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

Which technical skills did you learn while completing the preliminary task?

When producing our preliminary task we were confident in our work, however looking back now I feel we have come along way. Our shots are more sophisticated and the standard level of work has been risen hugely. One of the main faults of our preliminary tasks was the overall simplicity of it, we filmed in school and did not use the most advanced techniques. Therefore it was clear our film had been made by novice students. However since then we have learnt many things.

The importance of good quality lighting had been a major learning curve for myself, knowing how the lighting of a scene could completely change a scene increased the standard of our work significantly. For example the lighting in this shot, take from our preliminary task is clearly not the best, however comparing it to the shit taken from the final cut of thriller opening this is clearly a significant improvement.

In our prelimnary task our continuity editing was quite successful, this may have been due to all of our takes being shot on the same day. We have replicated one of successful shots in final thriller opening, shot reverse shot, these hots are extremely successful as they create fear with our protagonist. 

The shots of our preliminary task are not as intense as our thriller opening, although they may be successful in showing our characters journey through the scenes they do not illustrate our characters properties like a mysterious or vindictive personality. However, on the other hand our thriller opening is much more successful in conveying our protagonist and antagonist attributes. I believe it conveys our protagonist fear very successfully, this is done by the variety of different shots and the quick paced editing. 

What have you learnt?

In both our preliminary task and thriller opening we were given a specific brief to work towards, this was extremely helpful as it ave us specific guidelines to to work within, for example we knew we had to create an opening for a thriller film; thus giving us a guideline for a plot and character types. 

Working to a deadline has been difficult in some aspects like wanting to spend extra time on blogposts than was given. However, I think myself and our group have successfully worked well with the given deadlines.  I think this was due to good communication from our group and becoming good friends. 

Research and planning had become essential to having a successful media product, we planned every detail. We planned every shot so when it came to filming we had every shot played out how we wanted it done, this saved us a lot of time. Research helped us understand the genre of a thriller film so that we could develop our film into a good quality thriller opening. Over all I feel we have all been equally successful in our planning and research. 

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

Question Five: How did you attract/address your audience?

https://www.slideshare.net/HannahWicks1/question-five-75187100

Question Four: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Question Three: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Question Two- how does your media product represent particular social groups

Question One: In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms or conventions of real media products?

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

The term 'mise- en-scene' comes from the French theatrical expression 'put into scene', it encompasses location, costume, make-up actors and actresses. It is the elements that are deliberately chosen to put into the scene that can often define the genre of film.

Locations

Our mise-en-scene is significant because we have challenged some aspects of film noir conventions and some we have conformed to, for example, our locations have been inspired by the typical Film Noir locations, here are some example of classic locations used in Film Noir compared to our location which was a dark alley way, this was an incredibly common location.

The dark alley way is a classic location for a film noir film, the dark shadows and industrial brick all conform to film noir's conventions. 

Another example of our media film conforming to the film noir conventions is our location for our final ad climatic scene, this is where our actor Laurie had been tied up to a chair in a desolate, run down and dark garage. This location conforms to film noir conventions as we were able to use lighting to create dark shadows, this is a key convention of film noir. The dark shadows hint to something sinister and create a tense atmosphere for the audience. The significance of the dark and desolate is how the room is representing the feelings of the American society through dark shadows and emptiness, this portrayed the feelings of sadness and emptiness that American society was feeling in post-war 1940's, this is what Film Noir was meant for.

An intertextual reference we have made through our garage scene is the 1992 'Reservoir Dog's', this film is about a kidnapped policemen, through looking at the scene where he has been kidnapped we took inspiration from this. 

Through mise-en-scene of locations, we have developed the conventions of film noir, we have done this by existing media we have taken on board the locations as such and applied them to our film.

Costume

Although our film has elements inspired by 1940's film noir, the costume took a modern approach. Instead of pinstripe suits and bowler hats, we opted for dark, modern clothing. We wanted our character to look strange, dark clothing is suggestive of a tragic past and gloomy character. Laurie;s hair also makes him stand out incredibly well, he was a red Mohican with red tips. This not only conveys him as a little odd but also someone who is dangerous through the colour symbolism of his hair. Red symbolised anger, danger but also love. 

Catlin, our own female actor in the film, had a costume inspired by Sin City. We wanted to take a modern femme fatal look, same as Laurie we used colour symbolism in her costume. Sin City used the colour red for symbolism too, in our thriller the use of red exagreates the femme fatale by coveying a portrayl of sex and violence.

Our antagonist wears a dark costume to convey violence and a dark character, he hides in the shadows so his costume isn't visable. The dark colours forshadow bad things to later come, through lighting you are unable to see his face, this makes the antagonist seem villianous and wicked.

Lighting

In our film we conformed to typical lighting of film noir, the most common of film noir lighting is low key. This creates a chiaroscuro style for the scene, this style emphasises the depth of shadows and the harshness of the lighting. Here is an example of how we used low key lighting in our film, the shadows emphasise the darkness of our film in terms of what has happened to him. 

The low key lighting coneys a sense of sadness, through shadows its creates a tense atmosphere.

Updated:Evaluation of Media task

Media Evaluation by Hannah on Scribd

Update: From comments from my teacher we have decided to definitley use a microphone to ensure that our sound quality will be good in our thriller,  this was a weakness in our preliminary task.

Introduction

Hi, I'm Hannah Wicks and this is my media blog for AS level media at CNS.