Vidur Bharatram Evaluation.

Who would be the audience for your media product?
Like I said before that our aim were the people who enjoyed watching horror movies and suspense thrillers. As we did use two teenagers around the ages of 17 and 18 our main targets for audience would be the Teenagers across the U.K. The storyline does involve a love story gone wrong but has elements of The Ring. The decision to keep it above the age of 15 as the rating would be a good idea. Our project also aims at an older age, as thrillers usually tend to attract all age groups but is definitely aimed at the younger people.

At first we had difficulties to choose the “perfect Genre” for our movie. We went through many trailers of Romantic, Comedies and Drama’s. As a group we did not want a cheesy story that would have a few audience members and would be like the rest. We wanted change so as a group we came up with a storyline for a horror movie. Looking at many trailers of different movie that involved teenagers like “ I know what you did last summer” “Fear of the dark” and “ The Grudge” were the main reasons and inspirations for our Teen Horror genre. I think this genre would appeal to the audience because there are many teenagers right now in the U.K looking for a perfect horror movie that would directly relate to them. I think our movie, In The Shadows, would be the perfect example of the Teen Horror.

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

We chose add Newline Cinema’s in our opening. Hence I would like to think that Newline Cinema would like to distribute our movie around. Releasing this on DVD would be better than releasing it in Cinemas. Well of course DVD would be a better distribution method as this is only an amateur movie. Newline Cinemas has a tendency to distribute horror and suspense movies across the globe. Making this the number one target for distributing rights. Also Newline Cinemas have a big fan following which is a good sign for us.

I also found out that New Line Cinemas have released many horror movies that have done very well for example Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Final Destination 2 and 3 also Snakes on Plane. These movies were also very inspirational in our movie that as a group we made. Hence we chose New Line to distribute the movie. There is a big audience for New line which make our movie better in the market.

• How does your media product represent particular social groups?

My media product represents the social group, which wants to see horror movies and wants to get the thrill of watching something that frightens them. My movie also has the element of surprise and the fact that no one knows who is the real murderer till the end. This was aimed to the age group of 15 and above as it has not many graphic scenes but the suspense is very spine chilling. Also the fact that we used teenagers to play the roles of the main characters shows that we have aimed this to the younger crowd that is a teenage crowd. There is no particular class that we have aimed this at its mainly towards a teenage audience. These were our main targets that were in our plan when we as a group were planning the movie.
To make our movie represent a particular social group, which was, a horror group we had to make many decisions regarding how we were going to show horror and fear in our movie. We had to find a day, which was going to be dark and cloudy to have a horror atmosphere. We had many such days making filming easier than we expected. Editing I used many effects to show the horror scenes in our movie. Music we chose a dramatic sound effects that changed our movie to benefit us. Why did this happen? Because the music added a sense of anxiety for the audience who are hooked on watching our movie.

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

My media course work is about a 2-minute opening of a Horror movie. Or product took many ideas from different genres of films to create. Ideas like Donnie Darko and The Ring were central in forming the baseline of our script and our storyline.
I drew out a storyline that fit into the pictures above and tried to represent all the horror materials I could find that would fit in. The Fear Factor that I put into the movie contributes to the forms of the conventions of real media. The way we used lighting in many shots with dark backgrounds added to the genre of fear and horror. We used in one occasion a very well worked tilt shot on our chapel called the Michael Kirk. Here the dark effects could set the scene for an epic shooting. The effect of editing played a big role in our movie, black and white videos to represent the Killer or the ghost. The music was also chosen to have the scary effect of the movie on the audience a very slow build up song.

• How did you attract/address your audience?

I tried to attract the audience by using the simple method of suspense through our opening two minutes. Charles Lambourne our main character in the story dies at the start during the credits and before the main title of the film. We used different styles of editing and cross cutting to make it look nice and well done. We took the title into consideration and had a few ideas that we could sell. One of the titles fit right in with the movie and we decided that “ IN THE SHADOWS” would be the best one. This was a good was of attracting our audience as the titles tell a bit of the story already and gives ideas that this could be a horror movie.
To address our Audience we did not use Narration, but on the phone call in the opening scene we hear Charles talking to Lisa in a very casual informal way. Here we wanted to address the audience in a teenage casual way. This helped us be very natural with our conversation adding the point of fear. The titles were the only the credits to give the actors names. We did not use many captions to describe the events unfolding on screen.

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

Over the last few months working on “ IN THE SHADOWS” I have personally learnt how to use our editing software, Premier Elements, on our school computers and use Audacity, which is a music-editing software to compile tracks and edit them down to the right size. Also I have learned how to use a tripod to its full use. That is when filming to have the tripod stand straight and use to rotate and pan on many important occasions such as a chase sequence or a following shot. As I was the member to make all the titles for our movie I did practice a lot on Adobe Photoshop to re-construct the titles of the credits that are in our movie. Finding new websites on downloading music that wasn’t copyright was a big achievement on our behalf and use that in our movie to create effects and soundtracks. The Camera side of the technologies progress was also a maximum as I learned how to use zoom in and out to fade in shots that were highly required in our thriller.
Not only the technical side I mastered but also I learnt how to create a blog and upload images and videos on that. Learnt how to imbed videos from You Tube onto our blog that allowed us to give greater detail in our work. Downloading videos from the website www.keepvid.com has helped us get videos for our movie for instance the opening credits for our movie which was the New line cinema title. The technologies that I have learnt has changed our movies dramatically and every day im learning new things.

• 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 time we as a group did the preliminary task I can confidently say that I have improved a lot. I have learned how to use the camera well and hold it still. Learned different shots and angles from Low angles to high angles. From extreme close ups to point of view shots. The tripod has come into play as well as it helped me balance the camera so we could get better shots. I also learned that continuation shot is highly important in filming, so if the weather is dark and cloudy and I am filming I cannot go back and film the same scene on a sunny day. The continuation would not be successful. By now we learned like I said before how to edit our movie on Premier Elements. To be infocus is also one of the most important things required in filming a good movie. I learned this when I was filming the preliminary task.
Since our preliminary task ive learned how to edit on our computer and make a complete movie with transitions and fade in’s and fade out’s. This was the main ingredients of our movie to produce and successfully made it work in the end.

• How did the Feedback you received help you make a better film opening?
  
  "Brilliant video. I commented before and told you to build the storyline up more slowely and you did that now really well. The talking to Lisa on the phone makes it more understandable and the black and white effect and the camera shaking at the silent walk is really good as well.Well done!"
  Here on this comment we had Simon Dethleffsen giving us feed back on our Main task video. Here he said that we had to improve the quality of the phone call between Lisa Mitchell and Charles Lambourne so that the audience could understand what exactly was going on between them to. This makes the story line clearer as we as an audience understand why Lisa walks to Charles in the first place.
  
  Wow guys, since you last asked for criticism comments, this has gotten so much better! Love the fact that the music starts a lot earlier. Seriously. The music is really good and works really well with your footage. Good work! :)
  
  Here in the comment above made by Lisa Mitchell she tells us that our music was one problem that was pulling us down in the video. Hence we edited the tracks to fit the whole video of the opening scene. The track where it starts of in the “ Oceans Productions”
  
  These comments definitely helped us in improving our movie to get a better grade.