CAPTIVE projectThe Evaluation

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

products?

Choosing Thriller as our title sequence, I think we picked a difficult genre. The code and conventions of a Thriller were pretty dark as a whole, for example the Mise-En-Scene of weapons and story plots of kidnapping and psychological mind games. I think it was difficult to make sure our title sequence didn’t fall into a Horror genre more than Thriller. However, developing our Thriller title sequence was not as difficult as we could have made it to be. From research into Thriller title sequences I felt that our title sequence required some longer cuts than quick fast pace cuts. We did this towards the end of our title sequence when the Doctor follows Maria around the streets ready to take her.

We had to reshoot and add more clips to our title sequence twice so overall I would say that we struggled a little with our choice of genre. For influence we used the title sequence Se7en and Shutter Island. However, when looking back on these title sequences and ours, I don’t see much relation between them. When looking back at my Powerpoint I made on ‘Codes and Conventions of a Thriller genre’ I can see that our group did stick to the use of the codes and conventions.

Brief Summary of my Title Sequence:

The extract begins with the Doctor working in a laboratory like setting, allowing the audience to learn about the male characters job. There are then two shots which contrast with each other of Maria and the Doctor in the diary, showing that these two characters are relevant to the same situation. We then see the title of our film ‘Captive’ with Maria’s eyes looking around behind fainted jar bars, a jumpy pan across her bedroom is shown to try and portray that Maria is an ordinary girl to the audience, however the eyes looking around may hint anxiety in our character. We begin to watch Maria getting ready to go out by painting her nails, applying makeup and putting her ‘party looking’ shoes on. The Doctor’s eyes appear to foreshadow to the audience that the Doctor is aware of Maria’s social plans and that he knows where and when she is leaving. The title sequence then shows contrasting shots of Maria getting ready by showing the Doctor getting ready to leave which teaches the audience that both the character’s clips are being portrayed in the same time scale.

We show both characters leaving their homes which also shows both characters are in the present. The Doctor begins following Maria down the street, the Doctor gets closer to Maria in the duration of the title sequence. Point of view shots of the Doctor are shown to emphasise that the Doctor is aiming to capture Maria and it is not coincidence. The title sequence finally ends with Maria turning around and the Doctor grabbing the camera when the previous shot was Maria’s point of view. Which infers that Maria is now a ‘captive’

When looking back at the Powerpoint I made to help us gain a better understanding of the media product we was aiming to create we used to following codes and conventions:

MISE-EN-SCENE: Mirrors, Stairs, Tension building music, Facial expressions

CAMERAWORK AND EDITING: Quick cuts, Frequent change in camera angle, Black and white, Tracking, Pan shots, Jump cuts

THEMES: Two or more characters messing around each other’s minds, Demolishing each other’s mental state, Chase.

After we took our footage I feel like editing helped us create more of a Thriller genre feeling. When putting our clips onto Final Cut Pro, we decided to change all the footage into black and white. We originally did this because we took our footage in the sun which didn’t make our chase clips create tension when the Doctor was getting close to her. However, turning the footage to black and white made the title sequence more mysterious and looked better with our use of cross dissolves. When looking as our title sequence as a whole perhaps our group should have looked into the Thriller film Sin City as the whole film is filmed in black and white and works successfully.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Within our media product, it contained two characters, a teenage girl and a doctor. The setting was took two average london working class roads which concludes that the social class of Maria was working class as she lives in a stereotypical home of home. However, you never clearly see the Doctor’s area due to the fact as he is in the medical business he could be seen as a middle class man.

Maria: In the title sequence, Maria is getting ready to go to a friend’s party, which is stereotypically an average weekend for an ordinary teenage girl. The way Maria is going to a party also infers that she may be popular in school despite there being no evidence of this. The awkward eye contact with the screen also shows that Maria may be shy or nervous which is common in teenage girls compared to more older women. Maria’s character does not show her in the way people way presume the media presents teenagers in movies, for example, she is not fitting to the mise-en-scene of a typical teenager which is usually a hoodie or wearing something rebellious. The use of heels perhaps shows that Maria is more mature compared to other teenage girls. I don’t think Maria is represented badly on behalf on teenagers in Britain, she does not show any bad connotations in our title sequence, the only thing I believe that could present Maria badly is the use of lipstick which may represent the character as promiscuous.

