Here is our final video, a link to see the video in youtube is below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2d4Sz_30R8

This is our directors commentary for our video, and a link to the youtube post below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AURu56HXPo

Feedback

We have created a questionnaire for 20 people to fill out after they have viewed our clip. We decided only to question people that were within our target audience to get the most precise information to make the very best film we could. Although our target audience is male young adults and teenagers, we decided to also appeal to the female aged 15-30 demograpic as the results from the questionnaire showed that they enjoyed thriller/horror films. The feedback we got was quite good, with compliments along with with some constructive criticism. We decided that we would use this criticism to improve our film before we finalised it.

Here is one of the questionnaires that was given back from a group sample of 20 people.

How did you attract/address your audience?

The genre of our opening sequence is a psychological thriller, we used lots of ways to show this genre to build up suspense and gain the audiences attention so it is interesting and they want to watch the rest. Firstly, looking at the films target audience of male teenagers and young adults, we were able to select different aspects of the making and editing to suit this. The plot line, camera work, sound, editing and Mise-en-Scene are the different aspects we looked at, which were all extremely important for our film to work, flow and keep the audiences attention. We chose the title of the opening film to be Spiritless which we hope would attract our target audience as it sets the genre of the film. Due to the fact that our film is a psychological thriller, we had to remember that is not suitable for anybody under the age of 15, to both make sure our intended audience could watch the film and to distract people who would find the film disturbing and too frightening. The locations are quite normal, which adds realism to the clip; this can make the strange things happening in the clip look even more dramatic and frightening because the thought of it actually being real can be more terrifying its self. The fact that the main character is walking very suspiciously creates tension which engages the audience as they wonder why he is so suspicious.

We used a point of view shot, where the main character is holding the camera, this was used to show a ghost sitting next to him and then disappears at his second glance. This creates tension as the audience is left wondering what will happen next, and whether it was just his imagination or if it was real. It adds realism to the clip too. The main character is looking out at a beautiful location with glistening water, which juxtapositions to the unfamiliar strange happenings around him.The clip is very mysterious and grabs the audiences attention as they want to understand what is going on, what is the characters relationship with the ghost and what will happen to the main character.

It was quite sunny on the day we filmed, which helped us to film a shot of a shadow following the main character. This adds to the feel that a ghost is following him, which is an aspect that further keeps our audience engaged.

With more luck, it also rained the day before, so we were able to take a shot of the main character stepping into a puddle which is shown to frighten him a little, as he looks around to see if anybody is following him. This shows he is anxious and afraid as he is seen to be very jumpy. This then reflects on the audience too, as they will then feel jumpy too.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The target audience for our film would be teenagers and young adults. The genre comes under psychological thriller so would contain scenes too distressing for children and younger teens to watch. With this we have decided our film would have the rating of 15, which would allow us still to reach our target audience. At first we thought the rating should be 18, however upon review we decided that that would be too restricting to our audience, and as the film would not contain scenes overly distressing or inappropriate there would be no reason.

Shutter Island's primary reception was in the 20-30 year old age group, and we therefore set that as our target audience too, but allowing teens aswell so we can widen our audience. Shutter island also had the same age rating, 15. we decided it would be mainly males as our protagonist is male and men are typically more prone to watch films with horror and violent aspects, however we did not believe their would be a much less significant amount of interest in females. Psychological thrillers typically appeal to a more niche audience, and therefore we decided the typical nature of a would-be audience member would be to have interests and preferences to mystery, drama and violence. We would therefore advertise this on places such as TV, radio, bus stops and football stadiums.

This is an example of who might come to watch our film. Due to the fact that our main character is quite depressed and deluded and has a hint of "emo" and "goth" in his style of clothing. This would appeal to the "emo crowd" so we would aim to attract people like the teenager pictured. This is Luke, he is 18 years old and lives in Manchester. He dresses quite "emo" and gothic he would therefore shop in places like soho.com for example. He does not shop in high street shops and is not interested in whats in fashion as he has his own unique style. He would defenatly be interested in horror and thriller films and defenatly psychological thrillers - like our film. He is the type of person who likes goorey films and would certanly buy the DVD's of these types of scary films when they come out.

Luke listens to hard rock and metal music like AC/DC and Led Zeppalin, he doesnt necessarily listen to the radio as he has his own individual taste.

Our film would unquestionably enjoy or film, and if it was to be shown on the cinema it would probably appeal to him and he would be one of our viewers, as he likes other films like this such as Unknown and Inception.

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

Two films we looked closely at when planning our opening sequence was shutter island and The butterfly effect, as both are psychological thrillers and both incorporate flashbacks. These films were moth major blockbuster hits, shutter island was produced and distributed jointly by the major Hollywood conglomerates Columbia Pictures and Paramount Pictures, as they are very big companies. However, realistically they wouldn’t distribute our film. We looked into british distribution companies and found two main companies we thought may distribute our film; The first was a company called Hammer film, which has distributed many low-budget horrors and thrillers, ours would fit to their preffered genre and therefore they may be interested. The second is a more well-known british company – Working title. These have produced many well-known films such as Shaun of the dead. Another option would be working title’s subsidary company, working title 2. This may be more appropriate as they deal with lower-budget films, such as ours.

