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

Question Two: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

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

Question Four: Who would be the audience for you media project?

When we firstly carried out our research and planning onto the film genre of thriller, we recognised that the characteristics of the genre thriller most suited the older generation, this is because when reading the film rating categories from The British Board Film association about the rating of 12a we realised that the themes that it includes is just moderately mature where as we felt our script was a mature theme as it involved a possibly mentally ill character.














So we decided that we would not like to tailor our film to the younger audience so decided to aim our film to the 15 age rating audience. In this categories is states that it has a strong horror genre and can have moderate drug abuse but just not encouraged.

Choosing this audience made us more flexible in our story line and when actually filming. Looking over our finished film, I can say that our chosen audience still suits our film this is because we do include a short scene where the actress inhibits some sort of drug but it is not clear of what kind, also our film is strongly psychological so requires a moderately mature audience to understand it.

The role she plays presents a mature and shows in depth thought caters for our 15 rating too. Whilst casting for our actors/actresses to be in our film, we were looking for our main character to be female, this makes our audience for our media project more specific as it will attract the female audience more. Not only were we looking for a female actress but a young one, this also narrows our audience. Our actress was also a teenager (17) which also meant we

The scores we use in the scenes also reflect our mysterious and atmospheric theme which suits our audience. Moreover we use some extreme close ups to show some key props like the drugs and the business card at the end, these key props used are also aimed for a mature audience and too need a mature audience to link them together.

Whilst casting for our actors/actresses to be in our film, we were looking for our main character to be female, this makes our audience for our media project more specific as it will attract the female audience more. Not only were we looking for a female actress but a young one, this also narrows our chosen audiene. 

Question Five: How did you attract your audience?

We addressed our audience by using a variety of features, firstly looking at the theme we created. The genre we chose was thriller but we then chose to create more of a psychological thriller with the story of Lydia‘s hallucinations.

Themes that we then involved into our chosen genre were the possibility of the mental illness with our main character. Another theme could be that as our actress is young, it could represent teenage problems and how teenagers feel sometimes. 

These themes address our 15+ audience because it thrillers typically include a protagonist which in our case we did have, Thrillers also include mystery which we had by not letting the audience know whether the white masked people was her psychological state or real life. 

Another way we addressed our audience would be the settings that we chose, we had a variety of settings from inside a small park to the bedroom scene.

The bedroom scene is a personal scene which includes no dialogue just shots of Lydia. The bedroom represents a “normal” girls bedroom, so is aimed at girls. These camera shots of her in the bedroom show ‘normal’ things that people do in the morning, but instead we see how Lydia is different from others from her waking up to a nightmare to taking the drugs. 

As there is no dialogue it needs a audience to be able to interpret what is going on, so out chosen 15+ suits this. Our other locations like in the park when Lydia is jogging also suits our audience because the older audiences can relate more to it compared to the younger age groups.The score we picked is mysterious from its long, deep and slow rhythm this adds mystery to the characters life which gives the audience more questions to be asked on what is going on. When the white masked people appear on screen a slight bang is added to the score to add more shock to it, this makes the scene more scary which also fits in with our thriller genre. 

Throughout watching our film, the audience will constantly be on edge from the quick moving of different shots in different settings, and the different scores that are used so it takes the person watching to be able to link together the scenes and try to come up with a conclusion on what is going on so obviously the audience has to be mature so our genre suits it.

  

Whilst casting for our characters we aimed to find someone in their teenager years, and preferably female. This way we could aim our audience to be young females.  

Audience Profile: 

Age: 16+

Sex: Female

Hobbies: Dancing, singing, socialising, watching movies.

Likes: OUr audience enjoys shopping, partying with friends and socialising.

Dislikes: School work, Rock music, "being bored".

Favourite music artists: Drake, Rihanna, One direction and Katy Perry.

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

During the research  and planning stages, before making the product, I learnt a lot about what the internet had to offer. The internet offered a vast amount of information on past and present thriller films, clips of films going all the way back to the 1960's, which would not have been easily accessible if it wasn't for internet sites like YouTube.

All the information used on the internet was free, and without it, we would have had a limited number of thrillers to analyse and discuss and to use for inspiration for our own film sequence. When producing our product, we used DV cameras, these are not the best quality of cameras, giving a grainy and dull image throughout the sequence.

This was a problem especially in the bedroom scene where there was no natural light. There is a big difference between this clip compared to a block buster movie, such as Harry Potter:

  

The DV cameras also picked up buzzing sounds throughout filming, but we overcame this by adding scores over the top of all our scenes, so this buzz was unidentifiable.

We knew the DV cameras would not be able to pick up dialogue very well when filming outside, so we decided not to include any dialogue, and instead use the camera work, scores and editing to explain the plot and moods. The overall use of the DV cameras was easy to use and they were reliable. During post production we used the internet again to look for scored to add to our footage, we used a website called freeplaymusic.com.

 This website offered free, non copyrighted music at our finger tips. Without this website we would have had to either make our own scores which would have been extremely challenging, or contact music producers and ask for permission to use their music, this would have been a very time consuming process. We also used a free software called iMovie to edit our film together. Although it was not industry standard editing software, it was easy to use, offering keyboard shortcuts  for tasks such as "split". It offered a non linear and non destructive way of editing.

So if you made a mistake, you could always go back to how it originally was, this meant we could experiment different types of effects and editing ideas before submitting our final piece. We also used internet sites such as youtube, facebook, twitter, and tumblr to distribute our product which was a great success.

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