Evaluation Task 2 - How does your product represent particular social groups?

I would say that our product represents a social group that has a very similar background to the majority of the people immediately around us, that is the middle classes. We chose this group as the majority of the population in England fall into this broad category and we wanted the audience to be able to identify with both the characters.

We wanted the audience to initially feel as if both characters were perfectly normal and could easily be your next door neighbour, and we achieved that through our choice of characters. The character of Ellie (acted by Rose) was intended to be a typical girl in her late teens, who feels that life is going well for her until her boyfriend Matt (acted by Jake) decides to cheat on her. This scenario is a very familiar one, we all know of a guy somewhere who has cheated on a girlfriend or wife, and we wanted Matt to represent this type of person, somebody who uses their charm to their advantage, but are soon bored and will move on quickly. It is difficult to give an idea of what a typical person should look like, as it really doesn’t matter so long as they don’t have any particularly striking features. 

Usually in the media our chosen social group are the victims of accidents, crime and other unpredictable events as they are the majority population in this country. The idea of remaining anonymous has also been largely played with in films such as The Bourne Identity and Unknown. This is the sort of thing we are trying to represent, the idea that anyone, even somebody you think you know well, could suddenly flip.

Evaluation Task 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

From these 9 screenshots alone, it is easy to make the connection that the two of them have split up. We have highlighted this through using mirrors, and placing the characters on opposite sides of the frame most of the time.
Due to the fact there are more CU and ECU shots of Ellie, we connect to her character more as we feel closer to her. Also as she has more screen time, and displays more emotion than Matt, this helps us to identify with her a little more.


We were aiming to unnerve the audience with the CU shots of Ellie's face, as it feels like the character has invaded our personal space and the initial reaction among viewers that I have shown it to, is to sit back a little in their seats. With the character of Matt we deliberately showed him to be quite lazy, and we don't want the audience identifying with him beyond the surface, so we didn't give him any exclusive  close ups.

Thriller - Post production editing

So far, editing our thriller has gone relatively flawlessly, considering that we shot it as two seperate scenes as opposed to one continuous film. At the moment we have got a complete 2 minute visual sequence, and the sound is nearing completion. We estimate that we should be done by the middle of this coming week. However we have had some problems along the way, our first issue was that our male actor, didn't seem to throw himself into the role of Matt, and therefore we have a few shots where he is a little limp. Our other issue was remembering what we had changed on the shoot day, as we altered the order of a few of the matched cuts. Now what we are doing is getting other people to watch it through and give us feedback on what they think of it, what they liked, what they didn't etc.

Thriller - Shoot Day

I felt that our shoot day went fairly well, considering the amount of things that didn’t go according to plan. The day started off a little behind schedule, as we couldn’t get up to the room in which we were shooting until about 10 due to the occupant having a lie-in. By the time we had everything set up and didn’t almost burn the light (oops!), it was close to 11 and we began shooting. Or we like to imagine that we did. In reality, we hadn’t actually prepared a shot list, and we spent probably a good half an hour faffing around doing that, and working out from which angle we were going to do each shot. This was because we hadn’t all seen the room at this stage, and it was a different shape to how I had envisioned in the storyboard. Also we hadn't really considered costume at this point, we just told both Rose and Jake to wear their normal clothes. However Courtney decided to take Rose down to her room to find a costume more suitable.

 Once all that was out of the way, we decided to get cracking, and the first few shots went pretty well, it was only when we got to the shot when Ellie (played by Rose) had to throw the ripped monkey at the walls and smash the mirror that our first real mistake occurred. While practicing the shot, Rose actually smashed the mirror, which was OK, because we caught it on film, but it wasn’t a great shot and there is a medley of swearwords at the end. The only thing that annoys me about this shot is the fact that the camera was locked as the mirror fell off the shelf, meaning I couldn't tilt the camera and follow it down. Hopefully it will still have the same effect as we had originally hoped, because it was our only mirror and we’re going to have to use it as it was our only take! (at least the sound was good!) From then on we had to improvise the next few shots to get back onto our original storyboarded plan, which meant we had to try and guess how these cuts were going to match with Matt’s (played by Jake) actions. By this time we had to go for lunch, and we realised it had taken us all this time just to get 6 shots, so while eating, we sat down and planned everything else we needed to do for Ellie’s part and began doing the shot list for Matt.

