My Q 7

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


My prelim task and my thriller are very different. The thriller Snatched was a lot more complex and time taking than the prelim.


In my pre-lim we filmed it in 1 lesson and edited our footage so it was only a 20 second sequence.It is set in our school, where a male character and femail are discussing why the male was so late in bringing her a coffee and there is an odd relationship between the characters. In contrast our thriller Snatched is almost 3 mins long and it seems a lot more like a thriller.


I have learnt a lot in the progression from my pre-lim to my Thriller. We filmed my pre-lim in january and Snatched in March. We had a lot of time to plan ideas for snatched and think through what believed would work/not work.


When we originally planned this we had a vey different script in mind which we had already started planning. This sequence focused on the discovery of the kidnap,where we would film a woman(the nanny) doing her daily routine and at the end of the sequence to look at the bed where the little girl should be using a eyelinematch and then look at her clock and give a delayed reaction and suddenly dropping a glass and calling security as Sophia was missing,i thought this would add mystery as it could make the nanny look bad or good. This involved many different shot types and i had many ideas for this.I quite liked how there was not much dialoge as it was only an opening sequence i felt it was not nessasary to give away too much information. It would also be easy to make it look like a thriller by the use of soundtrack and varied shot types to make it look scary. 2 of our members decided they didnt want to do this idea anymore and wrote an actual script which was based on the storyline and plot which i came up with. I was more than happy to listen to their ideas because it is important that we work as a group and that everyone is happy with what we are doing. After discussing and debating what would be best to do we went with the rest of the groups idea on changing what we film to have more dialogue and film something entirely different based on the same storyline.


I am happy that we went with this new idea although i think the other one is good i think it would have been too short.



Snatched was much more interesting and enjoyable to shoot although it was very hard work it eventually paid off.our planning for the day of the shoot was organised and we had scripts for our actors,it was a lot more planned out and we had a shot list but we didnt really stick to our storyboards as in Snatched we found it so much easier to just plan it on the day because we were in the setting and it was a lot easier to get creative rather than sitting at a desk at school trying to imagine what shots to use.

Sound

The sound in the prelim was very easy and simple to shoot unlike our final product. There was only a little bit of  simple dialogue and not as many mistakes and footage that we had to go through at the end,so it didnt take too long. We didnt add in a sountrack or any sound effects, it was extremely basic. 

To contrast in Snatched , I spent a long time editing and doing the sound. The only sound effect we used was the sound of the phone ringing and it was diagetic because it was implied to be there and seem if it was. I also used adobe audition to warp the sound of the Kidnapper on the phone adding tension , from our audience feedback people seemed to love this effect. I also enhanced some of the actual and ambient sounds by increasing/decreasing certain sounds e.g. the car and the door slamming shut. 

For snatched we really had to think about why were adding in sounds etc and they all had a purpose and a job to try make our thriller seem more thillerish and wanted it to have certain affects on the audience 

I also added in non diagetic sound copyright free which i found on the internet and downloaded for a small fee so this wasnt an issue. The  music created tension and informed the audience when they should start to worry.Audience feedback tells us they loved this effect and that it worked well. 

Editing  and camera

Editing the prelim was very easy now looking back at it. It only took around 1 lesson to put all  the shots together as there wasn’t a lot of footage. It was only a case of putting the right shots together at the correct time and it was useful to practise editing and learn about it as i hadnt done anything like it before.

Editing Snatched was not so easy, we all did a bit of editing however some did slightly more editing than other,some did more sound than others  (i did the most editing sound) etc and it all worked out so we contributed overall quite equally. It was important and interesting in trying out diffrernt roles e.g. to try out filming. 

We edited this on a  system called  Adobe ProCC, this is a very easy and great system to use with a linear timeline into which shots can be placed in any type of order and an audio track underneath into which sound effects can be placed to match the footage to the correct time.

