Evaluation

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



Our product uses most thriller conventions and also attempts to take them to another level. It consists of a protagonist and a psycological antaginist (this is where we tried to develope our idea) which can be very confusing at first but as it goes on we begin to see that the girl is having her mind messed around with. We used voyerism towards the end of our piece along with a high angle shot to show the girl is being over-powered and can not keep on top of her feelings. We challenged the conventions by using a young ordinary girl who is having psycological problems. We done this because we didn't want it to be too typical. In most psycological thrillers, it is a man with problem and he ends up killing people. Our piece has no dead bodies or any sign of death because we thought it would be too typical.

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

Our media product doesn't focus on alot of people, just a young girl. As the actress, I am in my mid teens. However, I look young so it made things alot easier. To base our story on a girl in her early teens, means she could be experianceing hormonal problems that could effect her mind alot and make her mentally unwell. We focused it on the young girl because we was targeting out piece at teenagers and maybe they have experianced some psycological problems (maybe not like our piece) but they could relate and if not they could see how hard it is for those who do.

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

Film4 distributes films on all scales. They have been known to pick up some films that havn't done very well but also some of the best films known such as "Slumdog Millionaire". Although our film is sort of Americanised, Film4 do seem to pick up on many of these types of films such as "Love Actually".

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

Looking at our results from our questionaire and our research into thrillers, our target audience would be between 15-25 for both genders. This is due to our content being a little disturbing and younger people may be effected by it. I think people between this age could maybe relate a little bit more to the girls problem because maybe they have been depressed and suffered skitzaphrenia in their teen years. However, older people could also relate to this but maybe would'nt be as interested in this particular genre anymore.

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

We began researching thrillers and seeing what conventions attracked us the most. We addressed our audience but createing a questionaire and used the results to match them with the conventions we most enjoyed to. We used these conventions in our piece to attract our audience. We used visual effects to set the scene and style of out piece but also to seperate the present time from the girls dream.

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

From our preliminary exercise, I learnt how to arrange good shots and get them to be very effective. This became a big part in our final piece as we needed the best angles we could and make them mean something everytime. Using the tri-pod sometimes became difficults as it would only go so high and only go so low, and became a problem but we worked around it and it became easy to work with after a while of thinking. The iMac computers were all new to me. I had no idea how to use the computer itself let alone the software! After a few lessons of just experimenting I became very adapted to it and could do things alot more easier, even if we did encounter a few more problems. The iMovie programme did let us down quite regulally. I don't know why but it made out preliminary task go really bad and it kept jumping and speeding up. We still do not know why that happened. Our final piece also took a while to edit as the programme often didn't let us crop our piece properly or add effects. However, we did overcome these problems and produce a good piece.

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

Looking back to my preliminary task, I have learnt that you should always leave enough time to edit because something could always go wrong. We even encounted this with our final product but still managed to sort it out in time because we knew something could easily go wrong. In our preliminary task we experimented with many angles but found that when it came to editing they did not link together very well. I now know how to link them together at the time of filming rather than later on when editing. I learnt about the 180 degree rule and how to keep continuity, even if it is stilll a hard factor! I need to express my ideas alot more because once I finally did everything came together. Next time I should pick my group carefully as one member did not turn up very much and it made everything alot harder.

1st May - Editing - Final Touch - Alice

Neelam was not in media today. However me and Shelley view our piece again and decided to change the voice over. We made a new one and edited the pitch of it to make it more higher to sound like a young girl. It is SOOOOO much better now.