Evaluation

Thriller Practical Evaluation

I think our media practical was successful in filling it’s role as a thriller. Typical themes and conventions of a thriller is that it is fast paced and has some sort of hero’s quest to stop an evil entity. The thriller genre however has many sub genres so this is a broad and basic view of a thriller. My group’s practical however bore this in mind giving our audience a fast pace visual experience from the offset. The BBC documentary on thrillers we had watched earlier in the media course looked at the pro’s and con’s of the two different ways to starting a thriller. The slow seductive approach or instant arousal and for practical reasons as well as theatrical we went for the instant hit. I believe it is hard to discern what sub genre our thriller falls into but that I would say it touches upon the horror thriller genre as horror thrillers often consist of some mental physical or emotional conflict between charters such as the ‘Saw’ series, and depends on the audiences fear. Our thriller opening is not long enough to display all these forms and conventions but the editing of the ‘villain’s’ flash back suggest a mental/psycho element , as well as the actions displayed in it connote some form of torture that will be carried out on the hostage we see being him at the end of it. Also I believe out opening takes influence from the opening of “Seven” through its editing which we viewed in the documentary. Seven’s opening consisted of a lot of cross fades and dissolve that focused on actions as opposed to the characters identity which we definitely incorporated in our open to create suspense/ sense of thrill. Another typical trait of a thriller is the unexpected. We opened the scene with a figure in a dark room looking up towards the camera then it goes into his flash back and ends with the same shot but this time the camera pans to see a gagged hostage behind him. I believe this is effective as the audience has already seen the character alone they assume the flashback to have already been carried out or to be planned but in them seeing the hostage behind our villain they are placed at the start of the tyranny and have a vague idea of the horrors that are about to unfold leaving them with a thirst for more that a further production of the opening would quench.

I think we both abide by the typical social groups that are represented but also challenge them. We only have two characters, the villain (Cloudio) and the hostage myself (Daniel). Cloudio is a young white male blonde hair blue eyes and the hostage is your average black youth. I believe that this sticks to the common representation of whites being more supreme over blacks. I think its challenges common representations however in that blacks are usually the criminals and whites the heroes so the role have been switch although the power balance remains the same. Also I think the same applies to the representation of gender by having the two main characters being male but challenges the typical representation of women being victims or damsels in distress. Also the charters are quiet young which I think creates link to the target audience of 15-25 year olds as it makes both or villain and hostage identify socially with the audience. Hence, I think our thriller would be a Hollywood production, as the thriller is aimed at a mainstream audience. Also the thriller may then go on to be shown on TV.

Some shots in our clip where quite dark and I think this is down to the equipment used. On the small screens of the Digital cameras and through the view finder the shots where a lot lighter than they are when uploaded and this was a bit of hindrance to the effect of our thriller. Also initially allot of groups, including mine, encountered difficulty with uploading the footage onto the computer which made the process of editing slow, giving us less time to try and correct the dark shots. When uploaded we used Final cut pro to edit our footage. I found it’s a relatively easy and straight forward program to use, due to the introduction we had to match at the beginning of the course. I feel that garage band was decent for making the soundtrack it had lots of sound effects that we found useful in the making of our soundtrack.

I felt that the practical went well. I believe that the earlier practice projects helped allot. Our first practice project was to film a card game and I think the skill we learned greatest from that was mise-en-scene as in that project we focused on that aspect from the costume of the main character, a rouge gangster, (pork pie hat, shirt, braces) to the props (alcoholic beverage bottles). In the final project we tried to really tried to link make use of mise-en-scene scene as the original story was a psycho electronics teacher so we intended to use large jump starter crocodile clips as a main icon to our thriller as well of film the main character fiddling with lots of electrical equipment which we did have to a certain degree but not as much as we had initially planned. The second practice project was to film a person entering a room and having a conversation with someone already in the room. My group had fun with this as an initial joke to do a Chinese, dubbed, karate film ended up being what we did. Regardless, the aim was to focus on match cuts and this project helped us to appreciate filming with a view of match cuts in mind ad it make a piece much more interesting. In that project my group aimed to film each shot form a range of different angles but this proved time consuming so when it came to the planning of the final practical we create a rough plan of specific shots we wanted to make match cuts to. The end result looked quiet different to the original storyboard we had but it did keep the same theme. I think making a storyboard made it easy to do this as we had clearly set in out minds what shots needed to be filmed and also the order for the shots in editing. I enjoyed pitching the idea’s we had to the teachers as we got very helpful input back on what worked well and what wouldn’t. I feel comfortable setting up and using a camera although my trouble shooting skills could improve as most time I called for the teacher’s assistance and many times the problem was trivial. I believe our project met the criteria asked of it and I had fun with a good group of fellow students. I enjoyed working on this project as I was able to obtain the key basic skills of media work