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

There was a great contrast in more way than one between the preliminary film and the final film.
Our preliminary film was quickly planned as we were keen to test the equipment and we found the first locating we could that we found suitable. All our shots were static and although it had good sequential shots with no gaps it was to “clinical”. In addition, we had no costumes, no fabricated personalities and the storyline was made up mostly whilst filming.

However, during our first task we did stick to our objective and with great ease produced an adequate scene. We learnt to look back through the last clip and re do it instantly if something was wrong, before light or background sound changed.

I felt our camera angles were potentially the best part of our short clip due to the different heights and angles we used including a shot right down low at the end.




In contrast, for our final film we spent a long time planning as we knew we would have to get it right or we would not be satisfied with our work, we scouted for areas to film and when the first was found to be inadequate we moved to a second area to hunt for an ideal location. We took pictures of every shot we were thinking of including to test the lighting and how effective that shot would be. Our second location was defiantly a better choice due to the contrast in lighting and also there was no background noise.

We also learnt how to use both the editing and the soundtrack software quite ably and also found what it meant to get a soundtrack to sync with the shots 100%. Despite the time certain parts took it was worth it for the outcome as all the editing, sound, choice of location, angles and characters were all fitting with the effect we were trying to make.

Finally, the whole group has learnt different techniques what to do and not what to do throughout the whole of the production. Technical skill has had a massive improvement and the group has seen a massive improvement both technically and imaginatively from our preliminary film to our final.

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

Throughout the whole production of the film we were very happy with the equipment and the technology used to edit. The tripod helped us to create steady flat shots whilst the microphone picked up all the sound mad, the camera was also very good although initially we were unimpressed with the picture quality we had; we put this down to the poor lighting in the woods.

Final Cut Pro was flawless throughout the editing stages, we had all the desired effects and the only negative points would be that there was a limited amount of sounds that were available for our style of film. We would have used a scream instead of crying however, all the screams seemed almost comical.

Live Type was used for the credits and it had everything to meet our needs. No one found problems with any of the software and everyone seemed able to ably use it so everything could be shared around and everyone had an input into both the editing and the soundtrack.

Evaluation: How did you attract/address your audience?

Firstly, we conducted a questionnaire so we knew our most ideal target audience and also what they desired in a film like ours. We also showed people our short clips and they expressed excitement about the clip, we felt that this was down to the style of chase scene we chose along with the fast paced soundtrack. This changed our idea for the film completely, at the beginning we were planning on a slow creepy and very strange, however we were worried this might not hold the audiences attention and as we seemed to have a good idea of what the audience did enjoy then it would be safer to create a faster paced scene.

We felt that as we had chosen to film and edit in a style that seemed more favourable to the potential audience this was almost a full proof way of gaining audience appreciation and also to help attract them in initial stages.

Evaluation: Who would be the audience for your media product?

The target audience decided for “Bait” would be Male aged 18 – 35, we came to this conclusion after research into other thriller and horror film target audiences and what would be suitable for our film. There are sub-genres in horror/thriller films, for example, although most films of this genre contain violence, language, sex scenes and gore there are exceptions; these exceptions tend to lose the horror side of the film to allow it to be a lower rating. We looked at the Bourne series of films for inspiration and there is no way that that could be classed as horror, however, our setting and storyline would be much more conventional for a horror film. Therefore, we could use the ideas from the thriller we wanted although the setting of a horror. As we were not able to incorporate much of the 18+ horror film attributes we had to rely on the thriller side of the genre to create excitement and keep the audience entertained. We aimed to suggest that if the whole film was watched gore, violence and other conventions would all be included but without there actually being any in the short clip we produced. We also felt that, although it never became a problem, we should class it as 18 as a 15 classification may hold us back and stop our more “creative” ideas from forming.

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

Institutions similar to Lionsgate or Pathe might be interested in distributing a film like ours as they have been producers of horror films and have a large amount of experience in the distributing and the advertising side of things. Smaller more independent film institutions do not have the ability or the experience to match these two. Another advantage of using these would be that they could get the film into the cinema and from there onto DVD and then TV. Again, if we chose a smaller company, they might not be able to get it shown on TV as they have a very limited amount of influence.

Evaluation: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In our film we created two types of characters which represented or could be related to two different social groups for the audience to recognise. The first character that you see is the man in a hood (Harry). His surroundings are dark and enclosed which connotes the image of the villain. Also the use of the hood to cover his face puts a dark shadow covering his features, making him unrecognisable and the audience find it hard to connect with him, this helps to connote that as a dark figure he is likely to be a villain. In relation to Mise-en-scene the characters dark clothing helped to anchor the image of an antagonist.

