Evaluation - Mark Williams

Media Evaluation


Introduction: For our project we produced a two-minute opening video sequence to a horror film.The sequence depicted the kidnapping and murder of a young girl, who was stalked by a malicious teenage male, who's face was not shown. I worked with Joe Cudden and Ryan Watson, who shared an equal number of tasks with me in order to create our project. My particular contributions to the project included storyboarding and assisting in the shooting of the film, and later on, editing the footage so as to ensure our film had consistency and flow.





Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?



Our opening sequence followed the conventions of a British horror film. We had a budget of next to nothing meaning that the number of props available to us was very limited. The most obvious sig of our lack of money was our use of natural light in our film. We obviously couldn't afford to use lighting rigs or spotlights and so, unlike a typical Hollywood film, our characters could only be seen under light that was already there such as streetlamps. Our product fulfils the requirements of an opening sequence in that it establishes the setting(we can see from the shots of the male walking down the street that the sequence is set in a built-up area at night),



Q2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?



The representation of our protagonist was that of a young and vulnerable girl. We portrayed her as scared, vulnerable and defenceless by her facial expression, and used props such as rope to bind her to her chair, and a scarf which we tied around her face. This was effective because although it looked like the girl was on the verge of suffocation, defenceless and unable to breathe, we found that actually she could breathe and so it wasn't a risk to use the prop in this way. We hoped that seeing her gagged and unable to move would support her representation as vulnerable and helpless and encourage the viewer to sympathise with her, being drawn deeper into the plot. With our second character, the male, we made his costume a much more prominent feature. We used the stereotypical character of the 'hoodie' or ‘chav’; a menacing looking male in his late teens, probably of a low social class, who's face is not revealed. He is represented as the 'villain' in our film sequence by his clothes; we dressed him in a dark sweatshirt with his hood up. We did this so as to stick to the convention that a younger person with a dark hood drawn over his face, would look much more malicious than a youth dressed in, for example, a shirt and jeans. The character does not speak at all in this video sequence, which I think is appropriate because if he doesn't speak, we don't wonder what the character is like inside; it's makes him seem heartless. Also, for much of the sequence he is shown only in dim light, and also with the use of a 'negative' effect later added to make the character seem darker and more detached from the audience.

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

One particular media institution that has backed projects similar to our own, for example the 1997 horror movie ‘Scream’ is New York-based Dimension Films. However, because this company is based is the US and not in the UK it is unlikely that they would be happy to fund a project such as ours. I think our project is much more likely to appeal to a UK-based production company because our project is not one that would require massive funding or high-profile actors, as opposed to films made in the Hollywood industry. For example Stealth Films, the makers of Kidulthood, would work on average with a budget of 2 or 3 million pounds as opposed to a US film which would often be funded with over 100 million dollars. Kidulthood is an excellent example of how the British film institution works so well because the film was shot on such a small budget on a dirty, grimy location and yet still managed to effectively portray and address the issues raised in everyday life in London. We see this in the first scene as shown here;




Q4: Who would be the audience for your media product?



We can use the theory of GRASS to determine the potential audience to receive our product; we must establish the Gender, Race, Age, and Socio-Economic Status of our audience. We carried out quite a large amount of audience research in order to determine which factors were the most important to include in our film. We discovered that females aged 16-18 watched, on average, more horror films than males of a similar age. In addition, we found that the most popular sub-genres of horror film were psychological horror and 'teen slasher' movies. We think this is because many horror films carry a high level of emotion which appeals to many women more than men. Psychological horror is based around a character’s fears or guilt, by using emotional instability to build suspense and enhance the story, whereas ‘teen-slasher’ films typically involve a psychopathic killer stalking and killing their victims. We tried to incorporate many of these factors into our film in order to attract our audience. We think that our product should not be aimed towards anybody under the age of 16 because the themes we used could be considered disturbing and not suitable for somebody of a younger age. We did not aim our product at any particular ethnic group; our product should appeal to somebody of any ethnicity; however our product would be more likely to be distributed in Britain than anywhere else as it is a British film. We think that our product could appeal to a person of any socio-economic status although it’s possible that a person of a lower status (C2-E) would be able to relate to the setting more closely because it would be more familiar to them; the location we used was not an affluent area.



