Brief SoundCloud evaluation and Full written Evaluation

 

Written Evaluation



1)      In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (I.e. of film openings)

Brief Sound Version:
Sound Cloud
Brief Evaluation- Question 1



This is our contact sheet for our opening, The first frame of our film is to go straight into the credits, we chose to put this first instead of the title because we didn’t want to give too much away to the audience because from the title you can understand what’s there in the house so this was a better way to maintain tension and to keep the audience uneasy.

The second frame we used was to show the Title font and style, we chose this because it was a good font to use to keep with the genre of the film and make the audience know that this ‘cracked font’ can relate to what will happen to the characters which is why the credit names are in this style.

The third frame we used is to show the introduction of the characters, this is the first show we see of Cassia however it is not in a happy way, just from her posture and the way she is moving you can see something is not right, she is also dressed in white to show her innocence which makes the audience feel more sympathy for her.
The fourth frame was used to show the setting and location, because we don’t know where this place is, the only shot that gives some sort of hint to the audience is the one where Cassia is aiming her torch down the hallway and you see the doorway, this indicates that this may be her house, or a house that she has wandered into, this makes the audience constantly guessing about what’s happened for her to be there.

The fifth frame we used was to show our special effects, when the door slams behind Cassia she runs to the door and pulls it open, while she does this we added a faint breathing which sounds like something is running away on the other side of the door as she is opening it, this makes the audience think either someone is in the house with her or there is a ghostly presence.

The sixth frame we used was to show the costume and props, in the shot you can see Cassia is wearing a white top and jumper which jeans, this links to the stereotypical teenage girl with her white to represent innocence and teens to represent her social group.

The seventh frame we used was to show the genre of the film, with someone grabbing her throat it is very threatening and aggressive, this reveals to the audience that this is a horror film and they should expect more scenes like this, however it does not fully reveal who or what this murderer is which keeps the audience uneasy.

The Eighth frame we used was to show the story, from Cassia being pulled up through this hatch, it sets the whole storyline of this character going miss and the mysterious feeling around the house, throughout the film this hatch will come significant as it is used more often to kill other characters throughout.

The Final frame we used was the title of the film, the title hits in as soon as soon as the hatch closes, this is a good effect because it makes the sudden appearance of the title even more threatening as it jumps into the audiences face, we used the title “The Occupant” which is the term used for a “person or presence living in a house”, this links to the unknown murderer and how it’s presence is felt throughout the story.

When it came to making decisions about the plot and characters that were used in our films we kept the idea of having something iconic happen at the start of the film, i.e. a murder of someone, then this would come into play later on in the film as the main storyline. We decided that we would have a girl play as the victim because this goes with current film connotations of ‘the pure and innocent girl in white’ therefore we knew that it would be best to have this connotation in our film, however we also tried to go against the stereotype of having a male villain so instead we chose to have another girl play as the victim, again she would be wearing white which represents innocence however this juxtaposes with the characters personality as she is really cruel and murderous. Another reason why we chose a girl as the victim instead of a boy is that we discovered through research an audience tends to feel more sympathy for the character because of the vulnerability and innocence, a film this is clearly shown in is the original “Scream” starring Drew Barrymore, she is killed straight at the start of the film to show that there is a serial killer and are expecting more to come, this compares to our film because the same plot is used when a young girl in white is killed by some sort of murderer which is introduced. We decided to stray away from the normal conventions of horror films with blood, gore and a cannibal monster such as ’28 days later’ and ‘The Grudge’ because we didn’t want it to be another typical scary movie, we wanted to add a psychological twist to it which is used in films such as ‘The Sixth Sense’ and ‘Paranormal Activity’ because we wanted to keep the audience guessing and unexpected of what’s going to happen next.

Because of this psychological edge of a ghostly presence etc, we didn’t want to give too much away with showing who the murderer is and if she’s killing people, which is why we decided to close our ending on someone getting pulled up through the hatch with a continuous scream because we wanted to make the audience think, is she still alive?, what happened to her? So it keeps their attention throughout the film. This technique is also used in the film “Neighbour Hood Watch” where the character is pulled away by a mysterious figure and the audience don’t know what happened to him. I think this technique was effective because it added to the psychological side of the film of making the audience think about what’s happened.