The second character that is shown is the protagonist and all the aspects contrast with the villain so that it is easy for the audience to make the connection and to separate them as different social groups. The hero is positioned in an open road with bright natural light which give the man an almost glow with his blonde hair; also the costume is brighter which contrasts with the villain and connotes him as good.

We did not use dialogue at all during our two minute film so we could not use it to anchor the type of person a character was so we relied heavily upon the images an connotation of Mise-en-scene to show character personalities and motives.

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

Our film was focused around the chase scene which only really excluded the first few parts and an end part of our film. Not a very convention challenging idea so far, we even used a similar style of camera work as the “Bourne Ultimatum” train station scene. In the Bourne film it is more of a case of get caught or escape, whereas in our film we feel the character has walked straight into something straight away, he has already been caught and he is being played with.

The Bourne film is very realistic, in terms of characters, effects and is made to be seen as a real event. This is where we felt our film challenged conventions, despite it seeming like a real chase the second character, or the hunter, was a mysterious character. Was he just a man with a saw or was he something more demon like, we left this unanswered as we used effects to have the second character flitting about the screen and jumping from position to position. This connotes that the man is in fact a something of a supernatural being, although appearing human. This anchors our chosen genre of horror and not thriller.

Evaluation

Our media product includes quick sequences of shot changes used to build up tension and excitement, coupled with the fast soundtrack with a fast rhythmic beat, the audiences attention is kept throughout. It was important that the audience was captivated whilst watching our film, the sequence of shots we put together relies on the attention of the audience and for the audience to experience the tension and suspense. Without that then I think that the film would be found boring and uneventful. We studied and analyzed “Bourne Ultimatum” to help us keep the attention of the audience; we used it to help us with our style of shots and choice of character movement.

Final Film - Bait

Editing and Post Production

Editing was one of the most vital stages of the production. The short jumbled clips we had would make no sense and would look quite boring to someone who didn’t know the story board. We were relying on smooth continuity and a fast paced sound track. We were using Final Cut Pro and Garage Band on the Macs at school to produce the final film. We had the basic skills of editing from our preliminary task but we still wanted to explore, an example would be the slow motion close up of Martins face (1.18) and the reverse speeded up entrance to the wooded area (0.05). The slow motion was a good effect and slowed the pace of the film down before the final moment. The reverse shot was filmed out the back of a pickup, played backwards and then speeded up. We felt this could represent the isolation of the area we were filming, the route the jogger had taken or even just create a sense of mystery and add some confusion to the audience.

During the editing we found we had a very large amount of footage and plenty of shots that were left on the cutting room floor due to the time limit of the final film and to keep the overall story line appear simpler. As the wood had poor lighting we felt we should not make any changes to the colour of any of the shots, however, we also found that due to being in a dark location we did not have as crisp a finish to those groups who were filming in the light. Despite using HD cameras the actually quality of our shots were lacking. Although this was not planned it could be used to our advantage as an addition to the dark mysterious almost confusing scenes in our film.

During our media lessons we learnt that quicker cuts raised a person’s heartbeat and created excitement. We looked at music videos to see just how fast cuts can be, we looked at the Prodigy’s remix of Pendulums Voodoo People. In the first 1.05 there were 59 cuts. That’s nearly 1 a second, our cuts wouldn’t be this quick but this was a good example of how faster cuts can be used to create excitement.

After the clip was nearly finished we started on a soundtrack made using garage band. We created about 3 separate soundtracks the next one better than the last, it was important that the sound was well synchronized with the cuts in the clip, if the track didn’t match the film then it was worthless no matter how good the actual track was. It needed to fit perfectly, we spent time adjusting sections, adding parts in and taking parts out. It was very important to get the soundtrack right as it was what would give our film the edge of the seat reaction from the audience by helping to create tension and suspense. Two of the most effective parts of the soundtrack would be the heartbeat coupled with the slow cuts at the beginning; this slows the pace down before the running scene. Secondly, the loud sound used when changing cuts to keep the audience at attention and loud sounds followed by a quieter section were used as we felt it helped to build tension.
Our final task before the film was completely finished was the titles, they needed to be subtle, not interrupt the film but still be noticed and read. We chose a maroon colour so it would not stand out but neither would it be lost in the dark background. A font was chosen that was simple but not boring, we chose not to list jobs as such when showing names just the names of the characters in the actual shots and then my name with a “job title” as I was not appearing in the film. Finally, the end title of the film was shown in a large font in bright red so this time it did stand out against the black background, could clearly be read and in what we felt was an appropriate font.