It was very interesting to learn how to make a prelim with a little bit of help from our teacher on how to edit. I made notes and tried to remember everything ready to edit  our thriller.
Editing the pre lim was easy.We had only a few different shots
which we needed to produce:

1.Close-up
2. -medium shot /long shot
3. medium shot
4. Over the shoulder- shot
5. Low angle-shot
6. High angle-shot 

E.g. high angle 

The problem with the pre-lim was that we didnt think to say the exact same dialogue every time we shot it so there was a slight problem when editing but it wasnt too noticible and we now know for next time to stick to the script and to make sure our actors do and say similar things every time we shoot.

Our final thriller was a lot more complex with many more different types of shots.

Mise en scene

On the day of filiming our real thriller it was very exciting.For our pre-lim the mise-en-scene was not good at all because it just looked like a classroom. For our thriller snatched we planned the location to be at Essams house because it suited our characters as the mise -en-scene had to portray wealth and luckily his house does especially after we re-decorated the living room so it was exactly how we imagined and so it suited the Russins wealthy charatcer. E.g.

Here we placed the desk in the centre and moved away the sofa which was originally there and carpet and tv. We placed the mirror so it was in view of the camera and the bar in the background which emphasiesed Brodski`s wealth.

Whereas in the pre-lim we just shot it in a classroom,the only problem with this is that we got a few interuptions from other pupils when filming like people coming in and out of classrooms. We didnt think about a script or the mise-en-scene really at all.

You can clearly see that this is a classroom and it seems a bit fake.

However in our final thriller , Snatched the mise-en-scene in every shot was appropriate and suited the wealthy middle/class social group which we aimed to represent.

E.G.

Here is a photo which i took on the day of shooting ,that was the camera which we used:

The actors in our pre-lim were me and Ed from my group, im not an actress and not very good at it and Ed rarely acts:

To contrast in Snatched,our final thriller we were lucky enough to use our friends at LAMDA,one of the top Drama schools in the Uk based in London. Our 3 friends bought along their teacher/friend from LAMDA and he played the older character because we wanted an older character to give us more credibility and make it more realistic. They were also all keen for experience , so they were perfect to use! We also chose the actors according to who suited our characters the most.

Dimitri and Ilya Brodski`s Russian accents considering they are quite unexperienced were very realistic. 

Overall i think I have learnt a lot, especially from doing the thriller ,Snatched. It was very hard work but extremely rewarding and I preffered it to the pre-lim because i liked shooting on a set,with proper cast,scripts and everyone who knew their roles well. We worked well as a team and I am looking forward to hopefully doing A2 next year and using my knowledge and skills which i have learnt next year. 


I learned a lot from the prelim ready to for the thriller because I learned how i would  use and set up a camera on set. Where would be the correct  places to put the camera for certain shots and angles, this was to get the best footage and I definitely couldnt with no experience (it was a very  challenging task but rewarding). The prelim set up and filming really made me think about how much time and effort I would have to put in for the thriller. It got me prepared for the thriller Snatched and was yet to come. I really enjoyed it and it was very useful. 

During shooting the pre-lim we all tried a bit of everything so when it came to shooting snatched we all stuck with mainly one role so it was faster to shoot as the actors didnt have all day. On the actual day of shooting Snatched i did the sound and had to place and work with the camera girl, Nathalie in order to know where i could place the profesional microphone sound recorder pro. I wanted to do more filming but we had to work as a group and try get it done without taking too long so i understood it would be best if Nathalie shot most of it.

We used natural daylight and  we were fortunate to not have to bring in artificial studio lights. So the quality of the footage was good in terms of lighting although there was actually one piece of footage, where the camera focus`s over Brodski`s shoulder at him opening the letter and the audience reading what it said but it was out of focus so could not be used, it was our mistake to not take advantage at this point of the digital camera and play back the footage and notice  but overall we were lucky with the quality of our footage and sound. 

Group Q6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this porduct?

We found that several technologies converged in the making of a film.

·      Blog, this a bit like a directors note book, where research imagery, dialogue, notes and personal thoughts as well as early drafts of the scripts, script outline, shooting script and edit notes can be posted in one place.  This allows ease of access for everyone involved in the production, for cross referencing ideas and comparing notes, it also allows for immediate feedback and does away with the need for print outs which can so easily get lost.

