Question 4 Holly Hunter-Brown

Who would be the audience for your media product?

We initially decided to target our film at teenagers as they would be able to relate to the main character whilst still understanding the issue of whether or not her murders are justified. However we would have to tackle the issue of certificate as while it is a thriller, since our audience research told us that Saw was a popular film we chose to use more horror elements in our film which would make it difficult to determine whether to make it a 15 or 18.

Overall, it would attract any audience who is interested by current affairs and the problems in todays society. Due to the issues explored that we see in the news so often such as child abuse and disruptive teenagers.

Question 3 Holly Hunter-Brown

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

Our Production company name is H.B.N Productions we chose this very last minute as we had not thought about it previously; we used this as it was the initials of our last names. We didn’t come up with a logo as when we were looking for the order in which to write the names we saw that most productions companies do the same.

The production company is vital for the development, funding and production of a film.

For a film like ours we would find funding from the UK Film Council which gets funding from the institutions such as the National Lottery. By using them it would be easier for us to succeed as UK Film Council investments in British films have been hugely successful – for every £1 we have invested, £5 has been generated at the box office.

We chose to order our titles with the production company name first, then our names (as producers/directors) and then the film name. This is because when researching it we found that this was the order.

Our film would be similar to Seven institutionally with New Line Cinema distributing it as they are a mainstream company who produce many thrillers. We decided that our film would be mainstream due to the exploration of very mainstream issues explored in our society.

Questions 2 Holly Hunter-Brown

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Teenages- Our film centres around a teenage girl who was mistreated during her childhood. We showed her as very hurt, disturbed girl who has never recovered from the abuse. She is never shown with anyone in the shot which tells us that she is very lonely and isolated from society.

Parents- We chose to use to tackle the subject of child abuse and neglect as it is a current issue in the media and a problem that we see on a daily basis in the news. We only made a very sublte referance to it in our opening but did show a child being dragged by her mother.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/apr/29/baby-p-social-work-reform-backtracks

Question 1 Holly Hunter-Brown

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

Our opening uses conventions from real media products in the following ways:

• In many thriller the killer/villian wears a disguise to keep their identity hidden and create a motif that the audience will regognise throughout the film. This inspired us to do the same in ours, we spefically took inspiration from 'The Dark Knight' after our initail idea to use a mask.
• We also used special effects during the flashback in our opening, we included black and white and slowed it down in order to signifiy that it was a memory and create tension. In almost every film including a flashback there is use of special effects or Flashback Effects. An example of this is The Butterfly Effect and the use of blurs to signify the flashback.

• The title of our film, 'Once Upon a Time' is also very conventional in terms of thrillers as it doesn't give much away but still hints at the themes and motifs we used. It's similiar to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds which tells us the main subject of the film but without telling us the threat. It also implies the subversion of innocence, which is often explored  in thrillers such as The Omen.
• After the titles and flashback we introduce the action with an establishing shot of the school in order to show the audience where it will take place, used in almost every film for the same effect.
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  The sountrack to our opening is also seen in thrillers. It's very repetative which creates tension as seen in the opening of The Shining:

We also challenged and developed conventions of real media products:

• The use of faiytale images in the titles and throughout the planned narrative develops the creepy way in which fairytales are sometimes presented. We got inspiration from the scary forest scene in the Disney version of Snow White and developed the idea of the mistreated children in fairytales and how they can be presented in a scary way.

• The font we used challenges the conventions of real thriller films as we chose to use one which refelected the fairytale theme rather than one which implied the scary elements.
• The introduction of the villian first rather than the victim also challenges the conventions of usual thrillers and introduces our narrative which sees the murders from the killers point of view.

Question 7 - Anam Nasir

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

I have learnt a lot from our preliminary task and as we progressed to our full product.
In our preliminary task we didn’t use our storyboard effectively and filmed our shots too wide, which made the viewers concentrate on the surroundings more than the characters.
When we moved to our final product we made sure we included voyeurism in our film as Hitchcock has celebrated in his films, like Psycho and Rear Window.
To suggest violence we wanted to use a silhouette, however this did not work well with our film, therefore we used blooded hands washing against a pure white sink. This was to show that the sink had come against something impure.
We used the 180 degree rule in our preliminary task as the two characters had a conversation.

Within our 180 degree rule we did a shot/reverse shot to orient the viewer so they can see a relationship between the two characters.
We included a match on action shot in our film, this worked well as we had a mid shot of Victoria Jones turning a page in her book, then it cuts to a point of view shot of the character continuing to turn the page. This worked well as we edited it to create a sense of continuity.

Question 6 - Anam Nasir

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

We used a range of online and computer programs:

Youtube: to upload our two preliminary tasks, our rough cut and final cut.

Blogger: to write down the process of making our thriller film opening

iMovie: we used this to import and edit our film. We also edited sound through this software, as this was easier than using Garage band.

Photoshop: to edit our titles, we changed the colour of our scanned drawings and added the titles through photoshop and saved the images as JPEG.

iTunes: we used this to import our music to be able to use it in iMovie.

Using this function on iMovie we were able to edit the audio. We used this in the flashback scene. We applied the Reverb technique.



Here we can see the iMovie window; we were able to drag clips into the timeline to easily edit and move around clips. We were alos able to split videos and crop them easily with the iMovie tools.
We also used other technical equipment:

Camera: we used a Sony HDV Handycam, this was easy to use and record our film to.

However when recording our preliminary task we couldn’t function the focus functions, therefore our shots in the preliminary task were out of focus.

Using the camera on the tripod was much easier than a handheld camera; it was a lot steadier. We also used tracks for our tracking shot, this was difficult and time consuming as we couldn’t get the shot to be the same speed throughout.

Scanner: we used the scanner to scan our hand drawn images; this was simple to do but time consuming. In our test scan we have explained our difficulties. (Click here to see our test scan shots)

Question 5 - Anam Nasir

How did you attract/address your audience?


Here is my annotated version of 'Once Upon a Time'.