Target Audience?

The target audience decided for “Bait” would be Male aged 18 – 35, we came to this conclusion after research into other thriller and horror film target audiences and what would be suitable for our film. There are sub-genres in horror/thriller films, for example, although most films of this genre contain violence, language, sex scenes and gore there are exceptions; these exceptions tend to loose the horror side of the film to allow it to be a lower rating. We looked at the Bourne series of films for inspiration and there is no way that that could be classed as horror, however, our setting and storyline would be much more conventional for a horror film. Therefore, we could use the ideas from the thriller we wanted although the setting of a horror. As we were not able to incorporate much of the 18+ horror film attributes we had to rely on the thriller side of the genre to create excitement and keep the audience entertained. We aimed to suggest that if the whole film was watched gore, violence and other conventions would all be included but without there actually being any in the short clip we produced. We also felt that, although it never became a problem, we should class it as 18 as a 15 classification may hold us back and stop our more “creative” ideas from forming.



A 2nd Poster I made using handwritten font and showing the certificate.

Pre Production - Inspiration - Films - Bourne

We decided to continue analyzing the Bourne chase scenes as they were by far the most memorable and effective, using techniques we felt we could easily reproduce. This is a still from a close up of the characters face showing his emotions of concentration and with a semi out of focus background.

Pre Production - Inspiration - Bourne Chase Scene

After watching the numerous chase scenes of the three Bourne films we felt the London scene in “Bourne Ultimatum” was the most effective. We chose to use this one to search for techniques we could apply to our own film.

This is an example of the fast camera movement consistently used in the Bourne chase scenes; we decided to include fast blurred shots in our film as we felt it added a sense of urgency as well as encouraging panic and confusion. We thought that without such methods of creating excitement a chase scene could become quite boring and may loose the attention of the audience.

We also looked at the clothing of the characters in the films, we felt as it was more of a thriller film that attire such as cloaks and more conventional, stereotypical clothing would not be necessary. We chose to use normal clothing apart from Harry, the antagonist, wearing boots and putting his hood up to create a more mysterious and potentially dangerous character.

Pre Production - Inspiration - Films

During pre-production we looked at several films under a similar genre or with parts that could relate to our ideas. These films included the 3 Bourne Films as well as No Country for Old Men, Creep, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Birds, we looked these because of the great variety.

We needed to ensure tension, suspense, excitement and concern was present whilst maintaining the “edge of your seat” factor. All these films had attributes we were interested in.

No Country for Old Men was to be looked at not due to gore but to do with suspense and tension as well as a clever storyline. From the beginning the film has the audience focuses and involved, along with the violence included this was a style of film we wanted to incorporate into ours as we felt it was successful in a way such as we wanted our film to be.



Creep was chosen simply due to the enormous tension created with the jumpy atmosphere and the soundtrack used in the trailer interested us more, as we wanted to create something that would encourage the tension.



Texas Chainsaw Massacre was taken as it is a classic and almost simplistic gore film with a nail biting plot, with many graphic scenes we could not re create it made us realize what we could and couldn’t recreate for our film.



Although the Bourne films are not of a similar to our genre of film they contained chase scenes that could be analyzed as to why they are so successful and then used to influence our chase scene.

Pre Production

Planning was vital for our exam piece, it was clear that thriller would be a good choice due to our decided location in Ashridge woods. Hours and hours of brain storming and written planning, piles of scrapped story boards and potential location photos and a final plan emerged. We found a suitable day to walk out into the woods to take photos of our location and the places we thought it would be best to place the camera. As we had a rough plan of the storyline we needed to find a location to film.

We knew that we wanted a certain type of atmosphere. Also, it would need to be a safe area that wasn’t public so as to reduce the possibilities of background noise; but accessible and close to where we lived so as not to take over a day to film.

The location choice was very important and it was essential to choose the best area to create the scene we wanted. A dark area of Ashridge Woods, off the beaten track was the most obvious choice, it was close to our homes and we felt that it would help us to provide the desired atmosphere.