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

The opening sequence we have created has the genre of psychological thriller. The plot line is based on a young male student who is very spooked about his surroundings, seeming like he is going insane. The idea came from the film's Shutter Island and The Butterfly Effect where the main character is also very spooked, wary and unaware of what is really going on. These are real media products and both their story's have young male's as protagonists. We decided to look further into shutter Island after looking at both of the films, we thought our opening sequence would look better by looking into this film. We decided when we looked at the structure, it was best not to work from it, as it is too long and takes quite a while to get into the story so we decided to start differently. To quickly get the audience engaged and gripped we decided to give more hints behind what is going on the story and added much more things to the film. Therefore, we were able to pack lots more excitement into our 2 minute opening sequence and make our audience want to watch more.

In Shutter Island the main character thinks he is somebody else, it is only revealed later on in the film so we could not have this as the main idea of the film because nobody would know it was a psychological thriller. We still decided to make our main character misunderstood in some way, we decided that we would make him have hallucinations so it seems he is seeing a ghost, the audience however do not know whether these are hallucinations or if he is actually being haunted by a ghost. This keeps the audience involved and gripped.

At the end of our opening film, we how a midshot of the back of the main character swinging on a swing with the swing next to him swinging by it's self. This creates the illusion that there is somebody there, however the audience do not know whether they are just viewing the main characters point of view.

An important prop in our media product is the ketchup we used, without this nobody would know that the secondary character is dead or not, so we decided to spread the ketchup underneath his face to create the illusion that he is bleeding from the brain. To make this even more haunting we decided to do a worms-eye shot, this makes it seem more horrifying and real - more like he is dead.

In one moment of the film opening there is a high angle shot of the main protagonist character Matt walking past after he believed there was some sort of spirit behind him. We edited this in a way which made it look a lot like CCTV camera footage. We did this by adding a timer at the bottom of the shot and adding a black and white filter to the high angle shot. With additional incidental music from the sound bridge we were able to create an interesting creepy shot. This also makes the viewer question Matts sanity and informs them that he is paranoid that someone or something is watching him.

In terms of sound, we we did not know whether to use music or not. The quality of diagetic sound we captured was not very good so this really made us think we needed to add something different over it. We used a piano instrumental type of soundtrack to the video, so it would seem much more haunted.

The mise-en-scene in our media product is very simple, we only really had to look at a few props and we didnt really have to change our characters clothing to their clothing in reality as their characters were very similar to themselves. The locations are very juxtaposing like by the water at Salford Quays, this makes the film and what is going on in the film much more realistic as well as much more scary too as the audience can compare the beautiful scenery to the not so beautiful storyline.

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

We have learnt much about technologies throughout the process of our film-making. For the camera’s, we learned much about how to operate and handle them carefully and efficiently. As they were digital as opposed to the cameras used in real media products like Shutter Island we could not use the focus to do shallow and deep focuses, this along with other things, were significant differences we learned between the two types. In an attempt to do different focuses we attempted to use the different features on the camera, such as face recognition, these were not as effective as a lens focus would have been however, and weren’t very noticeable.

Eventually we became more comfortable with filming and produced more creative shots. Knowing how to use the camera and editing software meant that we could be more adventurous in the footage we shot, for example, the match-cut of the footstep in the puddle, we placed the camera on the floor on top of a coat to prevent damage, and put a waterproof film over the top, to prevent any droplets of water damaging it, this allowed us to do a worms-eye view shot of the feet of the main character.

We also learnt a lot about editing, for example adding effects and transitions to the piece to make it more aesthetically pleasing. This was difficult at first, but as we got used to it we were able to do more, for example adding cross fades and motion blur.

Learning all this was long and arduous but made the video making process much easier, and overall, we believe we are now much more adept at filming and editing.

How does your media product represent different social groups?

Our film is set in a modern-day society, and has such hints at the different subcultures within youth culture today. The main protagonist of our film is a male youth, a college student, a group often associated with being joyous and carefree, however this stereotype is broken in our clip, as the youth is shown to be deeply disturbed, having had a traumatic experience. We can see this through the use of facial expressions during the scene., which are meant to show the character has depressed, with a defeated, crumpled look.

The character is also socially relevant, as he represents the sub-culture known as “emo” – an emotional youth, we chose to show this In his outfit.

As the character is an adolescent, he is inbetween being a child and a man, this shows the difficulty teenagers face in dealing with experiences like this. The character is alone throughout the clip, showing he would rather brood on the thoughts himself than be comforted by others.

The secondary character, Raphael, is also significant. The characters are shown to have a very strong friendship, this goes against the usual stereotypes of black and white people as being divided into two social groups. However, there friendships shows unity.

