Thriller Evaluation

Before we had begun the practical side of our thriller opening, we did a number of watching videos and documentaries. One that was particularly interesting was “The watching” it was contained interviews with directors, telling the viewers what made a good opening, a good opening should get the audience wanting to watch on and pull in the audience right to the very end. Within the documentary a director said that the best opening is one where there is an establishing shot of the place it is set then slowing following towards to establishing the main character. There were other opening methods that were said, one where the audience were giving instant action from the beginning, meaning high arousal levels. This was said to be a good opening but it needed to be sustained to keep the audience interested to stay and watch all.




We also watched many movies opening which would help us later during our own thriller. All the opening was interesting and some with huge differences and little difference between them some followed the classic opening some went for the instant high arousal method but all were good.

In our Thriller we took into consideration to what we had learned and inputted into our thriller. In my opinion, I think that we as a group used the classic opening of having the establishing shot of the area which was London then slowly introducing our characters which was played by me and Nicole. The person we wanted the audience to identify the most was Nicole's character, we did this by showing Nicole's face character right at the end as she walked off.






In my opinion, I think that our thriller represents the young naive business people. I believe this because we have a young business lady which was played by Nicole and a young male businessman which was played by me.

If I was given an unlimited choice to chose which media institution to distribute my media product, I would consider working with Working Title because they are a well established British institution and our product is British because it is based in Britain, has British actors and actress, editors and camera people. Many British made films that came from working title became very successful which is positive reason to distribute through working title.



I would distribute our media product in cinema for the first few weeks of release to show that are product is good enough to hit the big screen. After a couple of weeks have gone by i would put our product on pay to view sites and release it onto DVD. Then slowly release onto sites such as YouTube to reach the widest possible audience.



Our media product will have a wide mainstream audience ranging from age 17 – 28 and both male and female audience will equally go and watch it. The reason I have come to this conclusion is because from one of our previews lesson I recall looking at a number of tables of statistics which showed that both male and female go and watch certain films and I believe that my media product fits into the category of that which both male and female view equally. I also think that my media product will draw in the people who like to watch British films as our media product is British. As for class I think that my media product would draw a main audience from the working class and middle class.

I have also made up a profile for our typical audience.
Name: John Smith
Gender: Male
Age: 21
Occupation: Retail worker
Class: Working class
Likes to go out on a Friday night to watch a film with his girlfriend after getting paid, willing to spend his money and loves to go out for most weekends. He is a party animal and loves to watch films in his spare time. Tends to go to HMV and buy DVDs to watch at home while he’s got nothing to do, loves his technology and games. Shops for clothes in places such as river island, Abercrombe & Fitch, Office, Schuh. Wears casual clothing which consist of a t shirt and jeans and a pair of trainers in the summer. Tends to go out and eat rather than making his own food.
To attract and address our audience I would have a famous person staring in our thriller, someone British, female, young and that has a large fan base. The star status would bring in fans of that stars, no matter what the film. I would market our product by genre, I would release posters which will state to the audience what genre the film is through the structure of the poster. Our product will be advertised on the Internet, such sites as apple.com/trailers, game review sites and many more.

Also I would also produce it onto the sides of buses and telephone boxes, though I would place them on any random telephone boxes, they would be placed in such places as oxford street telephone boxes as the working class and middle class will be there a lot. The telephone box would have a figure of woman not clearly visible sporting a knife in her hand wear smart clothing. Making it look like she is targeting the person with the telephone box. I wouldn’t place advertisement in places such as McDonald's because all different age groups go to McDonald's from little kids.



Through producing this Thriller opening I have gained a large amount of knowledge about the technology involved in the making of the media product. Through the practical hands-on level, this was filming and using final cut pro. Before starting the media project I did not know anything about how to use either the camera or Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro or the Mac as I had always used Windows computers. Tho i did find the Mac annoying to begin with I did manage to get around the one click mouse unlike Windows. From using Final Cut and the camera I came to appreciate films more, because from filming and editing I found it very difficult and my thriller was only a 2 minute opening, imagine a full hour and half film would take ages.



Another aspect I found interesting was using blogger.com to write about what we had done in our lessons rather than writing it on paper. This was also a first for me because I never bothered blogging things before this. I also found blogging much easier than writing on paper it was much more convenient, I was able to input images and videos into my blog to make it that much for interesting. I also found Vimeo.com as a great site to use to, it allowed me to access my clip easy to show others as I did. I showed my cousin over in Ireland, my mates and my family. It made it that much easier for people to view my clip. Vimeo is very much like YouTube but needs the user to register to view videos, as YouTube does not require any registration to view clips unless they are past the age restriction. If my product was on YouTube the audience would be very wide because anyone would be able to view it without registration.




Looking back at my preliminary task I believe that our group as came a long way to our final product. I do believe there has been an improvement since then from editing to filming. From doing our final product I have found that a good production schedule is important for the final product to be excellent, as we have learned from our own experience, as we missed some of our scheduled times which meant a rush against time. A detailed storyboard needs to be established to make filming easy as we also found out the hard way, as when we went to film we found it a bit difficult because our storyboard was not that detailed. We also found that weather conditions could make life difficult as when it snowed it made it that much harder for us to film for the next couple of days because of the continuity of the shots.