After collecting all our photos we started filming. However, after a couple of hours filming it became very clear that the locations were not suitable for our story and even that was lacking excitement. Back to the drawing board…


Narrative

Todorov suggested that stories begin with an equilibrium or status quo where any potentially opposing forces are in balance. This is disrupted by some event, setting in chain a series of events. Problems are solved so that order can be restored to the world of the fiction. The story needs to be structured to help the viewer understand the messages given throughout the film and this is done through the chronological structure.

Levi-Strauss looked at this narrative structure in terms of binary oppositions; values which reveal the structure of media texts. An example would be GOOD and EVIL – we understand the concept of GOOD as being the opposite of EVIL. Levi –Strauss was not so interested in looking at the order in which events were arranged in the plot. He looked instead for deeper arrangements of themes. For example, if we look at Science Fiction films we can identify a series of binary oppositions which are created by the narrative:

Earth - Space

Good - Evil

Humans -Aliens

Past - Present

Normal - Strange

NARRATIVE - TIME & SPACE

Narrative shapes material in terms of space and time - it defines where things take place, when they take place, how quickly they take place. Narrative, especially that of film and TV, has an immense ability to manipulate our
awareness of time and place e.g. flashbacks, replays of action, slow motion, speeding up, jumping between places and times.

Restricted narrative can be used to surprise an audience, e.g. when a character does not know what is waiting around the corner and neither does the audience. Stories are very important in helping us to make sense of our lives and the world around us, which supports our film structure of thriller. Most of the films we see at the cinema are narrative films, films that tell a story. Even films which are factual often employ story methods to get this point across, for instance a documentary may follow the 'story' of a group of environmental warriors over a period of six months in their fight to prevent a road being built. We are so steeped in the narrative tradition that we approach a film with certain expectations, whether we know anything about the story or not.

For example: We expect the opening to give us information about who, what and where. To see a series of incidents, which are connected with each other. The film shapes the particular expectations by summoning up curiosity, suspense, and surprise. The viewer also develops specific hunches about the outcome of the action, and these may control our expectations right up to the end. The ending has the task of satisfying or cheating the expectations prompted by the film as a whole. This is the type of narative we have chosen to use, as it is conventional to the thriller genre.

Finally, Cause and effect occurs according to a pattern of cause and effect; finally a new situation arises that brings the end of the narrative. Todorov's narrative theory is based on this; an equilibrium is set up which is then disrupted, causing disequilibrium, which is resolved into a new equilibrium by the end of the tale. When we are watching a film we try to connect the events to make sense of what is happening, to see a line of cause and effect.

This is by far the most important factor in narrative because even if there is no obvious connection, we still try to make one. This is a natural reaction because making connections is how we make sense of the world around us. What we are aiming to achieve within out film is to connect the images that the audience will see in both to createa causal effect between them.

We, as the directors can create a mood or atmosphere by choosing certain shots in a certain order, to build a picture in our minds. We wanted to cause an automatic link with what is happens in one shot with what happens in those either side of it, as this is what happens in real life.

Previous examples

Some directors have exploited this idea to extremes. Lev Kuleshov, a Russian filmmaker in the 1920's experimented by showing people shots of an actor in-between shots of different objects - food, a dead woman and a child. The audience interpreted the actor's expressions,Sergei Eisenstein, another Russian filmmaker of the same era, believed that it was more effective if consecutive shots were not obviously linked as the audience were forced to think and interact more to make the mental jump from shot to shot. Montage can be used effectively in propaganda, where the filmmaker wants the audience to believe in a certain idea or concept.

Our film is in a linear form of narrative, we have chosen not to include any flashbacks or scenes from either the past or the future. It is just a standard narrative including the disruption and the attempt to rectify.

Preliminary Task

This was our first assignment designed to firstly, allow us use of the equipment and secondly learn to film with continuity allowing for smoother transitions betweens cuts. The task went smoothly, we all got used to how the equipment best operated and decided to experiment with different shot angles and try to create a more original clip.




We were very pleased as a group with our task; it only took us a couple of lessons to get the desired finish. We had no issues of faltering continuity and did not have any issues with lighting or change of scenery as most of our clip was filmed indoors. We had few issues due to us re watching every section before we either re filmed it or moved to the next, this sometimes included trial and error with angles and timings. For example, it takes Harry longer to walk through the second door than as it is edited as in the final video. This was done to keep the overall clip short and to not loose the interest of the audience as it was unnecessary and the transitions still flow smoothly and do not look out of place.

Our Story Board: