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

Film openings tend to start in a typical format, here is a list of all the film conventions:

• Introduce production company logo
• Introduce distribution company logo
• Often carry a title sequence
• Mood and tone established through sound
• Intends to draw the audience in 
• Introduces key characters

I have analysed the beginning of Final Destination 3 and have found that “Hard Eight Pictures Production” have been placed first, followed by “Practical Pictures” and “Matinee Pictures” which share the same screen. After the production logos, the movie title name is portrayed which is “Final Destination 3”. You can instantly tell from the editing that the movie is a horror thriller, as the effects on the production company names have been put in smoky glow and then fade out. The mood and sound instantly establish the spooky atmosphere and draws in the audience.  

After the production companies have appeared on the screen the credits start playing in the same way through the eerie atmosphere, below I took screen grabs of the credits:

The names and titles have all been put in order:

• ACTOR:                                                    Mary Elizabeth Winstead
• CASTING by:                                           John Papsidera
• MUSIC by:                                                Shirley Walker 
• COSTUME DESIGNER:                           Gregory B. Mah
• VISUAL EFFECTS:                                  Ariel Velasco Shaw
• EDITOR:                                                    Chris Willingham 
• PRODUCTION DESIGNER:                     Mary Freeborn
• DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY:          Robert McLachlan 
• CO-PRODUCER:                                      Art Schaefer
• EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS:                     Toby Emmerich, Richard Brener and Matt Moore
• PRODUCED by:                                          Craig Perry, Warren Zide, Glen Morgan and James Wong 
• WRITTEN by:                                           Glen Morgan and James Wong
• DIRECTED by:                                         James Wong

In our thriller "Vengeance" we basically looked back at one our earlier blogs which spoke about film conventions, in doing so we used that as our guideline and followed the same order. Our thriller also begins in the same way starting with production companies, the movie title, actors names etc and then finishes with the director. During the editing process, we had to make sure that our titles were in the correct order but once we showed our teacher we found they weren't and that our thriller resembled a trailer rather than a title sequence. Our group then had to change the titles around and make sure it looked as if it was a title sequence. 

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

EVALUATION Q3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

In our thriller, the production and distribution companies that have been used are Candi Studios and 19 Productions. Candi Studios is a local production company that will be able to offer our thriller a cinematic release, with 250 dvd's being sent out and an online release through Vimeo. Whereas, 19 Productions is a Korean production company that have helped guide us break the Korean target market by providing us with suitable information and a limited cinematic release. Both of these production companies are small independent companies that have helped us with our thriller, Vengeance. Our group believe that both these production companies are very suitable for our thriller, although we won't get a big cinematic release and our thriller won't be advertised so hugely, the chances are that through Vimeo our opening may just go viral and gain a wider audience. Also, small independent companies tend to work very closely with movies which will benefit our thriller, and they may promote it through film festivals which will make our thriller more widely known.

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

Evaluation: Who would be the audience for your media product? on Prezi

EVALUATION Q5: How did you attract/ address your audience?

Q5 evaluation

View more PowerPoint from zaiba1995


Below is a video of two girls from our media class, giving their opinions of our thriller:

EVALUATION Q6: What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Q6: Media Evaluation on Prezi

EVALUATION Q7: Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full project?

During the prelim our task was to film “a character opening a door, who walks into a room and sits down next to another character and they share a few lines of dialogue”. The brief mentioned that we had to have at least one match cut, an example of a shot reverse shot and show our understanding of the 180 degree rule.  In comparison to our final thriller, we had to treat our prelim as a mini version of what was to come for our real title opening, so in terms of this we had to go through pre- production, production and post- production.  During pre- production our group had outlined some ideas of what we could do in our thriller, by doing so an animatic storyboard was produced which would identify the sequence of the shots and what type of camera angle it would be.  Due to the idea of our final thriller being based around Korean ghost stories, our group followed the theme by seeing how it would play out in our prelim that way we could get a taste for how our final thriller would be. Our group’s final prelim idea was that we would have a normal friendly girl (character 1) playing in a park and sitting on a swing, when another mysterious girl (character 2) shows up and takes the swing besides her, character 1 being a friendly person hasn’t seen character 2 before and so asks what her name is, character 2 replies by glaring at character 1 and before we know it character 2 has mysteriously disappeared, leaving character 1 in shock.

During production, my role was to be an actor so I had to play the friendly girl. Our group found that my character had to always be in the background; otherwise the sequence of our prelim wouldn’t match up. Due to the limited amount of time we had to find a set which was close by to film, so we chose Myddelton Square Gardens, what I particularly liked about our location was that there was a church right beside it which gave our prelim an eerie atmosphere.  I took some screen grabs of some important shots from our prelim, you can see that we have used a close up of character 2 opening the gate which was part of our brief, we have been told that shots of shoes are excellent and I think it’s great we used it in our prelim. Next, you will see a shot of character 1 and 2 talking both of these shots were done in a short reverse shot. Finally, character 1 looks around suspiciously wondering where character 2 has gone.

During the editing, sound and effects were added to our prelim. I like that one minute we can see character 2 walking and the next she disappears, it shows that she is a ghost and the dark sound adds to this. Overall, we have established the 180 degree rule where character 1 is always on the left of the screen while character 2 the right side of the screen. I believe that the prelim task did help when it came to making our final thriller, as we were gaining experience on how to use software’s such as Final Cut Pro and Sound Track Pro. 

