How I attracted/adressed my audience

How Did You Attract

Who would be the target audience for my media product

The age for my target audience would be 15 to 24 year olds. They would be attracted to my film because it’s a thriller and young people enjoy thrillers. Young men enjoy seeing films staring an attractive actress and that have a lot of action like Salt, the girl with the dragon tattoo and Hanna this is why they would go and see my thriller. Young women would go and see it because the protagonist is a very strong woman and they can see themselves in her or admire her strength and courage,she would act as a role model for them. Men also like to go and see a film with their girlfriend and this thriller being aimed at a mainstream audience would allow them to go and see a film that they will both enjoy. I believe their would be a secondary audience for my film of over 25's who still enjoy going out for a date or night out and would enjoy watching my film. Because the narrative deals in universal themes that would attract a global audience I definitely feel that if people saw my film advertised and read the reviews they would want to see it. Precisely because it is a genre piece that deals in action with a strong female lead much like Salt and Hana two other films that have been hits in recent years. If our film achieved good reviews and we developed a strong teaser trailer I definitely feel we wopuld find a wider audience through online marketing. This is the kind of new media technology that our target audience frequently uses so marketing online using youtube, facebook etc would certainly help us find an audience.

An example of someone who will watch my thriller is Tom. He is a teenaged boy enjoys watching thrillers with lots of explosions and girls. He also likes playing videogames and going out with his friends. He is currently studying for his A-levels and plans to go on to university to study business. Some of his favourite films are Salt, Hanna, The girl with the dragon tattoo…

What institution might distribute my media product

Fox searchlight would produce and distribute my film because it fits in with their ethos of making low (by Hollywood standard) budget thrillers.It has an interesting plot, action and beautiful camera shots. It makes thrillers and it is also interested in low budget films and first time directors. Fox searchlight has produced The Black Swan by Darren Aronofsky he had previously made independent films such as requiem for a dream and pii. It would make money at the box office asit is aimed at a mainstream audience so it will attract a large audience and so many people will want to go and see it. Fox searchlight is owned by the conglomerate 20^th century Fox it is their independent arm designed to make commercially viable independent films because they are owned by a conglomerate it is easer to distribute the films and get them to their audience. Although I wouldn’t imagine our film would be a success on the same scale as a high concept film by having an attractive female actress in it the commercially viable plot and action sequences I definitely feel that Fox searchlight could help it find it’s audience. Fox searchlight has also recently produced a film called Shame by second time director Steve Mc Queen. It talks about a sexually deviant person. Although the subject is unpleasant Fox searchlight has managed to find it a larger audience then a British film company would have. This is why I think Fox searchlight would be the perfect producer for my thriller.

How my product represents particular social groups

We have chosen to represent men, women and policemen. We decided to break the stereotype of the ‘dumb blond’ by putting Paula in a position of power. However we didn’t want her to look ugly, as it would not attract a large audience so we chose to have her wearing a sexy and classy outfit and filmed her in slow motion. This goes against the stereotype that powerful women are butch. This conforms to the general conventions as it is expected to see women represented in an attractive way in a film. There are other thrillers that use strong female characters such as Salt, Hanna, The girl with the dragon Tattoo.  However, unlike our thriller the girl with the dragon tattoo chose to have a not so attractive female actress. Our main character is inspired from Angelina Jolie in Salt or in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. She is aiming to shoot a man that has arrived in a Land Rover and is wearing a suit. This implies that he is from upper class. The fact that she is about to shoot him goes against the stereotype that men from a wealthy background are more powerful then women. We chose to have a policeman entering in the room and stopping her from shooting him. This is a stereotypical representation of policemen as it shows them as interfering in crime. However, he is represented in an unorganised way as the lighting where warmer then the one you see Paula in. This shows that she is professional and organised and that he is unprofessional and unorganised. This puts her in a situation of power over him that goes against the stenotype.

I chose to represent men as being week so that the lead female character in comparison seems to be stronger. That creates a reverse binary opposition to the normal one of men being in position of power. This is an uncommon representation of gender as in most media products men are never represented as being weak so it subverts the stereotype.

Women in power tend to be represented in a negative light as generally people consider that women should stay at home with there children. We chose to show our lead actress in a positive light because we wanted to subvert this sexist dominant ideology.

Thrillers similar to mine:

I chose to represent men as being week so that the lead female character in comparison seems to be stronger. That creates a reverse binary opposition to the normal one of men being in position of power. This is an uncommon representation of gender as in most media products men are never represented as being weak so it subverts the stereotype.

Women in power tend to be represented in a negative light as generally people consider that women should stay at home with there children. We chose to show our lead actress in a positive light because we wanted to subvert this sexist dominant ideology.