Whilst looking into horror films, it was clear to us that most of the tension created was through the music being played, we then thought about this but then decided to do because we also knew that the use of silence creates an uneasy feeling to the audience, however we also added a quiet breathing audio to play in the background of the scenes so it seems as if someone is there, constantly watching, this was effective because straight from the start of the scene the audience know something isn’t right in this place.

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

SoundCloud
Brief Evaluation- Question 2

We decided to use a teenage girl as our victim in the opening, we decided this because we wanted to stick with the connotation of the “Damsel in Distress” we decided this because it is used in many other films and it is the best way to get sympathy from the audience.  Cassia or her characters names of ‘Alice’ (which is not used in the opening but is later on in the film) was dressed in mainly white to represent her innocence however we wanted her to look also very realistic in the way she dressed, for example this was shot in the winter therefore we would not haver her in a dress, so we wanted Alice to be wearing jeans and a jumper, this links to the social group that Alice is in, from the costume it shows Alice part of the every day teenage group, which is the equilibrium of teenagers in the modern day where they want to look well dressed. This was effective because we wanted the audience to relate to the film and make them feel as if Alice is one of them or could be one of them if it ever happened to them. This sets up the target audience of our film as teenagers around 15 years and over, this was suitable as it was be the most interesting audience to target for our film.

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


SoundCloud
Brief Evaluation- Question 3

Whilst researching different institutions i came across “The Asylum”  they distribute films such as ‘Abducted’ and ’12-12-12’, this film institution will be good to use as they distribute a lot of psychological horror films that makes the audience think but also keep the continuously uneasy throughout because they don't know what’s going to happen next, however most of these films they distribute contain a lot of monsters and gore which our film does not consist of, therefore this institution may not be the best for our film.
Another institution that we could use for our film is “Brain Damage Films” they also distribute very psychological films such as “America’s Scream King” and “The Afflicted”, these also makes the audience think a lot about what is happening but also maintain this horror with it. Both of these institutions would be good to use because they promote a lot of psychological horror’s just like our film which would be the best possible way too do it. However these are only independent institutions, we could also go for major institutions such as Warner Bros or Paramount pictures because both these companies have very large audiences therefore by using them the film would get very high in viewings and popularity. When coming up with our own institution, we decided to go with ‘Slaughterhouse Productions’ This links to our film because it links to the amount of people being killed by the presence within the house. By having Slaughterhouse it stands out and gives the audience an insight to the films as they expect to see a lot of people being killed which may attract a specific audience.

However we decided to go with our own film institution which we made ourselves using Final cut express, I prefer this institution because it is very unique compared to already existing institutions. We decided to go with the name ‘Slaughterhouse Productions’, this is because our films are embedded with a lot of slaughtering scenes which along with it maximises anxiety.

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

SoundCloud
Brief Evaluation-Question 4

Our film would be certificate 15, this is because our film does not consist of blood and gore and is more psychological so it would be appropriate for this age range. The audience age would range from 15-25 as these are the most relatable audience for our character who is 17 years old, this is because this age range can relate the character in the film and understand clearly how this could happen to them if it were to exist. Another reason why we chose this age certificate is because we also looked at films currently out that are the same as ours, the main psychological one that I could find is ‘Paranormal Activity’, this certificate is 15 because it again doesn’t consist of much blood and gore so it best relates to our film as well.

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

SoundCloud
Brief Evaluation-Question 5

Because our film is a very short low budget film, we had to think of effective ways to promote our film to our audience, we first started off trying to create posters or advertisements, however after finishing we thought about it and showed it to a few other people in our year (who are also our target market) and they said they would not be interested by the poster as it would not give them much information, we then had to come up with another idea to possibly promote our film to our audience, then we realised that the best possible way to get our film to our audience was to use social networks as this is what are target audience mostly uses. Therefore we promoted on social networks such as ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ then instantly got a lot of feedback from our target audience because our target audiences we’re commenting on the film saying how it was effective etc. and also they were sharing it to their friends which helped increase the range of people who were seeing our film promotion. After all ways of promoting we decided that social networks was the best way to do it so we decided to stick with the promotions on there.