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

We have established already that our film would be aimed towards people aged 16-25 of a socio-economic status of . An audience of this type would expect from an opening sequence some action or horror to entertain them and to encourage them to keep watching. We set up the basic equilibrium in the first scene by showing the stalker composing a piece of hate mail. This showed our audience that the stalker leads a disturbed life and is clearly planning some malevolent act; already our audience have a grasp of this character’s nature. Also this creates our initial enigma; the audience wants to know who will receive the mail, and why he is making it. Our disruption comes to the protagonist’s life when she is kidnapped; the stalker takes her from the street and ties her to a chair before killing her. We did not use typical chronology in our film; there is a sense of disarray and confusion because the shots are not in chronological order. We addressed our audience by entertaining them with the enigma that the viewers did not know the fate of the protagonist until the very end of the sequence; therefore the audience would want to continue watching because they want to see if their protagonist will be safe. We used Levi-Strauss’ theory of binary opposition to create conflict between how the girl’s life should be and how her situation is actually unfolding; she should be in bed as it is late at night and yet she has been on the streets late at night and is now in the company of the stalker.

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

We have used lots of technology in order to research our product. For example, we used websites such as ‘imdb(internet movie database)’ in order to obtain information about similar products to ours. Also we used YouTube to find extracts of these products and analyse them to find out what worked and what didn’t, and what features we’d like to emulate in our own product, and we used our blog in order to record the findings of our research and also as a log of how much we’d done and what was left. In addition we used Microsoft Excel in order to create graphs so as to show the feedback of our audience research more clearly.

The one lesson learnt that sticks out clearly from using the technology available to us(digital video cameras etc.) was that it’s massively important to shoot your film at the exact right time of day because if natural light is not available (for example at night), it is incredibly difficult to depict the scene fully because it’s not possible to tell what is happening and therefore a lighting rig is necessary, which can be extremely expensive and therefore was not available to us. In addition, we realised that it was not possible with the equipment we had to include dialogue for someone that was distanced from the camera; if diegetic dialogue was needed it had to be included later in the editing stage. We worked around these limitations, however, in order to obtain footage that fulfilled our requirements.

The edit suite was where I felt we learnt the most. We learnt how to edit our footage using iMovie HD, which we found difficult to work with initially because it seems quite complex and confusing upon first use. However, we spent time using the program and became more confident at splicing the shots and at creating transitions between them, for example fading in and out. With this technology we were able to achieve elements such as the negative effect, which made our character seem much darker, and we were able to add a non-diegetic soundtrack which created tension and added suspense. There was little that needed to be altered or redone at the end of the editing apart from that we repeatedly changed the sequence of scenes; we couldn’t establish which order they should be in.



The only technology we used when obtaining audience feedback was the word processor we used to write our questionnaire; other than that we did everything by hand. We felt this was effective because it was the simplest, quickest and most reliable way of doing it.

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

There are many points about our full product which we feel have developed from the preliminary task. An important factor to consider was the story itself; the storyline of the full product is easier for the audience to relate to as it has a basis in real life and also provokes more thought from the audience. We have learnt that the basic storyline is one of the most important factors to consider when producing a film sequence so as to appeal to our audience. We also learnt that location is a critical factor when filming so as to set the desired mood/atmosphere; in our preliminary task we didn’t have a good range of locations to choose from and so it was difficult to establish the setting. Again importantly, upon comparison of our final project and our preliminary task it is clearly that we were much more familiar with the camera equipment as there is much more consistency in the quality of our shots, for example, in our preliminary task it was possible to see a member of our group who wasn’t cast in our film sat in the background; we didn’t repeat mistakes such as this in our final project. Also the flow between them is of a much higher quality because we learnt to effectively use transitions as I mentioned earlier. We found that dialogue does not have to be used excessively in order to establish a plot; we used much less dialogue in our final project than in our preliminary task, instead using graphic details such as the hate mail, and non-diegetic sound in the form of eerie music. In addition we learnt that mise en scene is massively important in the creation of a character; in our preliminary task we had no choice of costume as we had to dress our characters in whatever they happened to be wearing to college that day, but in our final project we were able to dress our characters appropriately in order to represent them in the way we wanted.



Conclusion

In conclusion I think our product deserves credit on the basis that it fulfills the requirements of an opening sequence; it establishes a setting, establishes the protagonist and secondary characters and also entertains it’s audience. It’s strengths are that it represents the two characters effectively, helping the audience to understand their personalities and showing how they are. Also I think we did well when it came to editing the film; the transitions are of a good quality and the shots are the correct lengths with good effects added. I think a weakness of our film is, primarily, it’s title; we found it difficult to give our project an appropriate name that hadn’t already been used; however the title of the film is not as important a factor as the quality of it. In addition, there are a few shots that we haven’t included which I would’ve liked to include, however the majority of the group agreed that the project could do without them. On the whole, however, I am satisfied that we have produced a worthy project and I’m pleased that we managed well with the time, budget and equipment we had, especially with extraneous factors such as snow and illness, for which I think we all deserve credit.


Mark Williams