·      Youtube, this is an essential tool and is so useful for quickly accessing movie trailers, excerpts from TV episodes, opening sequences for films and commentaries on films. Other useful internet tools are video on demand such as Netflix, where high quality films can be streamed in an instant giving immediate access to a whole range of ideas and inspiration.

·      IMDb, this is a great tool for looking at user ratings, and demographic breakdowns according to age and gender it also gives useful information on the film such as Production Company, director and year of release.

·      Digital cameras, there are so many devices that now capture high quality footage, that is it difficult to choose a format at the lower budget end. We used a good quality DSLR with separate sound, this was very useful as the handling a lightweight camera makes shooting very easy and because it records directly to a memory card there is no loss when capturing the footage into a hard drive, unlike previous generation DV tapes.  It also has instant play back functions which allow you to review captured footage immediately, so discard or keep.

·        Editing software, we used a digital editing software interface. This software is a linear editing interface, which makes it easy to swiftly put together a timeline of sound effects and footage. Typically there is a bin of shots to choose from, from which the editor selects the footage he wants drops it into the timeline and trims to adjust. This footage can then be further treated using contrast, exposure, and colour controls to achieve the desired stylistic effects. Most edit suits have further appearance tweaking controls to further stylise the look footage. In the audio timeline which is directly synced below the movie timeline, one can further add sound effects and the exact points in the timeline that the editor suggests. Once the rough edit is completed, transitions, special effects and titles are added for the final cut. This makes editing so easy in comparison to the cumbersome manual editing of only 20 years ago

Also My questionaire maker which i used online from  http://freeonlinesurveys.com/ helped collect research and feedback and find out our target audience and what they liked about thrillers.This was extremely useful.

My Q5

How did you attract and address your audience?

Our primary target audience is teenagers. I think we would rate the film a 15 and aim it at teenagers but I think we have also been successful in targeting slightly older people in their 20`s to 30`s,the father Ilya for example is middle aged/mature and I think this helps in attracting slightly older people as well as teenagers because they are able to relate to the older generation easily.

Teenagers have the most disposable income and from our research and questionaires we found out that teenagers favourite genre was infact Thrillers and that teenagers watched them the most (specifically from our survey we made 72%-57 surveyed) age 15-21 , liked thrillers the most and we were able to attract and target our audience by finding out why they liked thrillers and using this in our movie,e.g. teenagers were the age group that enjoyed thrillers the most so we could easily find out why they liked thrillers and target them by using similar conventions in our own thriller.


Teenagers also enjoy the excitement and thrill you get from watching a thriller, we also found out from some teenagers who answered a questionaire on film that they expected from thrillers mystery and the feeling of "what is going to happen?" and how many endings in thrillers are unexpected but most of all ,before watching a thriller people expect tension and they obviously love it because so many teenagers favourite genre is Thriller.



Our themes are both eternal and universal such as loyalty, betrayal, revenge, sex, and power. We have the theme of the younger brother seeking revenge on his older brother (This is found in Biblical and Koranic tales such as Cain and Abel, a variation is also found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet). The theme of betrayal and loyalty is represented by the trusted mother figure who betrays both the girl and her master, out of desire of the younger brother. Finally we have the theme of power, in the mafia Godfather figure of Ilya Brodsky but what is power if he cannot save his own daughter.


One of the contemporary issues we explore in this film is how thanks to the global community and the erosion of national borders, no-one is safe anywhere especially the super rich, who live in super secure environments in particular the Russian expat community in London, has a reputation of protecting themselves with armed guards. Whether this is true or not, the perception remains that the super rich are wary of potential crime against them, and in particular the perception of many in the Russian expat community is that they have perhaps acquired their vast wealthy, through not entirely ethical means and therefore perhaps expect reprisals against them. This film attempts to explore these issues by playing on the stereo-types and leading us to unfamiliar world.
The title of our film for example is “snatched” it is quite an exciting and thrilling title and it suits the thriller genre well, it makes us want to know what/who gets “snatched”. We thought about all the conventions of a thriller genre and conformed to many of these conventions. I think our opening sequence to a thriller successfully attracts our target audience and from our audience feedback ,we found that many teenagers "wanted to know what was going to happen next" and .

