Evaluation Task 3: What kind of media institution would distribute your product and why?

For my groups film, I think that even though it was low-budget and looks like a British, independent film the concept idea could be linked to a Hollywood style film.
 

  

 

• A Hollywood company that could possibly be interested in my groups film idea could be 'Fox Searchlight Pictures'. It is an American Entertainment Company. They produce a lot of thriller movies which fits my groups genre of film. Our film is slow paced, but it's suspense. I say this because 'Fox Searchlight Pictures' have produced similar films to ours in the past. One of example of their films is 'One Hour Photo'.

This is a clip from the film:

The plot involves a man who works in a photo lab and becomes obsessed with a family. This is similar to our concept idea as it involves a man using technology to find information about a family. This compared to our film shares the same idea of a man keeping pictures to look at about a young family. The film is suspense but not action packed, it is more of a slow-paced thriller which is what ours is. The man in 'One Hour Photo' is similarly casted to our actor, what is different is his occupation and reason behind the obsession of keeping the photos.

• 'DreamWorks SKG' is another institution, in California that could possibly be interested in our film. Again I looked at (and have researched about before) 'The Lovely Bones' - a film they have produced that is very similar to ours. Again, it has the same concept of a man kidnapping a girl. 'The Lovely Bones' is a slow-paced thriller, suspense just like ours. Again the look of the film looks similar to a British film where it's set and now it's filmed.

This is a clip in the basement:

The casting isn't quite the same as in 'The Lovely Bones', the man is more sleezy-looking and looks older, whereas in ours the 'Camera Man' is a younger, suited guy. This was done because we wanted to suggest he was more just kidnapping the girl, rather than, like in this film, kidnapping, sexually abusing girls and burying them. The concept of this film matches ours and again, it's slow-paced but suspense at the same time. The casting of the girl in this is similar to what we would cast our girl as - innocent, sweet looking.

 

• 'LD Entertainment' (formerly Liddell Entertainment) is an American independent film studio that finances, produces, acquires, and distributes full-length theatrical motion pictures around the world. A film I found that LD Entertainment produced was a film called 'The collection'. The only thing about this film is that it has a same idea of kidnapping etc, but it's genre is 'horror' rather than 'thriller'.

 

What is similar to ours is that they capture a girl (not same age to ours) and keep her. In the middle of this trailer it shows her being kept in a box, in some sort of cellar/basement and this is what is relatable to ours. It's the same concept of a girl being kept in control of someone coming to find her. However, the genre and whole idea is not similar to ours.

Evaluation Task 2: In what ways does your media product represent particular social groups?

We deliberately didn't show the mans face in our opening sequence because we wanted to leave him un-identified for the beginning as it makes the opening more suspense. However, we can tell from his costume and physicality the representation we wanted to convey, even though we don't see his face.

Adam (the man) is shown as a white/male, well-dressed, affluent man, also upper-class. By his costume, we can see that he dresses smartly, suggesting wealth, intelligence, high up in the business as he wore a grey trench coat, a black tie, black trousers, black shoes. We did a lot of close-up shots which allowed us to see, in detail, the costume which identified him wearing expensive jewellery, nice/smart clothes etc. His physicality also conveys him as being powerful and in control of the situation happening in the opening.

We showed through camera that Adam was quick and on-the-ball as he was shown as constantly doing something - this helped us suggest he was planning something and was obviously aware of what he was going to do, showing that he was professional. It also allowed us to capture the mise-en-scene which allowed us to see the surroundings which portrayed his wealth, interests and perhaps his own job as he has and uses equipment such as an Apple Mac laptop and advanced camera technology, all set in a dark basement. Also he has locked his basement door implying he knows that he could get caught therefore takes precautions in the procedure of filming the kidnapped child.

The basement which the filming happens is in his own home, it looks quite spacious and the equipment and laptop he has makes the assumption that he is fairly wealthy and takes pride in his belongings as he slowly unzips his equipment and being careful with the way he handles it.

 

 

To conclude, the character in our psychological thriller is a criminal. He shows many signs of a villain, for example, working on his own, not showing his identity, being a man who is well-built and who has experienced something which has changed his view on life and the way he lives it.

Evaluation Task 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Finished opening sequence - on youtube! 'REPRISAL'.

Our final, finished product, now named 'Reprisal'!

5th editing session

Today we finally finished our thriller!

With the music sorted, the shot lengths sorted, the credits sorted we could finally say we were completed. All that we had left to do is go through the sequence to make sure everything was in place, was in order and there were no mistakes... we noticed a couple of things we needed to alter.

One thing was spelling; we noticed we had spelt 'produced' wrong by spelling it by 'procuced' - an easy mistake. Thankfully we noticed this and corrected it. We went through all the text to make sure we hadn't made any other silly mistakes like this, thankfully we hadn't. We changed the placing of the director at the beginning also in a position which we thought looked better.

Another thing we also noticed in one shot, where the camera was placed, we had caught one of the group members in the shot. This was because it was dark and we had by accident caught a face in the filming without realising. We altered this by cropping the shot so that we didn't see the face.

Today we also changed our name of our film from 'The Camera Man' to 'Reprisal'. We thought 'The Camera Man' gave too much away and didn't sound professional, nor did it sound good. We started looking at themes within the plot, and we came up with the name 'Reprisal' through the fact it is about revenge and taking back what he deserves.

4th editing session

Today we were sorting out the music and the placement of text/credits.

We wanted an eerie sounding music so we used one we found from the apple store. It fits with the price really well as it doesn't sound too much but sets the mood really well...

We had to alter one part of the music - there was a break in the music where it starts again so we added in a musical note which fitted in with the key it was in so it doesn't have an interruption. The music then flowed really well. We noticed an interference during the music when the man is un-zipping the bag, we corrected this by changing the shot track to another shot we had so that the sound in the shooting didn't interfere with the music we had put over the top.

We placed the texts in this lesson making sure the positioning looked good. 

3rd editing session

We started placing credits into the sequence. We had to chose when we thought it would be appropriate to place credit titles. We are near to finishing the credit titles. The font and placing we have chosen so far look really smart.

We also debated through this session whether we were to add any music over the top of our sequence. After playing around with a few sound tracks, we couldn't decide by this lesson whether it sounded better without music or whether it need music because we could just have the sound picked up through the mic when we filmed.