Back on location after lunch and we got the rest of the shots by 3, including a fantastic one shot by Sophia, where we zoom in on Ellie’s eyes looking down and then they look up slowly and creepily. Also a good effect was the fake blood which she smeared on the photos pinned up on the wall and then goes oddly calm and plucks one off the wall and burns in front of her. 

One of the elements that annoyed me about the first half of the shoot was all the safety rules we had to follow, as Ellie was meant to just break the mirror, but then Adam decided that for safety reasons she should pretend to hit it and then we would film his hand close up breaking it. If we had stuck to the original plan, then the shot would have looked a lot better as I have a feeling Rose is tying not to hit the mirror and might look a bit half hearted. The other thing we had to change was we weren’t allowed to burn the photo in the room and had to go to the studio. I can see why we needed to do this, but we could have put some foil down on the floor and had a fire extinguisher handy in the room.

Next we went to the Turrets (which is an annexe of one of the boarding houses) and things went a lot more smoothly, as we had planned out exactly what we were going to shoot in what order. At this point I took over as director, and let Courtney and Nina take charge of the camera. All of the shots went as planned except for the last one where he had to light a cigarette and fall backwards down onto the bed. What had happened was the cigarettes had snapped in my pocket somehow, and due to this we have a quite bizarre shot of Matt lighting a stub and then burning himself as he tries to light it. The only thing I am concerned about is the lighting in the Turrets, as by the time we finished up there it was close to 5 o'clock and we were rapidly losing light. As the two sequences are meant to be happening simultaneously, we need the light to be the same in both. 

On the whole, I feel the day went well, but we really won't know until we get up into the studio on Monday to see our handywork.

Storyboarding the Thriller - Part 2

Back from the holidays, and the 2nd draft is complete! It feels good to actually have something that looks like a storyboard, although this one only shows every 3rd or 4th shot and is more of a visual reference to Courtney, who is doing the script. As the script is not yet complete, I think I may be doing a few more of these drafts before we get it to look anything like our final version. To the right is a scanned copy of the 4th page, just to give an idea to how it has changed compared to the last one. When they are all finished, I will try and scan all of the complete storyboards into one blog post, to see just how our ideas have progressed and changed.

Storyboarding the Thriller - Part 1

For our thriller, I was charged with creating the storyboard and piecing together all of the matched shots that we had thought up in the lesson previous to this, such as the burning photo/cigarette,and the cut from one photo to the same one in a different room. At the moment i think we hae 5 unique matched cuts, with a few repeats on objects. (mainly photos.) The image to the left is a section of the original sketched storyboard in which I used 2 sheets of A3 paper,(one for each room) and planned the shot like that. This was the most challenging part of storyboarding, as I had to actually visualise the shots in my head, and the effect we wanted the audience to get from each shot. 

Final Ideas Pitch

In this session, we got the whole group together and narrowed down our ideas to one each.

• My idea: was to set it in Peaslake, one of the boarding houses, and show how a seemingly harmless evening at a boarding house ends up with all the students dead the next morning, all killed in mysterious ways.

• Nina's idea: was about a teenage serial killer, who kills out of jealousy and is very methodical and messed up in the head.

• Sopia's idea: was to set the film in a police station, with a suspect being interviewed. The viewer would be partly watching on a CCTV camera, and see things that only the camera could detect.

• Courtney's idea: was about a girl who breaks down on a fairly deserted road, near a seemingly abandoned warehouse. The girl then goes inside and gets murdered. 

Once we had all presented our final ideas, we decided to vote on an idea, and we couldn't vote for our own. Nina's idea won it, but when we presented the idea to Matt and Luke, they said we needed to change a lot of it as our idea was unbelievable. So we changed the scenario to include matched cuts of her planning a kill to shots of her victim. Again we were told to scrap the idea, and we decided to change the story from a girl planning a murder to a couple that have had a violent break-up, and the scene is a foreshadow of events to come, i.e. the guy's murder.
Our new plot was much more popular and we felt that more of our audience would identify with it, as most people have gone through a break-up where they have felt either like Ellie, (violent, destructive, distraught) or like Matt, (doesn't really give a damn, little remorse).