Our thriller challenges real media products because I believe the certain elements that thrillers have on an audience are all included in my group’s thriller. Thrillers create a special type of suspense what gets your heart thumping and for a thriller to be successful, the opening sequence is vital in making the audience feel chills. I believe the unique opening of thrillers make them seem better because the audience are too used to the obvious and things that have been done and seen before does not cause a specific reaction. That’s why my group decide to take the risk of doing something new and not the basic stalker, stabbing or someone lost thriller. My group’s thriller was a sci-fi thriller which people don’t see many of. Even though this was a huge risk we still decided to go through with it because popular famous directors are always noticed for doing the unusual and out of the norm. Directors like Paul Haggis who directed “Crash” (2005) which was credited for its uniqueness, Christopher Nolan who directed “The Dark Knight” which was incredibly unusual in its own way like how he allowed the audience like the villain (the Joker) more than the hero (Batman), in the way how he portrays the joker when many films wouldn’t do this. Finally, there is the famous Alfred Hitchcock who was the master of making thrillers, as he brought us the classic “Psycho”. We also took into consideration of his article of “Let ‘em play God” which gave us an idea of how we wanted our audience to feel, in this case the same as Hitchcock and letting the audience to know more that the characters. This really helped because this way we knew that if our thriller did this then it would be very thrilling according to Hitchcock. We added this by making the alien character in our thriller not know what environment she was in and who was surrounding her by blind folding her (see below paragraph). The documentaries that our teacher showed us before we started the project also helped because we learnt the basic ways to create tension and suspicion but most importantly that the unexpected causes the most reaction and that there doesn’t always have to be a dramatic ending in the opening sequence to be thrilling and suspenseful for it to be successful which was hard to believe at first but when she showed us some examples, we understood how it did this, especially the thriller which confused many people. This gave my group many ideas and as we wanted to be unique, we decided to not have a huge dramatic ending to our opening thriller.
My media product represents many social groups as we thought about this before filming. Because we said in our pitch that we were going to appeal to a wide range of the population, so we decided to pick our actors carefully. I was going to act with my group member, Ola, but instead I decided to take the role of the director because we thought we should let Selma act so that the film would also appeal to the female side and not just the male side. In addition, because research tells us that many females don’t really watch sci-fi thrillers but this way because there is a dominant woman in our thriller, this would draw their attention. Also because both the actors are from completely different ethnic backgrounds, white and black, it cannot be classed a black or white film so the audience variety is widened. The age of the characters look young which is good because research shows that young people are the most spender and more likely to go and watch films in the cinema. Research also shows that sci-fi’s are usually watched by older people, especially the type of people who like star trek. This is good because the combination of the young characters and older watchers increases the audience, as there is no age limit on film. People have no excuse to say I am too old or young to watch this film. The way we conveyed the status class of the characters is interesting because the doctor is seen as a highly qualified respectable person in hindsight, but in our thriller, he is doing something suspicious and looks very evil. This supports the famous quote “the prettiest people do the ugliest things” which changes the audience perspective of the doctor from helping someone to doing something terrible to them. I think this creates a certain impact on the thriller because in theory, people would not think a doctor would do something opposite to helping someone. However, our thriller has one limitation on social groups as ours is a sci-fi thriller, many religious people may avoid watching it because they strongly believe that alien, magical or spiritual things are not true and that it should not be demonstrated on film. Beside this religious aspect, I believe my thriller targets a wide variety of social groups.
I believe my thriller has the potential to become a big Hollywood film because it looks professional, that even though my thriller was low budgeted, films like four weddings and a funeral was very low budgeted, and the profit went over the roof. It generated around 250 million and cost 6 million to help it. Even though mine is an opening sequence, it seems to lead people on and looks very interesting. Because we had a cliffhanger, this will convince people to see the rest. Perhaps our opening sequence could become a trailer for the rest of the film. The special effect we used could also help it to become popular because there has been a recent rise on sales for movies with unbelievable special effects as many people like to see these amazing things and how technology can help us do this. We tried to make full use of the technology because we knew we could do much on the Mac computers so we added a special effect at the end of our thriller. Thinking of marketing strategies, I would release the opening sequence on the internet like on sites like YouTube and view the ratings, then hopefully a big institution like Paramount would be interested in my thriller and invest in it so my group can complete the whole film. I believe this is the easiest, cheapest and quickest way for professional produce’s to scout people who are looking to make a career through film making.
