Media Studies production Report

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

Our main task was to produce an original opening sequence to a thriller movie. Each person in our group had to produce a pitch that we would present to the class and the most popular of the pitches was the one we chose to develop and write a script for the opening sequence. The class and our teachers thought that Rebecca’s’ Pitch sounded the most promising so we all began to give our ideas on how the opening sequence should happen and the shots we needed to include in it. We decided that the film should be given a 15 age rating as the sequence contains a fairly strong violence scene involving the lead character being suffocated with a plastic bag. Although you don’t get to see the suffocation for a long time, I didn’t think it should be rated as a 12 because BBFC guidelines for that age group say that their should only be moderate violence that isn’t very realistic, instead it should be more fantasy based violence that distance the film from real life. Our thriller doesn’t quite fit into this category as the murder it is quite brutal and realistic.

The main elements of thriller movies are that they commonly have quite a lot of action in the opening sequence to get the audience hooked into watching the film; they usually have two sides, good and bad, (this is known as binary opposition) with clear indicators as to which side each character is on. Chase scenes also feature heavily in thriller movies along with some degrees of violence and finally they always have a problem that will be resolved by the end of the movie.

From the first two minutes of a thriller you should aim to include the opening titles, the name of the movie should relate to the film and be easy to remember. It is important in these first few minuets of the film to set the plot for the rest of the movie and give the audience questions or problems to solve so they want to keep watching the film. This can be achieved through camera shots not revealing the identity of characters, sounds being played in the background, e.g. you could hear traffic outside and wonder where they are and the clothes they are wearing or the furniture around them could make you think about what time period the characters are from or there location.

The typical thriller conventions might be broken by some directors either because it wouldn’t suit some thriller sub genres, e.g. medical thrillers wouldn’t necessarily have good and bad sides and psychological thrillers might not have action packed openings, instead choosing to raise tension subtlety using close ups to so reactions and emotions.

Stephen Sommers directed ‘The Mummy’ which was a big blockbuster movie released in 1999. The opening sequence of this movie is effective because there is good use of music played on the opening titles; haunting, violin music is played at the start of the movie as the first shot fades through black. This creates the impression of danger and mystery. The first shot is an aerial shot that is zooming out from the sun then pans across an ancient Egyptian landscape and then into a close up of one of the main characters face, this is good as it quickly introduces you to the main character and the time period this sequence is set in. No Natural light is used in these opening shots; it is all candle lighting which adds to the effect that they are in ancient Egypt and it creates a golden aura in the scene which makes it seem very mystical and beautiful. Another clever shot is used to show the woman’s silhouette so we can see her stab herself with a knife, it is shot this way as it clearly shows what she has done but without much detail which means it could be classed as a 15 instead of possibly having to be an 18 movie. This has influenced our film because it has shown us that if you underplay the violence you see, it can be even more powerful as you have to imagine the murder and it prevents the film from having a high age rating.

I have also looked at the movie ‘No Country for Old men’. The opening scene starts with numerous stills of wide, open Texas landscapes during sunset. The landscape is very dark against the golden sunset almost like a silhouette. Whilst these images are being shown a man’s voice is being played, no musical background is accompanying it. This is a powerful start and establishes the movie to be a dark, brooding, slow-paced thriller. It then cuts to a panning camera following a man getting arrested and being put into the back of a police car. There is a close up on the gas canister as it gets put into the police car, this makes you think it’s important but you don’t know why.
A low angle camera changes to an aerial shot as we see the car drive down the long open road. When we see the murderer strangling the police guard to death in the station the camera switches between a high angle shot directly above the struggle and a close up on the murderers face this shot shows his emotions, or in this case lack of. Then we see a point of view shot from the front of the stolen police car as it follows another car down the road, this shot makes it seem like he is hunting this man down.
Then the murderer calmly kills the man from the car, no emotion on his face, he kills him with no hesitation, using a gas pressure pump. He is a man that is used to killing people; moreover, his killing method is very effective and clever as it doesn’t leave any evidence in the body like a bullet. Then the movie switches to the next character with a close up on his face. He says ‘you hold still’ which is a link back to the last scene when the killer said the same thing to the man from the car before he killed him. This movie has influenced our film because it we wanted the killer in the film to come across as a cold killer that uses a slightly different method of killing people, like the murderer in this movie. We also liked the idea of having a slow paced opening shot with not much to look at but the sound being the tool that is setting you up for the movie. So in ours the first shot is just a still shot of the music box spinning with its music being the only thing you can hear.


