The Red Snow

QUESTION 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Since I first edited and filmed the preliminary task I feel that I have gained a vast amount of new knowledge and experience. One feature I believe that I have improved upon is filming. In comparison to my Preliminary task, I feel that my Thriller shows more sophisticated shots and not only better camera angles but also cleaner shots. This has had a large effect on how our thriller will be reviewed and criticised and in luckily, this key problem in the preliminary task was not carried over into the thriller.
The main skill which I have learnt is editing, since the beginning of the course I had some editing knowledge but the majority of the software was new to me and I had little understanding of how to stitch my project together. After the preliminary task I had learnt a lot of the basics for editing, and since then I have refined the skills by repeating the edit and fine tuning every ounce of error that I could see. In my thriller the amount of cross dissolves, dip to blacks and addictive dissolves that I used contrasts well with the lack of dissolves used in my preliminary task. This shows that over the course, I learnt that in order to build suspense I need to make the scenes move faster. In fact, my thriller is half the time of my preliminary task purely because I learnt that my thriller needed to be fast paced.
Another issue was not technical based but instead it was an issue with the group. At many times the clashing opinions would push some people out of the group whilst others would argue the disagreed with the thriller. It seemed impossible to agree. This changed however after we made our first thriller and it was so far from a good grade that we decided to start again. This original failed thriller was in many ways was the the tipping point between not understanding and understanding what is required from my media product. The original thriller lacked a variety of camera angles and this taught us to open our minds to intertextual references and generic conventions that we would need to add into our thriller.
We utilised the snow in early january as a way to start over, we quickly created a story which could create suspense and appeal to our audience. We then filmed every single shot and angle which we knew of. This was key to our thriller because when the snow melted we would need to already have enough shots to complete the thriller. We decided to drag the character of Tiffany through the snow in order to create the suspense we needed for a successful thriller. We learnt a lot from the original thriller, for example costumes became a lot more important in our final thriller because we needed to contrast the dead body with the snow and we could not achieve this effect without including vibrant costumes. We decided to put Tiffany in a red coat so that we could link her to the little girl in "Schindlers list". This intertextual reference was created due to the lack of intertextuality in our first thriller. It seemed that our motives for the second thriller were to do everything that we didn't do in our original thriller. This is what caused us to learn the needed skills in progression from our preliminary product to our final product.

I found out that the use of sound bridges add a lot of effect to the scene and after analysing a few Thrillers I found out that "Once Upon A Time In America" used a phone ringing to create a sound bridge during a murder investigation. We realised that using the sound bridge of Tiffany's phone ringing would add to the importance of the phone call and make the ringing become more and more distressing. I also found my titles with a similar system, I decided that if I was going to use any title at all it would have to already have the font of a successful thriller. I finally decided that the font from the Third Man would be most successful. In comparison to our first thriller or preliminary task which didn't even have titles the Final Thriller Product shows that journey of understanding that we took as a group though out the course.

QUESTION 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

At the beginning of the course I had little knowledge on how to edit and construct a film and the most I'd ever used to edit before was iMovie on my mac when I was very young. Therefore throughout the course of the year I have learnt a lot about the technologies that are vital for the construction of media products. Very quickly I started to pick up on different camera angles and their uses, which led us to create a thriller where suspense and tension played a key part. I learnt that low angle tilts showed the characters as dominant and unpredictable, whereas a birds eye shot would show the characters as being vulnerable or insignificant. This knowledge came in useful when constructing the thriller because it allowed us to add intertextual references and confirm generic stereotypes.

I firstly had to learn how to use a camera, with the assistance of a tripod I gained the knowledge needed to start filming my thriller. Overall the camera work was not the issue due to the information already obtained in class. Instead, the editing software was the hardest obstacle. At first the my lack of understanding limited me to only working on the simple side of things, but after learning more about how to edit I branched out further to all aspects of the edit. I learnt how important titles were and when to place them within the thriller. I also learnt the importance of cross dissolves and creating non-linear narratives in an understandable way. Editing the sound was a key feature to the edit because I had to remove all the sound and then replace each scene with a looped dragging sound in a way for the dragging to fit with each scene but also work well when creating a sound bridge. We captured and edited our film on Premier Elements, this was a new experience for me and I found it at first quite hard to navigate the software. After a while I realised the perks of using premier elements and began to understand the complex system of stitching two shots together, how to cut the shot at the exact millisecond for the maximum suspense to be created.

The blogs, were at first irritating, due to the images being unwilling to move without deleting work I found that the blogs were highly inefficient and stopped me from progressing with my ideas and understanding. After some time however I got my blog up to scratch and found that organising and presenting my ideas on the internet made the work much more enjoyable and efficient.

Youtube, which had never really played a part in my life thus far, suddenly offered a new opportunity for annotating and analysing work, This became useful across the entire board, not just with constructing my thriller but also with researching Tv Drama. I analysed specific scenes and learnt more about the camera angles and intertextual references through this process. For example, we linked the characters of Peter, Blake and Tiffany to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. This was effective because we created a modern day version of 3 iconic characters after analysing specific thrillers and genres.

