Question 4

A particular group of people who we have identified as the recipients for our thriller film. The purpose of having a target audience is mainly because it keeps younger viewers protected. Identifying your target audience means you can make the content of the film suitable for your target audience’s age group. Our target audience was teenagers aged 15 upwards. This is mainly because our narrative was quite sinister it would be too scary for young children to follow yet not scary enough to make it an 18. Another reason why we made the target audience 15 was because the characters in our film were of a similar age which means the audience ae able to relate to them and the situations that are taking place. There is little gory in our film yet there is a jump scene at the end of the film, this could frighten younger viewers as they may not understand that this is fake so in order to protect them we found it suitable that the age group selected was for children that would understand that this is all made up. The mise en scene is also relatable for our target audience as the girl is evidently wearing her school clothes and is walking home from school which is a typical scenario that our target audience finds their self in almost every day. This will make them emphasize with the victim as they can easily put themselves in her position. 

Question 2

Question 2: Characters

The only two characters in my opening sequence are the victim and the antagonist, the victim being played by an ordinary teenage girl.  I chose the victim to be a girl as this is conventional to the thriller genre further her age will appeal to our target audience who are also of a similar age, she is dressed in normal teenage clothes for example she Is wearing a short skirt with a white blouse, this means she does not stand out. The victim is portrayed with innocence which entices the audience and creates an emotional bond between the characters and the audience. The only other character in my film is the antagonist, whose identity is hidden for the first few seconds of the opening sequence; this will make the audience fear the unknown. The teenage girl follows the typical representation of victims in thriller films this is because she is oblivious to the stalking taking place. The fact that the victim is a teenager will enable the audience to feel an attachment to the events taking place, the similarities between the eves taking place and real life creates a relatable approach. This creates emotions for the audience to think how they would handle a situation like this, the fact that her age is similar creates a bigger relationship with our target audience. As the victim is female the audience will create a relationship with the audience, the female viewers will feel empathy towards her as they connect with her vulnerability and the male audience will feel sympathy towards her as they know that she is too weak to handle herself.

Our opening sequence starts in a basement setting where we are first introduced to the antagonist. He is portrayed as the antagonist to the audience as his identity is partially hidden. The dark clothes and sketchy manorisms suggests that he could be a killer. As the camera pans the room that the antagonist is sitting in the audience notice a wall where many pictures of the same girl are hanging. The antagonist is often represented stronger of the characters which makes them easily identifiable through their superiority. This representation of the antagonist leads the audience to question his mental state creating an enigma.

The other character is the teenage girl the audience are made aware of from the photos on the basement wall. The audience are unaware of the relationship between them. When the audience is introduced to the female victim she is unaware of the strange man watching her every move. This could be seen as stereotypical as the female victims are portrayed as dumb therefor not noticing his presence and falling right into his trap. The idea that the young girl is unaware is shown by her continuing her route home until she is dragged round the corner. The representation of both my characters follow the way both of the individuals would have been presented in a typical thriller film.

The applicable teenage victim walking home from school is routine that would enable the audience to create a relationship with this character as they an relate to the situation that she has been put in. The similarities between our opening sequence and daily life will make the audience relate to the opening sequence. Our victim is the same age as our target audience which creates more of a connection and causes the audience to question what they would do in a situation where they were being stalked on the way home. The use of a female victim also relates to the audience as female viewers will have an emotional connection with the victim as they will feel just as vulnerable if they were to imagine being there themselves. Boys will fill empathy for the girl as they know she is too weak to look after herself.

Question 1

   In what ways does your thriller use, challenge or develop forms of conventions of the real media products.

     The brief was to create a two minute opening to a thriller that includes all the credits, sounds and conventions of a typical thriller film. I had to ensure that my final product contained all the elements expected in a thriller. The narrative of our film was one we created within our group. The sequence followed the codes and conventions that would appeal to the target audience of the thriller we were producing. There was three memebers in our group a first. Nojus, Harry and myself. Harry left our group before we started the filming process. This left me and Nojus to distribute the different job roles. Or roles included the producer, editor, producer of photography and the director. The roles also included the actors. Our job roles were shared equally between both of us. We decided that t would be beneficial if we both picked the job roles we felt most confident in.
d
     Typical conventions of the thriller genre usually include an antagonist and a victim. Typically the victim is played by a female and the identity of the antagonist is often unknown. Other conventions include iconography, such as knives and other murder weapons. Knifes are one of the most conventional murder weapons as seen in Scream and Halloween. Knives immediately create a huge amount of suspense as they are related to the image of death; this makes the audience feel sorry for the victims, thus creating a relationship between the audience and the characters within the film.