I found the film questionaire that i made very useful. I asked 

 "What would you say, attracts you the most to watching a Thriller ? " 

A few examples of what some people said :

Twists and the plot coming together at the end.Tension in thrillers..!

Solving the mystery

I love trying to solve the mystery and the excitement of thrillers.Theya are fun to watch and I like how they are normally quite realistic therefore more scary.

I love the way thrillers are never obvious and i find it fun finding out the mystery. I love the excitement and tension they create and enjoy watching with friends!

I like how the excitement thrillers give you and how they keep you on the edge of your seat. I love the mystery and the unexpected endings.

Then after we made the thriller i asked questions about what they thought and many said :

If you enjoyed watching it, what did you mostly like about it?	Yes, I want to know what happens now. I like the characters & I like the suspense; the music sets the scene perfectly too
If you enjoyed watching it, what did you mostly like about it?	it looked professional....tension in the atmosphere
If you enjoyed watching it, what did you mostly like about it?	I absolutely LOVED this thriller! The music made it really suspense and the dialogue was really exciting! I particularly liked the 'warped' voice of the kidnapper - it made the kidnapper seem really frightening and put me on the edge of my seat!! I could tell it was a thriller right from the beginning because of the suspense of the music.

After the first questionaire we tried to use what people liked and use it in our own thriller.I think we were very successful in attracting and addressing our audience and we spent a lot of time thinking about the conventions of thrillers and creating "tension" .I am extremely happy from my audience feedback and i think we were on the whole very successful and succeeded in what we wanted to achieve and worked well as a group.

Groups Q4

Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?If the ratings of IMDB are accurate then the market for this type of thriller is mainly under 18s, and fairly equally distributed over gender, closely followed by the 18 -29 demographic. We conclude this by examining the ratings for Taken and Shutter Island on IMDB
Young people under 18 have the most disposable income and the most time and inclination to see films. This is why all big movies are targeted at this demographic.

Since we are a young crew that fits into this demographic it is not surprising that we decided to make a movie that would appeal to our age group.

Also it must be remembered that this is a story about the kidnap of a young girl and so this film is going to have relevance to this demographic who will relate to and understand the terror and determination of a similarly aged human being. Therefore the question is not where the IMDB demographics deliberately influenced our choice of film genre but rather that the IMDB demographic breakdown reflects the interests of our age group.

Therefore it is clearly understood from this that our audience is ourselves and those like us, which is confirmed by the above research. In our questionnaire and analyses responses it was also clear that there is a slight percentage increase in the number of males who would be interested in our film due to the action, mystery and potential violence. In our analysis it appears that more females are scared by this type of genre although that is also a reason they like to view it. So both genders have an interest in this type of genre although from different perspectives. This may be somewhat stereotyped but holds nevertheless.


Although the traditional way of classifying an audience is to break it down into male, female, class, education, race and status our primary concern is to attract as wide a market as possible and not fit the film so completely into a niche market that only those who subscribe to that genre and sub genre will be interested.

It is worth noting that according to the IMDB ratings database, although the primary demographic was the under 18 market clesly followed buy the 18 -29 market – ther was till a huge amount of people right up to the 45 + bracket watching the film and this is what we would like to aspire to.


The questionaire which I made was extremely useful. I asked people what age they were and 72% of the 82 people in which answered it were age 15-21.We also found out that most of them liked thrillers and it was there favourite genre the second most popular was comdey.Both often genres which are targeted at teens. This was a good result and one of the main reasons why we also decided to target overall 15-21 year olds.

I then asked what people most expected before watching a thriller:

Many 15-21 year olds expect tension and secondly mystery which they try to solve.

