EvaluationBy Gabrielle Cooper and Katie Gardner

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

We have decided to stick to the majority of Codes and Conventions of a typical Thriller film, as this is what our Target Audience wanted when we performed a questionnaire.

For example, we have used dark colours, non-diegetic sound such as dark music, diegetic sound such as a woman screaming and a dark and isolated setting.

How does your media product represent particular social groups? Our protagonist of the white, female young victim

follows codes and conventions, as she is young and therefore quite vulnerable. She is also shown walking next to the murderer, and is quite a lot shorter and thus appears to be weaker.

Our murderer follows typical psychopathic features, as he is portrayed as calm and quite unnerving in our opening sequence. He is also quite good looking and seems to be the sort of boy that would be innocent if you saw him in the street. An example of this can be seen in the 2000 film “American Psycho” (pictured right), who is a young, good looking man with a psychopathic streak.

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

During our research, we decided that Universal Studios would be the ideal media institution to distribute our film, as they tend to be very successful in distributing films made by independent companies.

Extract from “Film Studio Research”

Who would be the audience for your media product? We originally decided on rating our film 15

certificate as this allows for a certain amount of violence but not too many graphic scenes – and this is what our target audience wanted when we asked them what they want from the Thriller genre.

Our audience is also female, and our protagonist is a teenage girl so this will also help the audience relate more to the characters.

How did you attract /address your audience? Our target audience is 15-19 year olds, and we

have used characters which are of a similar age in order to make the audience relate to them more.

We have also taken into account the results of our audience research and have used this during the construction of our opening sequence. For example, we have followed codes and conventions and have also tried to add in as much suspense as possible (as this is what our audience wanted).

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

We have used various new technologies during this process, such as: Blogger – we have both learnt how to structure and upload to a blog. Prezi, Powerpoint, Slideshare – we have both used various methods

to display our planning and research, and have learnt how to display the information as interesting for the reader as possible.

DSLR Camera and Panasonic Video Camera – the quality of the DSLR is by far superior to the Panasonic, and this can be seen in our final video. To improve, we could use a DSLR for the whole video. We have both learnt how to film, keep in focus and use tripods to give us the best result

iMovie – we used iMovie to edit the final video, and have learnt how to edit the speed (e.g. we put part of it into slow motion), add in non-diegetic sound such as voiceovers and music, and add in diegetic sound such as the victim screaming.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? Personally, we think both of our editing skills have

improved dramatically, along with our creativity when constructing a short film.

Additionally, we have both learnt a lot more in terms of the extensive research and planning which goes into the creation of a short film. For example, we found surveying our target audience extremely beneficial when making decisions such as whether to conform to or challenge typical codes and conventions.