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

Our preliminary task, although we were pleased with it, was very basic. The main task on the other hand was much more difficult and complicated. We had to use the skills we learned in our preliminary and apply them to our main product in order to achieve a successful video.

Setting

One of the things we realised during the preliminary was the importance of location, after looking back on our preliminary we realised that one of the worst things about it was the setting, the college. Due to the nature of our film this was especially important, as we should have surroundings which provoked fear or strangeness to hint at our genre. We therefore decided on three separate locations – an alleyway, a wooded park, and a water-edge scene. We decided we would use the flashback idea which was central to our film to link these scenes together, in an example of elliptical editing. We first attempted to film the scene in the dark in the hope that it would add to the suspense and sense of fear.

However, as is evident in the picture above, the poor lighting made the picture quality bad and in some cases unclear. We hoped that we would be able to modify it during editing, but this proved unachievable. Therefore we had to re-think our plan, and decided instead to film during daytime, this di

d however waste a lot of time, as we had already got a lot of footage, but it was necessary.

Camerawork

Our camerawork improved a lot from the preliminary to the main task, we became much more adept at getting a wide variety of shots. One shot that proved difficult was the CCTV footage shot

We had to do a high-angle shot for this, as if from a camera’s point of view, and it was difficult to get the camera high enough, as the stand would not extend far. We therefore improvised, and placed the camera atop a windowsill, having got permission to do so.

Editing

The editing of the sequence was also much more difficult than in the preliminary, one annoyance was in the amount of footage we had shot. We had to rifle through a much larger amount of footage than in the preliminary, picking out those shots we were to use. As we realised we may change our minds later on, we kept all the files we were not using in a separate folder, rather than deleting them.

During the editing process we fit the editing sofrware Final Cut Pro to our preference, we used apple mac computers, with dual-monitors, which allowed us to be able to sufficiently view both the clips we were editing and the full sequence.

The editing was much more complex than in the preliminary, as we had to do a much larger sequence and incorporate titles. We had to put special effects on some of our clips to show flashbacks also.

Sound

This was the first time we had the challenge of putting sound in our video, as this was not done in the preliminary. We had to find incidental music that helped create the atmosphere we wanted our movie to have, therefore, we decided to look on youtube, as this was where we could find free, uncopyrighted music. We selected a clip and used a youtube converter to change it into a file we could use, we then imported this into our clip, tested the effects and were pleased.

We also needed some non-diegetic sound, such as when the gate creaks open, we therefore found a free sound effect site and downloaded the appropriate sounds from there.

Performance

We realised the importance of acting during the main film, the character had to seem depressed and disturbed, and this was difficult to act. We tried different things and looked back to see whether they worked or not, for example, at first we decided the character should be drunk, however we soon realised that it was too difficult to act that, and decided against it.

180 degree rule

The 180-degree rule was massively important, sometimes we filmed a shot from different angles for a different variety, when we began to edit, we looked over all of our shots and chose the clips that were able to fit in with the 180 degree rule. Without looking at this we would not be able to make our film flow and it would look wrong. With this, in our main task we decided to only film from angles that would follow the 180 degree rule, therefore we had better chance of our film flowing and it would save a lot of time too.

To conclude, the experience tought us a lot of things, about what to do and not what to do in the planning, making and editing of the main task. We learnt how to use a variety of camera shots and how to manage and control time and problems we faced.

Overview of filming the main task

There were a lot of difficulties when in the making of our product, a lot of obstacles were also put in our way when in the production of our media product. We had filmed all of our scenes, mostly in the dark so that it would look more suited to the genre we had chosen. Unfortunately, the lighting was too dark to see anything we had filmed; We tried to lighten the clip when we came to editing it, however this would not work and so we decided it would be best to start the filming again but in the day this time round so we could make sure we had a clear picture with perfect lighting. We were only able to get through half of our filming before we had to stop filming - due to the lighting, so we planned to film again the next day, however it unexpectedly rained and so we were not able to film as it would not look right with the rest of our clips. This was incredibly time wasting as we were so far behind anyway. However, some good did come out of this because the following day, due to it raining the day before, we were able to film the puddle clip perfectly.

We then began to edit, the time we had left became a big issue as it didn't seem we were going to be able to finish the filming, and if we did it would not be as high quality as it should be.
We were able to find extra time to make this issue solved in some way, however some points were not finished. The dietetic sound in the background of all of the clips were very loud and did not flow with each other, we were unable to find the time to fix this as we were more concerned about how the film looked.

We found it very easy to put all of the different clips together as Final Cut Pro was very easy to use. All of the different effects we used looked really good too, like they were actual flashbacks for example.

We uploaded the music we used from youtube to find un-copyrighted music, we found a good piano instrumental which fit in with our genre, looked good in our film and helped our opening sequence to flow.

Overall, as well as our preliminary we learnt a great deal from our main task. If we do anything like this again, we will defiantly get better and we will pay more attention to the time we have, and plan more efficiently.