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

SoundCloud
Brief Evaluation- Question 6

Before starting our construction of the film, I never had experience on the Mac’s or knew how to do certain things on them using final cut express,  which came quite a problem at the start of construction but i soon picked it up quick and i have learnt a lot. When we were filming our preliminary task we were using one of the school camera’s however once we finished filming and started editing, we saw straight away that the film wasn’t  a good quality at all, so therefore for our Final movie we knew we had to find another camera that had better quality and audio, luckily Van (member of our group) had a HD camera which was clearly much better for what we were planning to do, another benefit of having this HD camera was that the clips were already in the right format for the Mac’s that we could start editing our film straight after we finished.
From my first experience on the Mac’s i knew that Final cut express was the best possible software for use to use to get the best final outcome, This is because it gave us a range of techniques that we could use to add to our film for it to come out with the best effects we wanted such as building tension etc. The techniques and effects that we could use were features such as being able to adjust colour and sound of our shots, we didn’t use the colour corrector in our film because we felt that the film was the right contrast of light and dark because it gave us  the opportunity to create a lot of tension throughout the piece. What we did use however was the audio adjuster, on some of the shots the dialogue/breathing of the character was too loud so it crossed over the music (breathing) and you couldn’t hear it at all, therefore we adjusted the volume of the characters breathing  to be quieter but boosted the audio of the ghost breath to add the effect of the ghost being more powerful than the character. If i were to re-shoot this I would of told our actor (Cassia) to be more quiet when breathing as it would save us a lot of time instead of having to adjust it. Whilst editing i also learned how to add credits onto the shots and adjust where they were placed and what font they were in, this was effective because it saved  a lot of time of our group guessing on what to do but i picked it up quick and knew how to do it. If i were to say criticism to Final cut express it would be that you have to render every clip after something you change, this became a big problem for our group as it became very irritating for us to do it over and over again as we had to change a lot of points which cost us a lot of time through our editing stage.

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

SoundCloud
Brief Evaluation- Question 7

If we were to compare my prelim and my final task, they are to very different things but still contain a psychological twist, in the prelim we focus on a real murderer who you can see who talks to dead people, however in the final we have a dead person as the murderer. However some shots and editing are the same therefore this shows that we are a institution who produce similar layouts of films.

In our preliminary task, we were given a task to include certain shots such as match on action shot and shot-reverse-shot, this helped us to film our final task because we had experience in using the camera. Through both films we wanted to maintain tension throughout and keep the audience uneasy because this is what typical psychological horrors do to the audience. A shot/technique that was used in both films was the ending, in our prelim we had the murderer grab the neck of another character however you do not fully see this because the shot cuts to black and a loud piece of music is played, this was used as well in our final when Cassia is pulled into the hatch the door slams and the camera cuts with loud music as well, we were very keen on using this because it was effective to have a cliff-hanger ending to keep the audience guessing.

I think most of the improvement from prelim to final task was due to the camera that we used, for our prelim we used a school camera that wasn’t very good quality or audio, so we decided to change to Van’s HD camera which turned out to be the right decision as it gave us a better quality outcome and saved us a lot of type because we didn’t have to change the format.

Overall i think the final outcome of ‘The Occupant’ was very good, we achieved this excellent product because we worked well as a team to get over the problems that we faced and we listened to everyone's idea’s within the group. Another reason why our final product was very good was because the amount of horror conventions and connotations that we added into our film for example the innocent girl in white of our character but also subverted the connotation but also having the villain in white. When showing friends and family members, the feedback was very positive with them saying how they were uneasy throughout the film and that they would be interested in more films being released.

SoundCloud
Overall