I think I have a mainstream audience and not a niche audience because recent statistics show that sci-fi’s have become very popular. For example, the hit television programmes such as “Heroes” and “Smallville” are both sci-fi and these are one of the most popular programmes on television. In addition, childhood programmes like Marvel characters are being made into films rapidly and becoming smash hit films. These could be classed as sci-fi films because they all have a supernatural touch to them. Many people want to fantasise about having incredible abilities so this film will make them feel that they are in the characters position and live the supernatural life, which the film will do. This is good because the main reason people go to cinema is to escape their life for a few hours and be looking through someone else’s eyes and I think my thriller allows the audience to do this. This will be therefore aimed at aspirers. I have mentioned how gender will attract the audience in a previous paragraph but also the colours used could convince the audience like the red spotlight to illustrate some sort of danger and also because red is stereotyped as a confident man’s colour, like the “Hitman” wears a red tie, and the purple/violet contact lenses conveys a mysterious girl or woman, like in “The Incredibles” Violet’s, the daughter, power is invisibility. Much thought has gone into how and who the thriller appeals to. An example of one person who would definitely love to see my thriller Dylan Seale, a big fan of the supernatural programme “Heroes”, favourite film is “Eleventh Hour” a sci-fi thriller movie, his age is 26, has a long stressful job and takes any opportunity to go out. This shows that there is a huge audience for this thriller because most people are in his position, as they would want to at least escape their boring, over-working stressful life for at least a few hours.
The way I would market my film would be through the internet as this is the easiest way to for world wide exposure. My actors are highly rated upcoming British actors with a lot of potential. I choose for them to be British because there are not many big British actors at the moment who are know by the whole world. British people want to see their people making it big and receiving credit for their exceptional performance. Also that because recently, British actors playing lead roles in Hollywood smash films has become very popular, such as Dev Patel in “Slumdog Millionaire”. This achieved remarkable success. They will be upcoming because the concept of this new sci-fi thriller, it brings a fresh look to it which will reflect the new fresh actors. This will address the audience of who they are to the whole world. Perhaps I would allow famous directors and actors to watch it first and ask them to give a comment and a rating for how they thought the film was. The rating would be out of 5stars because if it was out of ten it would be harder for them to give a high rating and also would deceive the audience slyly. All the good comments would be posted on the trailer with their names besides it.
I believe this is a good technique because ordinary people look up to stars credited for their work and will motivate people to watch it and also because if the movie stars really like it, there might be a possibility they might want to work with me in the future which would be a huge advantage for me to carry on with this incredible filmmaking. I would advertise through television adverts so that everyone will see it at one point, certain billboards like at bus stops so that while they are waiting, they are slow persuaded to see and read what it is about and allow newspapers to write a review about it even though this is very risky. These would be all a good way of getting the film across to many people around the country. I believe that these advertisements should be first held in America because if the film becomes a hit their then it is very likely to be a hit in every other country.
I have learnt a lot about the technologies I have used in order to make an exceptional piece of work. The resources at my college were unbelievable; I had no idea could produce some of the things I did. The editing software was incredible as it had many different functions to choose from, which was good because this would mean that everyone will not all have the same sort effects and edits. The software we used to edit was Final Cut Pro, this was a very professional software what actual film-makers use and as soon as I started, I had no idea how to use the system properly, apart from the short tutorial we had before the project started. It allowed use to put everything together smoothly and cut shots so that we only use appropriate parts we needed. However, this did bring stress upon the group, as the software was sometimes too complicated for use to use making us miss simple things we could have used but the software was too advanced. After time progressed, we got more familiar with how it works so things became easier and quicker to do. Final Cut Pro was good for allowing certain parts flow with the timing as we could maximise and minimise the timing toolbar which made everything much easier, especially near the end of the project when everyone was rushing and particular shots did not fit each other or if they didn’t have enough footage. It was amazing what the software could do, but I was not surprised because I believe I was only scratching the surface of its capability. The second software we used was Soundtrack Pro. This was a hard to believe system in which we could add all types of non-diagetic sounds to our film. There was a huge range to choose from, including the supernatural sounds that we favoured as our thriller was a supernatural one. It was also much easier to use as the format was simple and putting the sounds on was very straight forward. The third and final software we used was Live Type. This was the most astonishing software I have ever used. The special effects were unbelievable and varied from matrix code style effects to black hole tunnels. Once I explored this software, it encouraged me to add the special effect called “Light Chase” which I used it for the when the camera zooms into Selma’s eye, and this would seem like it is going on a journey through her eye. The original colours was green and red but we change it to red and black as it would suit our thriller better because the colour coordination symbolises a certain effect. Also the credits were to be done on this software as well and the fonts and how they appeared on screen looked implausible. Once we had fully explored this software, we found everything we wanted to use and this made our production look twice as better.