A good example of successful women with good jobs represented negatively if they don’t have a man with them is the girls from Sex and the city as their life is always incomplete if they don’t have a man in it and are constantly looking for one.

In what way does my Mediaproduct, develop or challengeforms and conventions of realmedia product?

Task 1

Editing my thriller

When we first started editing we went through all the shots to choose the ones where the acting was best and the angle of the shot was nicest. We also had to go through all the go-pros shots to choose the right sequences. We then marked them as good shot alternative shot or bad shot.

We used crosscutting between Paula setting-up the gun and Ted driving his car to show that these two things are happening simultaneously and to signify to the audience that she is going to try and shoot him. We then used en eye-line match from Paula to Ted to confirm to the audience that she will shoot him. We also did crosscutting between Paula and Simon to signify to the audience that he will stop her from shooting Ted.

It was very difficult to find the right pace because we had many of our sequences were filmed in slow motion. The problem was we wanted our opening sequence not to be to slow so we had to gradually speed-up the pace after the slow motion sequence. We had to re-edit so many of our shots with Simon to make them the right length and place them at the right moment and make them the right length to speed-up the pace after the slow motion shots and to signify that something is going to happen.

We wanted Paula to be the hero of our thriller this is why she is the one with the most camera time. To give her more power we play a foreboding music when she pulls out the sniper. We used Simon as her opponent. They are binary opposites as they look and act in completely different ways. Paula’s sequences are slow and long where as Simon’s sequences are shorter, this presents Paula as a calm and precise character in contrast with Simon who appears to be more chaotic.

Finding the right sounds was extremely long and tedious. I am a perfectionist and having spent so much time working on this opening sequence I wanted the sounds to be as close to perfection as possible. We had trouble finding the right sound for the car driving past, as there wasn’t sound on all of the go-pro shots of the car so we had to go through many different go-pro shots of the car to find the right sound. We also wanted to use music to create rising tension so Diana created a beat on her I-Pad and we then added other sounds from, soundtrack pro, to give it different tones to make it sound more scary and foreboding so that it fit better with the thriller genre.

Using final cut pro was, at first, challenging, however little by little it became easer. The things that at first took ages (e.g. Cutting a scene at the right moment) became almost mechanical. However certain things remained very tedious, it was always rely difficult to place one shot after an other it a way that didn’t make the editing very visible, this was particularly difficult in the first sequence when cutting from the car to Paula walking into the room because the lighting is very different from one sequence to the other. It was also rely difficult to edit the go-pro shots together because the roads had to look more or less similar in each shot.

If I had a chance to go over the thriller and change it I wouldn’t because I’ve already spent so much time working on it that even the idea to have to work on it again would make me go crazy. Also I’m really happy with how it turned out so I rely wouldn’t change anything. There were moments that were very difficult to edit and find sound for. An example of a really hard sound to create is the sound of her coking the sniper; there were no sounds that matched the coking of the sniper so we had to create a new sound by extending loads of handgun coking sounds (found in soundtrack pro) and then editing them together to create the perfect sound. I didn’t find that there were any particular moments that were very difficult to edit.

I loved editing, it is so satisfying to see the opening sequence finished after all that time I spent editing it! There were moments when I just wanted to burst in tears by frustration in front of the computer because I just couldn’t find the perfect cut or sound, but over all I must say that I did enjoy editing.

We were an excellent team, we all got along and worked rely well together. I did a lot of the editing my self but I must say that there rely wasn’t one person who edited more then an other because we almost always edited all together so that we were sure that we all agreed with the decisions made by the others. There some times were moments where we disagreed about something, for example we originally only wanted two go-pro shots at the beginning of the clip, however some of us wanted more go pro shots at the beginning so we tried adding more. It turned out rely nice so we decided to keep them.

It was very different from editing my preliminary task because this time we had to make our choices of when to put each sequence. It was also much harder because in the preliminary task we didn’t have to add extra sound so it was much less complicate to edit. We had to cerate music for our thriller and make sure that the beat matched the pace of the opening sequence. However the result was much more satisfying because this time we knew much more about how to film and edit our shots. We also had much more freedom in choosing how to film and edit them.

Trough this experience in film making I have learnt how long it takes to edit and how difficult it is to find the right sounds. I also learnt how to use sound successfully to create meaning. I’ve never been rely good with computers so it was very challenging at first to use final cut pro but it soon became rely easy to use it. What at first I found really challenging was cutting thee shots at the right length but that became much more simple after a short amount of time spent on it. However the most challenging thing by far was the sound editing. Sound is what makes the difference between a good and a badly edited sequence and it is extremely difficult to find the perfect sounds. I learned how to play around with sounds to make them fit with the action. It wasn’t very hard to make my film appeal to my target audience and to fit in with the genre. It had several guns in it that is a key element in the thriller genre, it also had an attractive actress in it that attracts the target audience to thrillers: men aged 16 to 25. However adding music to it helped create more suspense and adds an up beat feel to it that fits in with the genre.