My research of other films has helped me to create our opening as by watching how other directors have presented ideas though certain camera shots, use of sound and mise-en-scene. For example, a common way of capturing the audience’s interest is to have a murder in the opening scene, we also decided to not reveal the identity of the killer and we made him look evil as he is dressed in black with his hood up cloaking his features. This character is very important as the audience watching the movie will want to find out who this mystery killer is and why he has killed someone. We also included a small red herring, you see the door open and the lead character turns around, you think something bad is going to happen and the tension is raised, and then it drops as you see it is just the dog coming into the room. Through my research on thrillers I have learnt that they need to keep raising and dropping the tension to keep the audience interested. Like the film ‘The Mummy’ our opening sequence included eerie music to give a foreshadowing effect that bad things are about to happen. The film was going to have a more brutal murder scene that we chose to cut down to make the film less violent. We were also going to have a shot of the killer reflected in a mirror walking threw the door but we chose to cut this scene as it removed some of the mystery surrounding the character and the mirror couldn’t be adjusted to the right angle due to the layout of the room.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The main group of people that we represented in the movie were middle class fathers, the mise-en-scene we used to make the actor look middle class was the smart causal clothes he wore, and he didn’t shave that morning so he looked older. In the scene we see a father crying whilst in his daughters’ bedroom holding a childhood picture of her. We presented this character as a grieving, loving father by lighting his face in a warm, soft light and we used water to simulate tears. The camera angle is also looking up at him, which makes you think about your low view point and his low state of mind, it instantly gives you empathy for the character so you care when he is murdered. The dog enters this shot it is almost like a point of view shot looking at the man, wanting attention from him, but he is too sad to stroke or play with the dog. The killer is represented as being evil as he is dressed in all black and he is kept in the shadows throughout the opening scene. His killing method is brutal and didn’t allow any chance of resistance or fight from the father. The killer has the impression of a cold, hardened murderer, who shows no remorse or hesitance to kill this man. We tried to portray this as the killer doesn’t pause at all; he just walks straight in and gave the man no warning or chance to defend himself.

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

Warner Bros, Entertainment, Inc. is one of the world's largest producers of film and television entertainment, founded in 1918 and is an American owned company; they have also taken over New Line Cinema. This is the institute that I would choose to distribute my product. I would do so as it is a world renowned company with a track record of producing hit movies, this would be a really good company for the product to be associated with and would add a lot of creditability to the film and this company would have a lot of contacts that could help with advertising and promotion. They would also have a large budget so we could afford to get really good visual and editing effects. Some well known Warner Bros. Movies include, 300 (2007), I am Legend (2007), The Dark Knight (2008), Lethal Weapon (1987), The Matrix (1999). These films are thrillers that involve violence and death and so I feel my film with fit in well amongst these other titles.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

To find out who the audience for our media product should be we created a questionnaire so we could carry out audience research to find out what they want or expect from the piece. From the questionnaires we found that the ages 15-35 was the target demographic for our film and that the audiences favoured sub genre of a thriller is an action thriller, whilst the least favourite is a medical thriller. From our surveys we also found that most people would want to have an opening sequence that ended with a problem that had to be solved. Obviously we took those expectations on board and made a action thriller opening that ends with you with a few problems, such as, why is the man crying over a picture of a young girl, who is the murderer and why did he want to kill this man? I have conducted further research into understanding the audiences for media products by deconstructing other thriller movies and describing the audiences that consume them. For example, I have watched ‘No country for Old Men’ and I would suggest that this is a thriller movie for a more late teen to adult demographic as it more slow paced than an average thriller, it has many scenes of wide open American landscapes and slow cuts that younger viewers might get bored of. It is also a very quiet movie with mostly non-diagetic sounds. This film would also appeal more to men as it is quite gruesome and shows many dead bodies and murders taking place.

Our opening of ‘Suffocation’ (the name of the movie), received good audience feedback. The viewers thought the grieving father was played well, the dog was a nice addition to the movie and they thought that the plot was good and the questions that the opening raised would keep them interested and would watch the whole movie. The feedback we received was positive overall, the close ups were praised as good at capturing the emotions of the grieving father and the music box sound worked well at unsettling people. But some viewers commented that we could have used a wider range of shots and had more dialogue.

How did you attract/address your audience?