I took inspiration from other thriller to make my thriller seem more conventional to the thriller genre, one of the idea that I took from the film Halloween was the idea to make the antagonist a teenager, I was also inspired to do this by the film sinister. A child playing the antagonists is becoming more and more conventional to the thriller genre, also used in woman in black. From this comes the idea that the child has been possessed by the devil or an evil spirit and the audience begin to question their mental state.  Through my research I learnt that thrillers become a lot scarier when the identity of the antagonist is hidden. This I incorporated into my own thriller right at the beginning of our sequence when Nojus is walking down the stairs and the lighting is so dark the audience are unable to identify his face. Low key lighting like this and the music we enveloped with it made my opening sequence conventional to the thriller genre. Other convention such as quick pace is typical of the thriller genre, it is used to build Adrenalin within the audience, this build up is used to go with the image that will follow. By adding fast pace music alongside, the pace and excitement of the audience increases.

The title of my thriller is ‘Blacklist’ this tie in with the narrative of the story and follows the convention of the thriller genre. The definition of the lexis ‘Blacklist’ is when a person is put on a list of individuals which have been singled out as deserving some sort of punishment. The title of our film follows the narrative and explains why the victim has been chosen in my thriller. The title we chose revels a sinister element though just one word which incises the audience to watch the film.

Final Thriller Production

Rough Cut - Miss Georgoiu

Rough Cut

Within mine and Nojus group we made a rough cut of our thriller sequence. This was an important step to making our thriller as it is final draft of what our thriller should be like. This is including editing and sound effects. Our rough cut includes all the music and editing that we will include in the real final sequence.  The credits for our thriller are also included. The feedback we received from other students in the class and both our teachers were taken on board.

After we had produced our rough cut it was uploaded onto you tube. Where students in our class and from the year group were able to leave there criticism and comments below. Including what hey though would make our final sequence better. We though we aught to take action on their suggestions as they were part of our target audience. Getting feedback from our target audience rather than Nojus and I picking out the flaws in the piece is a better idea as we would both have been bias to the bits we had created. For example if i had worked hard on a particular frame and it did not look good, I would not want to take it out as i had worked so hard.

On our final sequence we allowed our target audience to leave their feedback, their comments included what went well and what we could of done better. These comments were really helpful as now we know specifically what we should have done better and how we will be able to improve it. The feedback our our video was mainly positive the comments said that  they liked the way we added a filter to make the whole sequence give more dramatic effect.  From these comments we gathered that we could make our sequence more enjoyable for the audience by adding in background music this would have made the sequence easier to follow. After looking our our film we realised that there was a lot of silence this can be filled in with at least once piece of music playing in the background. Choosing the right music would make our opening sequence more conventional to the thriller genre. We will have to make this change before we upload our final piece. By taking on this criticism we will be able to engage more with our target audience.

Our feedback also said that the second half of our film was not as good as the first half. Unfortunately we had no time to redo the whole our the second half so we will have to make little tweaks and hopefully that will make a difference. The second half of our opening sequence lacked the originality that we produced in the first minute, thus failing to create as much suspense as the audience are able to predict.

Although we had some critism we had positive feedback for the sound that we used. Our feedback said that the second half did not make the audience feel that much suspense. We should have used different angles and have used better cinematography like we did in the first half. Both me and Nojus agreed that the second half of our thriller was had to compare to the fist section after the opening title is shown the sequence ors downhill. In order to make our sequence more thrilling we must change bits of the second half.

The feedback that we received after uploading our rough cut to youtube suggested that we need to improve our second half of our opening sequence, this would then engage our target audience. Our group needs to go back and improve our second half as the first half is more conventional and engages our audience more so that they will be more inclined to watch the rest of our film. This feedback has shown to me that we can still improve our opening sequence. Another negative comment that we received was that we could of added music to the suspenseful parts and professionally fade the music in and out instead of the music cutting straight out.
The changes we will make to our thriller sequence is that we are going to add background music to the places where there is silence. An example of this would be where Nojus is following the victim and in order not to kill the mood of the sequence we just left the silence. Our target audience thought this was abad idea.


In conclusion, the feedback we were given allowed us to rectify any mistakes that we had not noticed. Or that deemed to be unconventional to the thriller genre. By taking on the comments from our target audience we are able to see what they expect to see in a thriller movie . 

Group Meetings - Miss Gergiou

Group Meetings
In these meetings we discussed how vital and how important it is to have a meeting schedule as it allowed us to arrange times where everyone in our group was free. It allowed us to discuss the different micro elements and how they were important to our thriller. The discussions we had helped us communicate with each other in a way that made me and Nojus both understand what we were gaining from this process.
As there was only two of the in the group the communication was easy and there was not many people giving their opinions. However as there was only two of us it did make the filming on a whole hard especially when both of us needed to be in the scene.

From attending our group meetings we discovered that communication and planning are essential to making our finished product better, it worked as we didn't know how long all the filming was going to take so by meeting up al together and discussing what we needed to bring the next time we filmed saved confusion and time. By the time me and Nojus had met up around 3 different times we both knew what came next on the filming she dual.