Shoot day

The first thing we did on our shooting day was to make sure Paula (our actress) knew how to use the sniper rifle. We then went to Cornhill. The very first thing wee had to film was Ted because he was only available from 9 till 11. We also helped Paula get dressed and do her hair makeup; it was essential because the character she was interpreting is a very classy and sexy killer. 

We filmed it in Cornhill because it looks like a hotel. However it is a boarding house now so we had to take out most of the stuff in the room and change the bed sheets because they were pink and that did not correspond to the sort of room our character would be staying in. We also had to make sure that half of the room wasn’t in any of the shots because it looked too much like a boarding house room rather than a hotel room. Because of this we had to change the angle of other shots.We used several different types of shots; we used high angle shots to make her look mire powerful; but we decided not to use it because it made her look very strange. We used a point of view shot from her to Ted to show that she is going to shoot him. However we didn’t film that shot from the window in her room because you couldn’t see the car park from it.  We did many handheld shots because they looked more interesting and allowed us more liberty with the camera then if we were only using it on the tripod. They were also the only way for us to take some shots from he window where we see her putting down the hand gun and aiming with the sniper. We also did an incredible amount of close ups to show what she is doing, how she is setting up the gun... We also had to set go-pros on Ted’s car to film it while he was driving.After that we concentrated on Filming Paula. We wanted her to look rely sexy, professional, powerful and dangerous so that the film would attract people aged from 16 to 20 year olds. We did this by using low angle shots of her setting up the gun (to make her look more powerful and dangerous), Slow motion shots (to make her look sexier) and close-ups of her hands setting up the gun to show that she really knows what she is doing. We decided to try and film some of the moments in slow motion that day, it was possibly the best idea we could have ever had as it adds a lot to the scene. We also wanted to film a shot of her shooting out of the window but the window was to high up to film it from outside so we had to film her aiming on the bed as if it was the windowsill, making sure that the back of the room wasn’t in focus. 

We wanted our character to look like a cross between “Hannah”, “Salt” and a Bond girl.

We had originally chosen to have Paula ware a skirt and high heeled shoos but we finally decided that black fitted trousers would be better because it makes her look more professional but kept the heels. We chose black as a dominant colour because it looks mysterious; however we chose a delicate black see-trough silk blouse with white butterflies because this makes her look more feminine and sexy. We also chose to have her with red lipstick and red nails to signify that she is a “femme fatale” All her cloths were straight of the catwalk because we wanted her to look extremely glamorous. She is in contrast with the mail character that we wanted to look like a grungy policeman. They are binary opposites as he is graceful and he is chewing gum to show that he isn’t very sophisticated.

We chose Paula for the “femme fatale” (Catherina) because she is very beautiful and looked perfect with the sniper in her hands. She also has amazing facial expressions that are at the same time very sexy and dangerous. She would appeal both to a female and mail audience aged from 16 to 20s. We chose Ted for the man she is trying to shoot because he looks like an important businessman or politician. We chose Simon for the policeman because he is very different from Paula (he has brown hair she is blond, she has blue eyes he has brown eyes) and because we saw him in an opening sequence of a thriller from last year and he was rely good in it.

The lighting in the room where we filmed in was very warm and orange. We wanted the lighting to be very cold and bright so we used high lightingcovered by a blue plastic film to cool the lighting down (blue is the complementary colour for orange so it annulled the orange of the light). This worked extremely well and if I could go back I would definitely not change this

            We didn’t use any sound because we are going to add it during editing.

            As a team we worked rely well together as a team. We discussed the mise en scene together and how we were going to film the thriller. There was a big debate about if we should film the thriller in slow motion or not; in the end we tried it and realised that it was amazing so we kept it. We also discussed a lot about the mise-en-scene; what sort of hair due Paula should have, if she should have it up or down. We also discussed if Simon should wear a tie and decided it would fit better with his character if he only wore a shirt. We decided beforehand what shots we were going to do but on the shoot day we still all came up with new interesting shots for it. We weren’t sure of what ending would be best, to have Paula or Simon die at the end or to have a blackout and just here a gunshot so we filmed different endings. I personally think that the black out is the best option, as it would leave the audience in suspense. All the elements of our thriller opening sequence were carefully studied by all of us to create as much suspense as possible and respond to the demands of the thriller genre.

I am very happy with the result of our shooting day. Everything went very smoothly, we got all the shots done on time. I couldn’t say what went best on the shooting day because everything was so amazing. Probably what was the most fun to film were the slow motion scenes and the scene where Simon enters the room. So many of the shots are good that I don’t know how will be abele to choose them when we get to editing.