The internet has also played a large part in my process of producing this opening sequence as I have recorded everything I have done since the project started. Every time I do something towards the project, I record it on the blog so that I can see what I have already achieved. This also worked out as a timing schedule because the blog easily indicates to us that we needed to move on and start the next stage as other groups were progressing faster than us at the beginning but then we soon caught up and came back on schedule. Blogging was essential to gain marks because we needed to reveal what we have done, why we did it and how it has helped us in order to make our opening sequence just as good as it is. The uploading of our film on Vimeo can increase the amount of people to see it because it is a broadcasting tool like YouTube. This will widen the potential audience and hopefully entertain many people. Tools like Vimeo make me want to make more production as I like to entertain people and be rewarded for my hard work through praise. It can perhaps allow me to go many pathways with my film and can lead to a destination a have always looked for. Things like this inspired me to do this subject as I like to be a part of the amazing productions that can be done be my creativity and exploring many different things. Hopefully I can upload this on YouTube later so I can broaden my fan base as I have seen many things become known and very popular from just posting creative pieces of work through the internet.
I have learnt very much since the preliminary task stages. At that time it was only the beginning and I had no idea what I was in for. It made me realise how organised you have to be and how passionate about the work you are creating to make the whole project work to reach a high standard. The key aspect of storyboarding is precious to what we wanted to make even though it is highly unlikely we were going to do everything by the storyboard. This was the hardest stage for my group as we made around six storyboards because we were not satisfied with the previous ones, but this was only because we wanted to make an original piece of work. However, we knew our stress would become the audience’s pleasure and that is why we kept on going and did not waste time dwelling on failure. This encouraged our spirit and this made us learn valuable lessons that would help us in media, as well as in the real world. Filming was every exciting for me as I was the director of my thriller and I got to do some marvellous camera shots which are included in my film. I also took into consideration the match cuts we learnt at the preliminary stages and used this effectively in my final thriller. Editing was probably the longest and most stressful process but it all paid off as the production came out very well. As soon as we finished the opening sequence, my group and I were very excited to post my video on Vimeo because now the film would have worldwide exposure on the internet.
Finally the audience feedback was a warm applause and engaged with the film very well. Positive reviews were frequent to my thriller and the audience could see the work ethic that was put in. There was no negative feedback which was not very surprising because my group and me made every single piece of detail to perfection. One of the positive views was about the sound, as they liked all the sounds we used and they also thought the surgery glove slap sound and scissors cut sound were real but in actual fact, they were added by my group through Soundtrack Pro which they thought was amazing because the timing was exactly on point. The audience liked the special effect very much because it created a fantastic image on the screen and because not really anyone used an special effect like mine. Another thing was the CCTV shot because when the shot was on Selma, it illustrated that she was not human and was an alien because she did not appear clear on the screen. They thought this was very effective because up to this point , they did not know she was an supernatural alien but this told them everything they needed to know and by doing it this was much more stimulating then just telling the audience simply. Many things were mentioned, including the match cuts, editing, zoom into Selma’s eye and the astonishing introducing shot of behind the fan. Overall, I and my group were very impressed with the feedback and felt that we had achieved a lot.
The cinema experience made me very nervous because it felt like a real premier and I didn’t know how the audience reaction would be like. It was in Vue cinema in angel. This was the first time my production would be judged by people I don’t know. However, everything went well as I could hear people talking about how good mine was and the applause could have blown the roof off. Me and my group felt proud of our piece of work and the audience’s reaction told us everything we needed to know.
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