The Internet Movie Data Base became very useful throughout the course because it allowed us to research thrillers and thriller genres at the click of a button. We could find out about the director and link two of his films together to create intertextual references. I also found that the Internet Movie Data Base was very useful for screenshots and plot summaries of films that were unobtainable. For example, from the Internet Movie Data Base I found the thriller "Fargo" and managed to make key intertextual links between the two.

Overall each piece of media technology has had its own effect on my understanding throughout the course, but the most interesting of all has been Premier Elements, which taught me how to use all aspects of my knowledge at once in order to create a final product I could be proud of.

QUESTION 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

We attracted our audience through the characters and plot, we used both female and male characters in order to attract both genders and used the conflict between the Middle class and the Working class. After handing out questionnaires to our target audience it became clear what was most appealing about our thriller. 4 people handed us feedback two girls and two boys. A key feature was that they enjoyed the soundtrack, which is the sound of dragging running through the background of the shots. They explained that this created suspense and made the characters feel not just isolated but also created the idea that they can't escape their crimes. We used two sound bridges in our thriller and both got very positive responses. This showed us that our soundtrack was very attractive to our target audience and made the thriller enjoyable to watch.

We addressed our audience directly by aiming the soundtrack at the target audience, we also based the characters around the audience so that they will find it easier to relate to the characters problems. When handing out questionnaires we realised that the one problem with our thriller was that the non-linear narrative was hard to explain. This showed us that mainstream audiences would not understand or enjoy our thriller because it does not appeal to them. However, in order to reach a larger audience we could alter this aspect of the thriller and make the narrative simpler so that out thriller would appeal to both the target audience and the mainstream audience.
A very strong aspect of our thriller was the use of sound in the background of the opening scenes. We built suspense throughout with the use of sound bridges and this is suspense is a key feature for influencing the target audience. In the shower scene in 'Psycho', the use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound creates suspense and tension which grips the audience as they watch Marion Crane fall at the hands of the shower enigma. The violin screeching which is heard throughout makes the scene fast paced and even more violent. This is a key example of how we used sound to grip our audience throughout our thriller.
The final comments gained showed that our target audience would very much enjoy to watch more of our thriller. This showed us that it had successfully addressed the audience and would become successful within that group.

QUESTION 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our audience would be between the ages of 16 and 20 and would enjoy independent films, this is because of our young cast who the audience would relate to and our low budget. Because our thriller 'The Red Snow' is not a mainstream film the target audience will be smaller and harder to advertise for. Our audience will be film lovers and this would allow us to reach them from social networking sites as they try to research new films. Our audience would be mainly middle class due to the main character coming from a very middle class background and because the plot tackles the conflict between the working class and the middle class.

The audience is mainly aimed at 16 to 20 year olds but this does not rule out the older generations who also love independent films. The Australian thriller 'Animal Kingdom' is targeted at young audiences in the same way that our thriller is, but it also reached out to the older audiences through its use of older characters and plot. Due to the lack of older characters it is the plot which interests this older audience.
Because our plot follows three different topics, youth, mental problems and social classes in conflict. This links to the wide audience for "This is England" which has covered some of the same problems. "This is England" is also shown on WARP-FILMS to the same audience which we are appealing to, and the links between both films could influence our target audience to watch our thriller.
Our Thriller is mainly based around the issues of youth. The characters are shown as isolated, irrational and violent. This could link to the current generation who lash out at society as it becomes more desperate. Overall our audience will be young and enjoy independent films, we will reach this audience through the links that our Thriller has with many other popular independent teen films.

Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Our Thriller 'The Red Snow' was intended to work along the same lines as Animal Kingdom, in the sense that it would be targeted at specific audiences and specialist cinemas like Cinema City. Because our thriller is an Independent Film it will be distributed through social networking sites like Facebook, this will allow our media product to spread quickly and cheaply to our target audience which is middle class teens between 16 and 20. YouTube would also work in this way because it would allow the trailers to be easily accessible and would link to online sites where the Thriller is available. Much like YouTube IMDB (internet movie data base) would also show trailers, photos and small story summaries in order to reach our audience. The most important online distributer overall would have to be WARPFILMS, which is specialises in distributing independent films and helping new successful directors. From the WARPFILMS website we notice that the layout is very basic with films listed down the page which may interest the our target audience. Another reason we would distribute through WARPFILMS is their current attention to Snowtown, which is an independent thriller following young teenagers through their deviant actions. This is useful because it links to the plot of our own thriller and 'The Red Snow' could become publicised in the same way.

 Apart from an online based system our thriller would also be distributed to cinemas. As previously stated we would use Cinema City as our main distributer because it rarely distributes mainstream films, but instead advertises to the audience of young middle class teens who enjoy independent films. As mentioned above we intended to distribute our thriller in the same way that Animal Kingdom was distributed. This means that our Thriller would be shown at very few cinemas and would gain its publicity through social networking sites in order to make sure that only the target audience sees the film and that the advertising does not cost much money at all.