To address our audience we used many classic thriller conventions, such as tension building music being played on the opening titles. There is a murder within the first two minuets of the scene to attract the audience’s interest. We disguised the identity of the murderer, so you question who they are and their motives for killing. We also used quicker cuts where we wanted to raise the tension or in the case of the murderer entering the room we dragged that shot out to make it more frustrating that you as the audience can guess what is about to happen but there is no way of warning the main character. I think that the narrative of the piece and how it has been shot have lived up to the audiences expectations as the story is an action thriller and it leaves you with many questions that are to be revealed later on in the film. The BBFC guidelines have influenced are thriller because we have had to class our film as being a 15 because the BBFC description of a 12 film clashes slightly with its content and the murder scene it tastefully done so you don’t see the act for long, it cuts to the dog barking at the killer, so it wouldn’t be classed as an 18 movie.

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

In our production we have used a film camera that we borrowed from the school library and we have used the Adobe Premier Pro software to edit the movie and burn it onto a DVD. I learnt many different camera shots through our class work and research and through our preliminary task we were able to practise some of these shots. For example we experimented with using close ups to see the characters reactions to the strange things that were happening to them, zooming out of one shot to make a seamless transition from the same object in the shot before it, panning shots to follow the character as she walked down the hallway and mid shots to show the character in the surroundings. We developed these shots on our final piece; we left more space before and after the film clips so we could edit the piece easier. We were much better at filming the shots as we were much steadier than when first started using the camera. An earlier experience with lighting problems taught us that we needed to think more about the lighting and in our movie we wanted a dark room but light to be on the main characters face as we wanted to see his emotions clearly, so to accomplish that we blacked out the windows with bin bags and positioned lamps in the right place to light up his face but not to spread to much light around the room. This took a while to get right, but the lamps had adjustable heads so it was much easier to get the light going where we wanted it to and we also did a few tester shots before- hand to see how it looked. We also learnt that to get a clearer music sound we should record just the sound of the music box then we looped this sound through the piece using Adobe which worked very successfully. We learnt our Adobe Premier Pro techniques from an instructor who came in to show us how to use it as we edited our preliminary task, he taught us things that we used in our final piece, such as fades, how to edit scenes together and how to apply titles to the film. The hardest part of the editing process was trimming down the selected takes and placing them on the time line and then putting in fades to make the transitions between the shots so it didn’t look like the camera has suddenly jumped to the next scene, it makes the movie flow much better.

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

Looking back at the preliminary task I think I have improved so much as a film maker and editor. In the preliminary task we did around two takes of each shot and thought it would be enough, but in the final piece I insisted I looked at each scene we did and that we repeat it again and again until I thought we had got the shot I wanted. Me and Rebecca conflicted on some of the shots we should include, so to resolve this issue we took the same scene from both our perspectives so when it came to editing we could decide which shot worked best in the scene. From the preliminary task we learnt that we should leave a longer gap before and after filming each scene to make the editing easier and one of the main problems in our preliminary task was that the lighting was behind one of our lead characters, this was a big mistake and made him seem in shadow so for our final task we thought a lot more about lighting and blocked out natural light choosing instead to create our own light source using adjustable lamps, so we could position the light where we wanted it. When we came to editing we also found a few shots were slightly out of sync, so on our final task we made sure we had a few takes of each shot, luckily this problem didn’t arise again. But if it had happened we could have manipulated the sound until it fitted into the visuals on the Adobe software. We changed our mind a few times during the shooting as I thought we could alter some of the scenes to make the film run better and the layout of the room, as it was quite small, meant we couldn’t do the original idea of the killer being seen by the audience coming in by a reflection as we couldn’t get the right position and angle to make that work properly.

I have learnt that producing even a short piece of film like we did takes many hours of hard work and helped me understand how feature length films require lots of staff, many hours and a lot of money to produce. If I were to do this film again I think I would have tried to include a wider variety of shots into the piece, although it was hard due to the short amount of film time we had, and we should have fully agreed more of the camera script before filming because it would avoid disagreements on how the film should be shot and save a lot of time that should be used filming the piece. But I do think that the scripts can be open to some change as when you see the location new ideas come to you and unforeseen problems can arise. I feel that our grouped worked well as a team, but as me and Rebecca where both strong leader figures in the group we sometimes had confrontation on how scenes should be shot. I would have also liked my team to be more understanding when I wanted to keep repeating the same scene over and over until we had got it how I wanted. But overall I think the group worked really well together as we are all good friend and we had good interaction so we could share our idea with each other really well and no serious conflicts occurred. I think everyone played their role in producing the film and I am happy with the group and the piece we have produced.