The Doctor: In the title sequence we are shown the Doctor in his workplace and him leaving the door but have no idea of his neighbourhood and wealth due to only footsteps being shown leaving the house. The workplace suggests that he is perhaps a hard worker and very knowledgable juxtaposing with the teenage girl who does come across less wealthy and slightly anxious. The Doctor’s workplace is shown with a ‘Bad Film’ filter on it which shows that it is in the past and could also represent his work being recorded which makes him seem more professional. The mise-en-scene of rubber gloves and a mask also shows that he is a professional middle class man.

The conventions of a middle class man portrayed in the media are usually well dressed and wealthy or sometimes arrogant. The Doctor is seen in professional clothes at the beginning of the sequence which does not break any of the conventions, however when following Maria later on in the title sequence, he is seen wearing quite modern and fashionable clothes which may portray his look as being more working class and less wealthy than we originally believe after seeing clips of him being in his workplace and looking professional. Looking back the use of our actor Christian wearing desert boots instead of more formal shoes may of been a mistake but I don’t think it effects our title sequence and the Doctor’s role too badly.

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

When doing our research before making our title sequence we decided to choose Film4 and Lionsgate for our production companies. We decided to choose Film4 as our original idea was to make an Independent film like Film4’s ‘A Field In England’. We also decided to pick Film4 as they seem to have targeted a similar audience to us, for example ‘The Inbetweeners Movie’ was clearly targeted towards to young adults as it was about a group of friends going on holiday together. However, we realised that Film4 was not appropriate for our film idea after performing our Film Pitch to our media teacher and other students, a big Hollywood budget film would be more ideal because of the actors we wanted in our film to create star power to attract our target audience.Another reason our group firstly decided to choose Film4 as our production company is because of a film which has a very similar plot to ours, “The Lovely Bones”. Film4 producing a Thriller containing a troubled teenage girl including some mind games and a dark thriller storyline brought in our attention but after some early feedback we realised it was not suitable despite this similarity.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

We decided to choose Lionsgate for a number of reasons regarding the amount of different genre of films they release which are successful with the target audience we

was going for.

Hunger Games: Catching Fire is a novel which was adapted into a Thriller/Adventure genre well selling film which made a gross of

$424,339,131 in America. It could be questioned that the Hunger Games series gains popularity due to the stars which the

film contains. Jennifer Lawrence is a popular and role-model to a lot of teenagers and is known to have a lot of fans of the target

audience which The Hunger games has. This gave our group the idea of using ‘star power’ in our film idea which took our film out of the

idea of being an independent film.

The Cabin In the Woods

Another reason we decided to choose Lionsgate for our title sequence is because of another Thriller film ‘The Cabin In the Woods’

which is a psychological thriller. This film contains deceptive mind games and this could be compared to our film idea as we

tried to create deceptive mind games in ours due to our surveymonkey feedback coming

back as deceptive mind games being popular with our target audience.

The film had an interesting and unique plot which was influential for our film idea.

Although the film does not contain much star power like Hunger Games does, I feel like this

is a great influence for Captive because of the storyline, using these two movies as

influence was a successful mix as they used different techniques to create their target

audience when having the same production company.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

When creating our title sequence we created a ‘Surveymonkey’ and got 18 responses to our survey. One of our questions on the survey was the age range of the people who took the survey. The majority of the audience were 14-17 so we decided that to target teenagers and young adults, because of this decision we decided for our main cast to be an actor and actress that would interest this target audience so we picked Emma Watson and Leonardo Dicaprio who are popular at the moment and attract the target audience we’re aiming for.Towards the end of our title sequence editing and the

coursework as a whole, we received feedback from our class which thankfully, are the target audience we was

aiming for.This is the best feedback our group received and I am

aware that the student which filled it out enjoys Thriller movies herself. The ‘developing’ points actually helped our

group a lot when making final changes to the title sequence.