Date	Action	To be done by	By whom	Discussions
19.10.15	Deciding the group narrative	15.12.15	All members of the group	Different ideas were discussed with all member of our group. Eventually we combined all our ideas to find a suitable narrative
12.10.15	Planning the opening sequence	15.12.15	All members	In this meet up we discussed how the opening sequence would be set out. Including where the credits will be placed
23.10.15	Planning mise en scene	15.12.15	All members	We though about what areas of mise en scene we will fatuous on for example characters and iconography
24.10.15	Elements, example, and sounds created	15.12.15	All group members	We decided that we will remove all of the sound from out clips and edit in our own sounds that will exaggerate what is happening in the scene.
02.11.15	Planning sound	15.12.15	Nojus	We looked at the footage we had filmed and came to the conclusion that all our sound we filmed did not sound as good as they could.
23.10.15	Planning editing	15.12.15	All group members	We discussed that we would use an ‘ash’ layering over our work to make it look more conventional to the thriller genre.
05.11.15	Planning Credits	15.12.15	All group members	We both though of different names that we would use for our credits to make it less repetitive and make it look better
13.11.15	Planning characters	15.12.15	All group members	We spoke about what characters we will need in each individual  frame and who would be filming while all the characters are in one frame.
20.11.15	Group story board	15.12.15	All group members	In this meeting we decided to add all of our story boards to come together and produce one final story board that will reflect a bit of all of our work
26.11.15	Filming schedual and risk assessment	15.12.15	All group members	We developed out filming schedule and risk assessment to ensure that we could stick to a time frame and that there would be no confusion with meeting times and what props needed to be brought.
27.11.15	Filming the thriller	20.12.15	All group members	This is when we started to film our thriller we decided we needed to redo some shots which keep us behind our filming schedule sometimes.

Production Roles - Miss Miller

Within the film industry and creating a film, the best way to manage a production team is by allocating specific roles to each person as it will make the whole process more organised. By doing this way if everyone is doing their own job it will make everything less stressful this means that each person can specialise in the area they are focused on.

These roles include:
- Producers
- Directors
- Actors
-Director of photography
- Music producers
- Screen play writers
- Mise en scene coordinators
- Editors

Our group was different from the rest of the others, as there was only two of us we did our best to allocate the different rolls between us. The director was the main role that we allocated, the director is given the job of planning out and arranging times for filming. This was easily done as there was only two of us. We both made sure we had planned in advance where we were meeting and at what given time so this role was shared between the both of us. The directors job is also change any ideas if they do not look as good as they were planned to be in order to achieve the best possible role.

The producers role is to make sure the characters are playing their roles properly and making sure that the filming is going to scheduled. This role was once again shared between the both of us as we both made impute to the filming process by changing scenes and frames of the original idea. In our opening credits we are going to use made up names to make the credits more interesting rather than repeating the same two names.

The roles of characters had to adapted as there is now only two of us in the group. The characters are now played my only Nojus and I. The killer will be played by Nojus and I will still play the victim. The role of the actors is to follow what the story board plans. Making sure they are ready for the next frame they are in. These are the people that the audience should be able to relate to. The actors role is to follow what the director says and to preform as if they were really in that position in order to make their performance believable.

I was given the job of finding the music and sound effects that need to be added in. As the editing was all done on Nojus computer I found the sounds for him and he added them in. I am responsible for making sure the sound is in every scene that it needs to be in. I was able to find music that created suspense but also allowed Nojus to give his own opinion and ideas on the sounds I had used.

As there is now only two of us in our group we had to change the narrative of our piece on short notice. This accounted for me and Nojus becoming screen play writers. We both shared the responsibility of writing the new story for our thriller. We had to change each of the frames of our story boards and then filmed around that. This job involves making sure that the story is followed throughout filming and is made easier as this is also the directors job.

The next role I took on was the mise - en - scene co-ordinator, this means I had to plan what props needed to be brought in for the filming that day. For mine and Nojus' sequence we needed a knife that had to be brought into school. This also includes the costume and make-up we needed. My role was to also make sure Nojus and I were in the right positioned when we were being filmed to make sure the shot looks exactly how it did in the storyboard.

Nojus individual role was editing. He chose this as it is the element he is most comfortable with doing however when Nojus is not in school I use the lessons to input my own editing skills. The role of he editor is to input all of the raw footage onto final cut pro in order to fasten up and add effects to any given frames. The editors role is one of the most important as they are in charge of the final touches before showing it to the audience. As editing is one of the most important roles this was the only individual role given to Nojus. I feel by doing this the roles were allocated fairly to make sure he was not doing to many difficult tasks at once.

Despite having to change groups which meant changing our entire narrative, me and Nojus were able to take on all the roles involved when making our final sequence. By taking on these responsibilities me and Nojus have worked more as a team which will reflect in our final product.