Group Q3

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

"We have created a mainstream, high production value product, that addresses contemporary issues dealing with corruption and terrorist threats in the Russian diaspora. Due to our high level of professionalism and high end production values this film is a main stream media product. To get interest from production companies we would use a tiered approach: We would post High definition edit on Youtube We would create a website devoted to the film With deleted initial scene, script outline to create a “buzz” about the product. With quotes from well know people in the industry supporting our product. This will be linked to the Youtube page to expand potential audience. Using the Website (www.snatchedfilm.com) and Youtube we would approach commissioning editors at Chanel 4 BBC. With this material we would also approach, UK based production houses such as SOHO based Tiger Aspect productions Also submitting this to as many Film festivals and competitions as possible. Including Virgin Media Shorts, London Short Film Festival, The BFI film fund and researching UK and European film festivals, and American festivals such as Rain-dance Also giving the nature of the Russian film connection we would target selected Russian individuals with money to see if they would be interested in financing out film, with a view to targeting Russian film festivals such as Moscow film festival. To create a ‘Buzz’ for this film using the LAMDA actors from Snatched, we would create a fake kidnapping of the young girl, possibly on the streets of Knightsbridge outside Harrods, to get into the papers and local and international news, giving us a platform to advertise our movie. If questioned by the police we would explain that this was a piece of performance art to highlight safety concerns around children of wealthy Russians expats in London. We would ofcourse make sure this was filmed by ‘a member of the public’ on the Iphone, and posted on Youtube to get people talking."

Groups Q2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?




Our thriller opening sequence represents different social groups, we planned to represent these social groups quite stereotypically, this way we thought it would be easy for the audience to relate to our thriller. We represented the Russian Father, Ilya Brodski`s and his family (brother Dimitri and family background) as a wealthy, corrupt, and a serious Russian family. This is a stereotype of many wealthy families in Russia, that the family is large and that those wealthy families our quite corrupt,many mafia gangs etc. It represents the middle class negatively, that they are rich, flashy and corrupt.


We also represented the little girl in two ways,first of all, as a stereotypical teenager who is demanding to “go outside “ on her own but then the father shows his authority and makes her seem vulnerable, who stereotypically needs a man or a nanny to protect her.


The nanny typically acts as Sophia`s carer (because the Father is wealthy/corrupt businessman and doesn’t have that much time to act as a full time guardian) . Our group thought that this combination of the father being in charge of the nanny,he works and the nanny acts as the mothers role,this would help to represent the Fathers serious character quite well and make him seems as a stereotypical bredwinner who carries out an instrumental role. I think we portrayed this successfully.


Lastly the nanny seems to get away with being in on the kidnapping with Dimitri so this is also representing her in a stereotypical way because it is a stereotype that girls can get away with more and that we don’t expect the nanny to be “bad”.Although you could also argue that we are challenging the stereotype because she is an evil character who cares about money rather than being the stereotypical and kind female which the audience at first expect.


Our research of these negative representations of various stereotypes helped us to easily portray the thriller genre well because they are very typical representations and are therefore easy to manipulate, for example using russian characters helps the audience relate to the fact that the father has a corrupt background because often Russians are stereotypically associated with dodgey mafia gangs (even though this isnt correct,it happens)

We also use Mise-en-scene to represent all these stereotypes. For instance, the setting of the Father,Ilya`s office,its very modern(the modern phone),bar in a background and it looks expensive which relates to the stereotype of wealthy “flashy” Russians. The father is also wearing a suit and looks like a Russian , serious businessman. The little girl, Sophia is wearing a girly, simple and quite conservative dress, with blonde hair (stereotypically blonde hair is seen as quite idealistic).


Overall, i think we have created a negative representation of Russian middle class families,often and stereotypically the Russian middle class are very wealthy and we have portrayed these characters as corrupt mafia buisnessmen getting involved with the wrong people.I think we are very successful in entertaining the audience because there are various social groups and different characters which makes it very interesting.

My Q1 POWERPOINT

 

More info relating to slide 8/24

• Throughout the film the character Alex Cross gets calls from the kidnapper,below is an insight into how it is done in Along Came A spider(could not find many scenes of Along Came A Spider on youtube so you can see this use of the phonecall voice change on the trailer at 59-1.02 seconds into the trailer and 1min .37 seconds to 1min .45 )

And this relates to slide 4/24
Jezzes character throughout the film is portrayed as good and we arent suspicious of her at all throughout the film we want to use a similar stratedgy in snatched to portray Patricia as not very suspicious.For example at 1 min 04 secs  :