It was nice to see from the feedback from our target audience that they approved of the black and white video filters we went for and it fitted to the genre and made the

genre more clear.

From this survey I created an audience profile for our title sequence

and looked into the demographics and the psychographics our target audience would most likely have. I decided that our target audience

demographics would be most likely be E as the people that would see this

film would be an AS student or in higher education. The psychographics I picked was Explorers and Aspirers as

our audience is still young and experimenting with what they want in

life. With this attitude the audience may like to look into all different kinds

of genre, including Thriller. When thinking about the stereotypical likes and dislikes for our target audience, I

would see our audience being a frequent user of social networking

and interested in the latest trends if they live in the city.

How did you attract/address your audience?

As mentioned before we decided to cast actors and actresses which may be seen as

‘teenage heartthrobs’ so we decided to choose Leonardo Dicaprio who has been in romances such as Titanic and Romeo and

Juliet to attract the female audience. Dicaprio also had the leading role in the

famous Thriller film, Shutter Island. For the male audience we decided to pick Emma

Watson as she is found attractive by many males in the UK. Watson also usually plays teenage roles in recent films such as Perks

of Being A Wallflower.

I think the use of star power in our title sequence helps attract the audience that we was aiming for. I think the production company we decided as a group (Lionsgate) would help promote our film to our target audience as they have released teenage targeted films such as The Hunger Games. We decided for our film to have a budget of £600,000 which would allow us to work with Lionsgate to promote our title sequence. As our production company is Lionsgate, if our film was to air on television it would be before the Watershed as Lionsgate films usually are. Our film being promoted before the watershed would allow our film to reach our target audience of teenagers as it may be shown on television at convenient times such as coming home from sixth form and college.

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

During this project we mainly used two programmes on the computer which were Final Cut Pro and Photoshop CS5. Final Cut Pro was hardly a struggle to use due to our preliminary project at the beginning of the year, but as a whole I think Final Cut Pro is an easy software to use for simple editing and has a lot of effective add-ons such as Video Filters and Transitions for the clips to work better together.

Photo CS5 was not a struggle to use for as I have used it in my year 10 and 11 coursework. I did not use it much this year as Sophie was left to do screen credits on Photoshop. I felt like I helped her use it because I had previously used the website ‘DaFont’ and Photoshop together before in previous coursework. The only time I used Photoshop this year for this coursework was to create a logo for our production company ‘Silent Studios’.I created a logo by filtering and modifying an image I found on the internet and adding text over the top. I also filtered the text I found on DaFont. I liked the design of our production company and thought the image matched well with the production name, however we never fully developed this because we never took the photo the text is overlaid on ourselves so left it out of our future decisions. As a whole I didn’t find any difficulties using either of these programmes, I found both simple and had no major struggles.

This was the last adaption which was made to our production company’s logo. I think it was effective to the genre we was aiming for and matches in with the theme of our title sequence because of the idea of secrecy and loss of freedom for our main character.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from

it to the full product?

At the beginning of the year we was put into different groups from our coursework groups to create a continuity editing video. When recording this I felt pessimistic and thought the shots would not come out as I expected. After taking my tutorial with the media department of Final Cut Pro, I realised that the stress of combining multiple clips together was unneeded. Using the razor tool was simple and was able to make clean cuts of clips to make the editing more accurate.

My experience with Final Cut Pro was successful the first time I used it which gave me confidence with my coursework. Our preliminary task contained the editing techniques Match On Action and Shot-Reverse-Shot which were quite simple to do. Shot-Reverse-Shot was used in our coursework title sequence so it feels like the preliminary task was a lot of help to create my work.