our film to a wide variety of our target audience, another way we would merchandise our products is by creating small figures of the main character (The protagonist) or even the dog.

Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product? 

Our opening sequence target audience is aimed towards 15 to 45 year old, male and female audiences. To find our target audience we thought of the age and gender of our characters. Also, some professional films which are similar to ours are a 15 certificate. This helped us think about who our target audience would be and who would enjoy this genre. This gives an expanded variety of different types of people that can relate to our media product. For example the main female character can be related to the teenage female majority from our target audience, as she is portrayed as a stereotypical teenage girl. She is shown walking the dog in a warm coat and Wellington boots instigating a normal dressed teenage girl taking her dog for a walk. Another main character is the middle aged man which is the antagonist in our media product. He is also stereotypically portrayed as a middle aged man in the woods dressed in boots and tracksuit bottoms. This is characterised as normal because he was in the woods, which matches the environment he was in.  Another film called Taken which is a crime thriller is similar to our media product, as they are both about abduction. The main character in Taken is a teenage girl that gets kidnapped similar to our story of our main character. This would appeal to teenage female majority as the main character is, but also would interest older middle aged men and teenage boys as another main character is the dad who is legitimately clever and on a mission to get his daughter back.

Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

In our audience profile we aimed to attract audiences from the ages of 15-45 which were female or male genders. So we firstly researched what sub genre films they liked and done questionnaires to narrow their hobbies and interests down. Our title is called ‘Hostage’ this, just by this name it gives an indication of what is going to happen and this by itself can attract customers because if they like kidnappings they will want to see it. The events that occur in our opening sequence will scare or excite audiences of similar ages, such as the young female character gets kidnapped and this may terrify girls of a relatively similar age as it reflects reality’s of what could happen to them and by doing this will give them a thrill of watching the thriller movie, it may also scare parents or careers that have daughters because it could open their eyes into what the real world is like when young girls are alone.

 In our sequence opening there are certain points that would entice the audience to make them feel anxious or even as if they were in the main female characters position; such as when there is a shot of her point of view turning around. Also there is the antagonist point of view from behind trees which creates an eerie atmosphere for the audience watching. From the audience being able to imagine themselves in the females position of being followed makes them on edge and fulfils the sub genre of ‘thriller’ in the sequence, they are witnessing what is happening and questioning why it is happening which makes them want to carry on watching it. The generic thriller conventions help us to achieve this as the audience feels the female characters sense of danger which then again builds suspense.

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

When creating our opening sequence, we were all able to figure out how to use the camera pretty fast. Everyone, even the characters in the opening sequence had a chance to interact with the camera. When we went to film part of the first scene in the Great Park, it all worked well until we attempted to upload it and found that it had fuzzy lines across the footage. However, next time during filming we will look after our tape and ensure that our footage will not be ruined. One of the problems we faced during filming was the weather. It was hard to find the right time to film as our location for the first scene was the Great Park and we needed it quite dull so it would give more of an effect on the storyline. A few times we attempted to film there, however it was either raining, hail stoning or too sunny to film our footage. It was difficult trying to find the right time but we eventually got there with a lot of effort put in, we just took every opportunity we could to finally get this done. Final Cut Express was a completely new software to use for all of us, though we caught on to how it worked quite quickly. We found a few effects useful to creating our overall mise en scene such as the black out we used after the young girl got kidnapped, this helped emphasise the crime. As a group we found Garageband useful to produce our opening sequence soundtrack on as it gave us many different sounds to use to create this. To produce our soundtrack we used a variety of suspense sounds. This helped the filming become more exciting and nervous for the audience. However, we found it quite difficult to find the most appropriate sounds for our soundtrack but eventually we discovered some good sounds. Music plays a huge part in films as it helps build up the tension more and more.  Blogger.com was an online technology that we used to gather our certain planning that we used to organise and present our information. We also received blog of the month as a group. We used the still cameras to take pictures of our location, props, make up and costume.

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

When we were given the brief of a two minute opening thriller sequence, we were excited yet anxious as we had never done anything like this before. To get used to the equipment and the techniques of filming, we done a preliminary task which lasted around 30 seconds and we felt this went good considering it was every group members first time using the camera equipment and acting. After we had practised using the equipment, we went straight into researching our topic which was thriller and our sub genre which was crime thriller. We chose crime thriller because we felt that from the clips of professional crime thrillers this option was the most electrifying yet realistic. A few of the crime thrillers we watched were Oceans Twelve, The Watcher, Silence of The Lambs and Memento.

After watching a couple of the clips we started to notice the generic thriller conventions and started realising what our opening sequence must consist of to give off the same feel. The next step was to create a storyboard, we all had great ideas so we finally managed to put them to paper with detailed hand drawn images and notes above to know which scene they would be in and what would briefly be happening. We knew exactly what shots we needed to use and which scenes would need to be edited, it was good to have this planned so we could follow the sheets and not have too much trouble when trying to film it. When creating our animatic, the pictures and scenes matched and flowed well so we handheld recorded the storyboard and uploaded it onto the Mac. We also made a short practise music soundtrack using Garage band, this was also the first time we had used Garage band, so experimenting with the different sounds and effects we could use was exciting. We managed to put together a short 30 second track with eerie sounds to match with our sub genre of thriller, we then uploaded this into our storyboard so it would play and the track would run at the same time. We felt this went really well, as we had only just learnt how to use all these new software’s and our knowledge was growing so next time we used them we would have a better understanding.

We were aware that the more we filmed and got used to the camera, our shot types and angle techniques also improved at the same time. We feel that one of our best shots that had improved from the beginning was match on action as we practised this in our preliminary task, and looking back to that shot from the one we used in our final thriller, we can see that we have improved a great deal. Although we initially found it difficult using the tripod, as we had numerous times of difficulties with it, we persisted and carried on until we eventually got the hang of it and then after this the rest ran smoothly as well. However another one of our main problems was the weather because it’s unpredictable. As we had an outside scene it was hard to keep the continuity precise and we did have to go back and re-film a few scenes.

Looking back at the brief of the task and then our end final product overall the whole process went really well. Yes we had to overcome some obstacles but we tried to do it in the most professional way with the mind set to get the best possible opening sequence grade that we could. As a group on a whole we got along well, with also receiving blog of the month once. If we were given this brief again, the things we would change is the outside location to indoors, as we now have a good understanding that weather is very unpredictable. Finally we have enjoyed the overall experience from planning the research to filming and editing our final opening sequence.