Vengence Final Version

This is group 3's final project; Vengence.
The password is student.


3. Zaiba, Vanessa, Kiah from 283goswell on Vimeo.

Titles in our thriller

We found out from our teacher Mary that our titles were in the wrong order and that we had to change some of the names used as we were using our names to often .However when she did tell us it was the final day of the deadline . We decided to correct the titles but as were doing so we realised that we would have to get rid of the korean translation titles as we didn't have time to find out what the new names were in korean.

It was a bit of a disappointment as we've been planning to use the korean titles since the beginning of our project , but we've come to an agreement that the right order of our titles is more important.

We looked back on our blog and found out that we did do a post on the correct order of titles but this was at the very beginning of January .

This is the post we are using to correct the mistakes of our titles . We are hoping that our intertextuality is strong enough to give of the korean flavour we wanted to have.

Last minute changes ... !

After our rough cut thriller was viewed by our teacher we realised that some aspects of our thriller needed to be changed so that the quality overall would be better . One of the points our teacher made was that the plot didn't make sense , he suggested that we film another scene .

Plot (Before) : Theres this main girl who get's bullied by other pupils at her school constantly , she get's to a point were she can't take it no more so she runs away to the forest , commits suicide and comes back as a Onryo Ghost . We have a jack in the box which she winds up to suggest how what the bullying is doing to her . When she turns into the ghost she goes about killing all the people who bullied her at school.

Dan our media teacher said he didn't get the plot from looking at our rough cut edit therefor we realised that we had to change our plot to something less complex and film another bullying scene to make our plot more clear.


We decided that we weren't going to film a suicide scene as it's only our beginning however after we filmed another bullying scene he commented saying "Now i can tell that she gets bullied and that's what turns her into that ghost"

  

Editing Summary

Through the course we have learnt how to edit Video and Audio using Final Cut Pro, How to edit Audio using Soundtrack and how to edit text using LiveType. (As you can see in our skills audits).

We edited our production company l

ogo using LiveType. We were able to change the font just by chosing the text track and double clicking a font. Text could just be typed in.

Effects could be dropped and dragged onto the track by dropping the effect into the effects tab. The effects could then be edited by clicking each individual attribute of the effect in LiveType.

We could edit the length of time the text appeared, the length of the effect and the keyframes/key-points of the effect in the timeline. With the Yellow bar being the text, and purple bar being the effect on the clip.

We could change the alignment of the whole text track or individual letters, as well as size an placement on the main board of LiveType.

For the Visual part of Vengence we used Final Cut Pro to edit.

We've added filters to most of our clips, and flashes to indicate flashbacks. We desaturated clips in the flashback to help the audience view the bullying scenes as flashbacks. After adding the effects into the clips we were able to edit the effects ourselves to choose how they would effect our clips. To add filters and/or fades all we had to do was drop them onto the clips we wanted to use them on. Filters included negative, grayscale and desaturate.

We overlaid a few clips to give the scenes a ghost like effect. We put two of the exact clips on top[ of each other. We lowered the opacity of the higher clip.

We added colour dips to fade between the forest scenes and flashbacks to bullying scenes. The majority of our colour dips were white.

We used fade in fade out dissolves between some of our clips to create a smooth fade between them.

For the text we used the modern Korean script Hangeul with English translations.

Rough Cut of Vengence

Our teacher dan gives us feedback on our final project 'Vengence'

Vengeance Rough Cut!

Uploading to YouYube

Due to posts having been deleted Group 3 have decided to upload their work to YouTube as a back up. The AS Coursework playlist can be viewed here. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1CC59D6197F03432

19 Productions Company Logo

This is our Production Company Logo, it is in Korean first and then English, this was done to shown intertexuality of Oriental Horror films.

Pictures taken while filming - Intertexuality

 These two pictures shows us taking pictures of Zaiba after she got her eye make up done , we wanted to take some close up pictures of her face and work/try with angles before we recorded her .

At first we were hoping to use a samsung mobile phone as part of the korean intertextuality as it's a korean make and korean films usually are mobile phone/technology based.However we found out that it didn't go with our plot so as a whole we thought the hair , eye makeup and white outfit is strong enough intertextuality to carry of our korean inspiration .

Analysis of statistics

Coming close to the end of our project we have decided to analysis the statistics of our blog. Doing this we can view what has been popular and who has viewed our blog from where.

Overview

All time views

Most popular posts

Top 3 traffic sources

World Audience

Most popular posts

The sites which have reffered to us

Page views by country

VLOG - Final Filming day

We decided to make a VLOG  , we weren't prepared for it but we thought it would be a good idea . Overall though we've concluded that we should make a  Summery VLOG of all our filming days with set questions and detailed answers . 

Filming our thriller!

During the half-term group 3 decided to start filming our scenes for our thriller, we found that our chosen location had many forests and was a secluded area to film. While we were filming we took some pictures of our group, to show how the filming process went about.

In this picture you can see Kiah placing a
ribbon on a branch

We have used intertextuality as we are using pieces of The
Grudge. The picture on the left is our version of a scary eye
 and the picture on the right is what we have used as inspiration 

Using intertextuality in Vengeance

In our thriller, Group 3 will be using intertextuality in terms of  having the main character resemble the villains in The Grudge and Ringu. In the following pictures you will see Zaiba dressed and looking exactly like the characters from our chosen examples.

On the left is Group Three's version, the middle is an image taken from
The Grudge and on the right hand side is an image taken from Ringu