In what way does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Once we had agreed that our film would be a psychological thriller, we began looking at films to acquire some knowledge of the nature of this sub-genre. One of the films that we looked at was Memento. Memento is a film about a man who suffers from short-term memory loss. In the film, he uses notes, tattoos and evidences alike to hunt for the man who he suspects killed his wife. 
We found the title sequence for Memento very interesting, as it appeared as if it was being re-winded. This effect made it seem as if the main character is trying to know what occurred in the past; he's trying to trace back to what had happened. Although we found this to be very interesting, we didn't imitate it in our film and instead, we decided to use a flashback effect. There was another feature in the title sequence that attracted us and it was the use of the Polaroid picture. We adapted this idea into our title sequence to show what our main characters were like before the tragic event took place.
Aside from Memento, we also watched Amityville horror. The title sequence for this film includes a phone call in which ‘Ronnie’, (the man who killed his family because he was possessed by demonic forces) calls the police and tells them that his family were killed. This gave us the idea of using a phone call to convey the story of our film. Although Amityville Horror is a horror film, the phone call featured in the title sequence proved to be very useful in our thriller.
How does your media product represent a particular social group?
Our Title sequence is loosely similar to the film, ‘A rich man’s wife’. As you can see in these images, they both look lonesome and fragmented; as if they don’t know what to do. Our media product represents women who are hiding and vulnerable; would like to be strong and stand up for what is right.
what kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? how will you attract/address your audience?
Our film is low budget; therefore the only way of distributing for free is through the Internet. The most popular video hosting website in which we can post it on is YouTube. Posting our film up on YouTube means anyone can access it, so long as they have an Internet connection. Another example of a video hosting website is Vimeo, which city and Islington uses to put up a level media students’ work onto the internet. The interesting thing about Video hosting websites is that it is completely free and anyone and everyone can post videos as long as they’re not violating any copyright issues. I post videos of myself singing on youtube and I currently have 154 subscribers. Here is a video of mine which received 964 views.
Our film has been posted on Vimeo and was shown at ‘The Screen on the Green’, a less mainstream cinema (compared to Vue and Odeon), which is located in Angel. Approximately 200 media studies students from city and Islington viewed our film.
Our main target audience are females who are aged 30+. Domestic violence is a serious issue and as women are the common victims of this, they should feel empathic towards the main character of our film.
Our main target audience would fit this description:
Anna is a mother of three children. She is married to a man called John, whom she doesn't see often because of work. Her daily routine consists of: taking the children to school, cleaning, cooking and watching TV. She enjoys soap operas such as EastEnders and Emmerdale.
what have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
To show what we have learnt about technologies, we made tutorials on the softwares that we used to create our film.
Here is Kozan explaining how Final Cut Pro works. Final Cut Pro is the software that we used to edit the shots together.
Here is Heena explaining how LiveType Pro works. LiveType pro is the software that we used to put titles in our film.
Here I am explaining how Soundtrack Pro works. Soundtrack Pro is the software in which we got our music and sound effects from.
looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned on the progression from it to the full product?
This video below is the preliminary task that we did prior to our thriller title sequence.
In my opinion, I think we’ve improved a lot since we made this short film. When we created this, we only knew the basics of Final cut pro, LiveType Pro and Soundtrack Pro. Since then, we have discovered a lot more about how they work, which we implemented to our final piece.
In our preliminary task, it is evident that we didn’t pay much attention to mise-en-scene or sound effects. With our title sequence, you can see that we have focused more on mise-en-scene and sound as we realised that if anything goes wrong with them, the whole sequence would be ruined. Our camera work has also improved since the preliminary task. In the preliminary task, we only used a few camera angles but for our final piece, we used a lot more. This was important so that the audience can see what we are trying to illustrate clearly.
Question 8: Audience Feedback and Comments
In our media lesson, we had the opportunity to watch our group's, as well as others' title sequences. We gave each other feedback and this word cloud is a collection of the words that people used to describe our title sequence. This word cloud was made on www.wordle.net
Below is a video showing the feedback that we received from our fellow classmates.
I was happy that they enjoyed our film and they thought it was suspenseful and thrilling. I particularly liked the fact that they thought the use of the phone call was very effective.
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