Final Edit of Captive.

Evaluation.

In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Our media product uses several of the classic conventions of an opening sequence for of a thriller. The main ones are: Opening credits, Establishing the antagonist, using female victims, establishing the narrative and finally it's able to draw in the audience's interest. The opening credits last throughout the first half of the sequence, usually they might last slightly longer in a thriller but we wanted this to take up less time so the audience can get straight in to the film. The female being the victim is a vital choice we made as it is absolutely typical of thrillers, it is extremely rare for the victim to be male so we wanted to keep this aspect. However, we have also challenged the typical conventions of thriller openings. The first part of the sequence is filmed in broad daylight which is not common in thrillers. Also instead of showing everyday life for the majority of the sequence we actually instantly turn the characters lives upside down, throwing the audience straight into the action of the film. Finally we have a small amount of dialogue in the sequence which is actually not so common in the opening sequences of thrillers. How does your media product represent particular social groups? Our media product represents young females as vulnerable and slightly naive. I would say this because they are walking alone in a forest and a male on his own manages to kidnap them. This represents them as weak and helpless and we wanted them to be represented in this way so that they were portrayed as typical damsels in distress. The villain of the thriller is represented as a twisted and negative person. As well as this he seems powerful and in control of the situation. The representations would be typical in a thriller movie for example, in the film Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) The female victim Marion is murdered by an unknown male. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? A low budget independent media institute would be most likely to distribute our media product. This would be a company such pathe as it distributes British films. An example of a film recently distributed by them would be 127 hours (2010, Danny Boyle). This movie is of the same genre as our film captive therefore it is a possibility. Another smaller production company that would be more likely to distribute our film is Momentum Pictures, they have also distributed films of a similar genre e.g. Limitless (2011, Neil Burger) and Control (2007, Anton Corbijin) An alternative to a distribution company would be to advertise our thriller on the Internet and make it into an Internet film as it is aimed at teens between 16 and 19 and the Internet is widely used by this age range. I could use 'Youtube' for sneak peeks and trailers too.

Who would be the audience for your media product? The audience for my media product would preferably be 16-19 year old of a working/middle class. The main reason for this would be the fact that the characters in the thriller are 17 years old making it easier for our audience age range to relate to the characters. This website National Statistics Online, it presents me with a graph showing what age range visits the cinema most. It says that the age range which visit the cinema over once a month the most is 15-24 therefore this audience is more likely to watch our film if it were to be diostributed to the cinemas in Britain. I would not think that our film would be appropriate for people under the age of 15-16 because some of the ideas may be disturbing for them such as the kidnap/abduction and the idea of a stalker.

What did you do to attract/address your audience?

There are many aspects of our opening sequence that are deigned to attract the attention of the target audience. Such as the mise en scene, there are lots of quick cuts of things such as: close-ups, running from the front and behind, feet/hands close-up and throughout all of this the situation is becoming obvious to the audience. The music also attracts the audience as well as interacts by setting the tone of the of the film. It begins quiet and calming before building up with more sounds and volume causing a bigger atmosphere. This draws the audiences attention because it insinuates that something is about to happen and they want to be enlightened and find out whats happened, how its happened and why.

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

During the construction of our opening sequence i learnt how to fluently use 'Adobe Premiere Pro CS4' which is an editing programme. The skills I picked up from this consist of importing and exporting film, changing thew order and size of film, adding in effects such as cross dissolves and sound effects, I also learnt to import music and how to create titles using this programme. I have also learnt how to embed videos which enables me to present them in my blog. Finally i learnt how to use all of the camera equipment such as the tripod, the camera itself and the way to import the film on to the computer. After learning all these skills I feel that in my second year of A level Media I am well prepared if I needed to use this programme again.

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

Since we did our preliminary task i have learnt a lot of useful things. Our preliminary task felt very rushed and this meant that it wasn't finished to the best of our ability. Also we had some problems with members of the group. One person who just wasn't committed and this caused problems for everybody else. We also did not use the different types of shots well whilst filming which would have lowered our grade if it had been the final thriller piece. Luckily as it was just the prelim task this enabled us to sort out all of these problems for our actual thriller. We were much more organised with our timing and scheduled our filming and editing. Even though we didn't totally stick to our plan it still worked well and we were not rushed. Secondly, I made sure that the people i worked with were dedicated and would not leave all the work to one person or never turn up. This was a huge help as we did some really good teamwork. Finally, we used a number of camera tecniques to get good shots such as, close-ups, panning and two shots.