Mollie Ridgard: January 2016

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Q7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

When I began to plan my preliminary task I only had a storyboard to go off when filming, but in the end I didn’t even use. As I didn’t use the planning I prepared it took me a lot longer to film because I was on my own as well as I didn’t have a plan to help me so it took me over double the amount of time it should have done. I learnt from my prelim task that before we began to film that we had planned, mind mapped and made sure we all knew exactly what we was doing when starting to film our opening sequence. I noticed the difference between shooting ‘Lola’ and shooting my prelim task because it took me around 2 hours to film all of my preliminary task and it took us 2 hours to film half of our footage for ‘Lola’ even though my prelim task was a lot shorter. This was all down to knowing what we needed to film at the right moment. I noticed that the footage we filmed was very similar to our story board and it helped us get the best quality of footage that we could. Even though we took some extra shots of the same shot we didn’t need to use the extra footage we filmed because our original footage was the best quality we could get. Whereas in my Preliminary task I feel like I should have taken more shots so I had a bigger variety of shots I could choose from the make the clip look professional and well thought out.

When I started editing my preliminary task the technology and apps were all new to me and it took me a lot longer to edit it on my own because I didn’t know what anything was used for. When we came to edit our final thriller we knew how it all worked, like sounds, cutting clips and knowing which shots we were going to use because we had a clear storyboard which we stuck to. The one thing that we didn’t do in the preliminary task which we included in our final piece was sound effects and non-diegetic sound. We didn’t use any noticeably fake effects that people would think straight away that they were added but we did use a track of music throughout the whole sequence which was very unnatural. This worked because the track was very freaky as well as it being very subtle and it worked with our narrative.

When editing ‘Lola’ we found out that choosing the right shots was the hardest part of the whole project because we took multiple shots of the same shot. We shot the film in 2 days, one day was in the bedroom and the second day was at the location both outside and inside (the stairs). We found this benefitted our film better than squeezing the whole film into one day because our biggest part of it was that we had plenty of natural light and because it’s in the winter season there isn’t much natural light.

Q6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Q5: How did you attract/address your audience?

Our ambition to attract the audience was using different types of music that dragged out causing tension for the audience to keep them drawn into the scene as well as using a variety of shots and camera angles to keep the audience intrigued. We also made sure we didn’t show the face of the main character fully to create enigma for the audience and for them to carry on watching ‘to find out who she is and what she’s done’. Our group collected a few different pieces of feedback from people around the class, both female and male for different opinions to see what worked and what didn’t. We found out that the opening production title was the most common positive feedback we got back, we produced this using Adobe after effects. They said that it was ‘very professional looking’ and that because none of the other groups had a production title like ours it made it stand out and caught the audience’s attention. The only negative feedback we did get was not to show as much footage and information of the body.

Other positives we got were that the music worked really well with the theme and narrative and the laugh at the end creates the suspension for the audience, our audience said ‘It creates uneasy watching’ we thought this was good because we didn’t know whether this made the scene have a more horror feeling instead of it being a thriller. The audience also said that the colour theme of red with the nail varnish and red lipstick was a good aspect to add because it caused tension and mystery for them because red has connotations of danger and blood and because there was a body included in the scene it fits in well with the narrative. Our group put a lot of effort into our opening scene to make sure it looked like a professional thriller and by only having one lot of bad feedback made us happy knowing we were able to attract the audience and keep them intrigued and carry on watching.

To attract our specific audience which is young adults we did add the production logo because it was modern as well as having bright colours and effects to it to catch the attention of the audience to keep them watching. We also added girly aspects and modern life props to give the modern feel to the sequence because it will make the audience feel included if they know what the props are instead of having older props which people don’t know of or aren’t used anymore. We did use props like makeup and jewellery which are aimed at more of the female audience than the male audience but with having the body it keeps the male audience included.

Q4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

We looked into different themes and which type of themes would appeal to different age groups and we found out that thriller are mostly viewed by teenagers and young adults. So we then started making our thriller to fit in with young adults and suitable for teenagers to watch as well. We thought to target our thriller at teenagers (15+) because when carrying out our primary research we asked mostly teenagers and from the answers we got we felt like we adapted our thriller to suit the teenage age group whilst still letting young adults watching it because it’s 15+. This was a choice we made in a group to let as many age groups watch our thriller without limiting the viewers to only one target age group.