Evaluation 7

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

Below is my preliminary task:

Here is my final task:

Evaluation 6

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

Sound 
From making our opening sequence I have learnt a lot about sound and its importance within films. Before we even started to film or plan our opening sequence we analysed lots of different opening sequences. From this we  knew that sound could make or break a thriller as a lot of the tension and build up comes from the music and the sound effects. From this we learnt that we shouldn't rush the process of finding non-diegetic backing music but make sure that we have selected it carefully and appropriately. In terms of editing the sound I have learnt a lot about how to change, cut and edit sound on Adobe premiere pro and Adobe sound booth. Within the editing software I have learnt how to alter the volumes of different audios such as creating the perfect volume for the music, how to fade things in and out such as the sound effect of the shower and this played a crucial part in adding to our narrative enigma. The fading in and out of audios added to the verisimilitude of the scene as it didn't sound like the effects such as the sound of the shower didn't obviously sound like they had been added in as a sound effect rather than the natural sound. Experimenting with the sound also taught us to incorporate different audio techniques such as a sound bridge.

Camera
Before creating our thriller opening sequence I had no/little experience with camera handling and filming, I have therefore learnt a lot. When filming, we decided to use the Cannon 700D which was one of our media departments newly purchased cameras and so we knew it would offer a good quality of footage. This camera has a modern touchscreen feature which made it easier to focus and this therefore gave us professional looking footage. We only found out that we could use this to focus after trying to continually focus manually, learning this then helped us massively to speed up the process and give better looking footage. This easy-focus feature was particularly helpful when shooting close up shots as it captured the detail well and an example of this was when our female actor presses the doorbell.
 Along with the camera I learnt how to use all the equipment involved with using the camera such as the tripod and microphone. I also learnt that if you don't set the white balance correctly then it can effect the quality of the footage and distort the colour. We therefore set the white balance for every shot by placing a piece of white paper in front of the camera and making sure all the camera settings were correct.

Editing 

The editing software we used was Adobe premiere pro. Like with filming, before making this I had no previous experience with editing and so I have gained a complete new skill set. By doing the Prelim task I learnt how to do basic editing and this meant I could quickly edit together a draft edit and it didn't take too long to create the main structure of the opening sequence only using the razor tool to cut down the footage. After further practice I learnt about all the different features of Premiere pro and can now edit to a good standard, incorporating lots of different features such as the audio and visual effects and transitions. Examples of these effects and transitions is the 'black and white' effect which was put over all the footage and the 'dip to white' transition allowed us to signify to the audience when the flash backs were happening.

Evaluation 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

Evaluation 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?
Thriller films appeal to both female and male genders of a variety of different social classes. There are however a variety of sub genres within the thriller genre and so certain sub genres may appeal to one gender or social class more than another depending on how relate-able the characters and themes throughout the film are to them. As we have only created an opening sequence and not a whole film this has the potential to appeal to any gender and any social class.
In terms of age, thriller films appeal a wide range of ages and so it is difficult to specify which ages would like them most. However, they are mainly aimed at 15-40 year olds. I felt as our characters would all be young adults that an age group of 18-25 would be most appropriate for our target audience age. They would be able to identify more with the characters and this seems correct. However, after doing further research into this I found that psychological thrillers, which is the genre that I feel fits our group, appeal to mainly over 25 year olds because they're intellectually demanding.
We also have to take into account that most psychological thrillers are given the label 18+ because of the content of some of the topics which can be rather disturbing and have long lasting psychological effects if a younger person were to watch it. I would therefore say our thriller would be aimed at people aged 18-30. Other people aged 16 and 17 could also watch this but only if they took an interest in horror/thriller films and so knew what they were getting themselves into.
Both genders would enjoy our thriller however women may enjoy it more as women typical enjoy psychological thrillers more because they can try to work out what is happening and predict a possible ending.

Links I used:
http://www.slideshare.net/jphibbert/thriller-film-research
http://www.slideshare.net/jphibbert/thriller-film-research?next_slideshow=1