EVALUATION 3: What kinda of media insitution might distribute your media product and why?

EVALUATION 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

MALES

Michael Ridgewell in our thriller opening is a protagonist; an every day, normal character who reinforces the male stereotype of the heroic male. Most stories and thrillers in society have shown males to be the hero; from when we were younger in fairy tales such as Snow White to more current films such as I Am Legend starring Will Smith, who plays Robert Neville, the hero, the man who risks his own life to save a lady and a child. This is the stereotypical male leader, showing that he's the stronger sex. Like in most typical thriller/horror films the man is usually the protector.

I compare Michael to the character Robert because even though the story lines of these thrillers are completely different these characters are alike in the sense that they both dress very casual, like every day, normal people. They are both protecting something; in Delirium Michael is protecting Sarah which is why he goes off to find out what the strange noise is whereas Robert is protecting a life saving formula in blood and saving a female and her child. The storylines are completely different but the characters in itself are similar.

FEMALES

 

AGE

In most thrillers the hero tends to be an older male although in ours that is not the case; this is because we didn't have older people available to film for it. Our thriller is made up of actors that are teenagers. Rather than represent the stereotypes of teenages we decided to oppose it. The media represents teenagers to be rough and they are not usually represented as heros however our male lead went out to protect his girlfriend. Our thriller aim to show the vaunrability of teenagers and shows them to be more caring of each other. One of the stereotypes we decided to use was that teenagers are rather careless. Our characters went to investigate an abandoned building which is outside of the public eye. Doing this meant that they were risking their safty by going somewhere where they could not be protected. They age of our killer is unknown. We decided to keep this as it helps to build mystery in our thriller however he is also from the teenage age group even though the audience don't know this.

EVALUATION 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge form and conventions of real media products?

After long discussion and research we finally created an idea for our project which led to our final thriller opening. We came up with different ideas and genres for example, a psychological thriller, an action thriller and a horror. We chose a psychological thriller, the final outcome is called Delirium.

Title of our thriller: After looking through the codes and conventions of thriller titles we found that short, mysterious titles were the most effective and this is how we got the idea of 'Delirium'. It works with the conventions of the thriller because its in an odd font although we were limited of choice of font. It is also red which signifies blood and the black is darkness which is creepy. It is challenging to find the right font that looks professional and dangerous at the same time because we had a limited selection. When editing a lot of fonts were experimented with but this one seemed to look the most effective. Defined, Delirium means "a temporary state of mental confusion" which fits our idea perfectly.

Settling and location: Our location is an abandoned bomb site in the fields in Shenfield. We filmed in a house that had previously been bombed and abandoned. We made a few questionnaires and sent them around to see what locations would be best suited. Thanks to the questionnaires and looking at the codes and conventions we managed to find a suitable location which we completed a risk assessment on to make sure it was safe to film there. We wanted the location to be different/remote; somewhere quiet that we won't be disturbed. The idea of the thriller is that its a couple going on a walk, they don't expect to see anyone else which adds to the terror when the antagonist appears.

Costume and props: For costumes and props we decided to keep natural/casual clothing however we used a variety of props to make our thriller look better. To fit the conventions of our thriller we had to create the illusion that this could be possible, the more relatable to life and the target audience better. People seem to be more afraid of what could be perceived in reality/in their own lives; as these are our protagonists they are just everyday, normal people. Mentioned in one of our first blog posts of codes and conventions of a thriller that the protagonists have to be just like everyday normal people; most likely middle class people.

Props: We went to a fancy dress shop called Props and Frocks in South Woodham and bought some fake blood and latex. We also found face paints in The Factory Shop; Basildon and black paint from Asda; Basildon. These fit the conventions of a thriller as our antagonist is a villain and has to look mysterious and unusual; this is portrayed through the strange black areas on his face and the ripped skin (shown by the latex). It makes the audience ask the questions, "what is it?" and "why is it there?" and "where is the blood from?" making the situation more mysterious. The blood on Sarah's face adds to the terror of the situation; we then ask the question; "what happened?" and makes the audience feel sympathy for this innocent victim.

Editing and Camerawork: For this area of the thriller it needed to be edited to show the distance passing, if we had filmed the whole thing and not edited it, it would be a waste of time and wouldn't have shown any editing skills; the fades were added to make the change in distance clearer and not jumpy. The fades used within the thriller were effective because it made it more mysterious and added to the creepy tension we were trying to create. The font here is very clear here because in the credits we want people to be able to read it; its a plain font making it look more professional. We first introduce two characters, a male and female; a couple; all we know is they're having a walk, that's all we know so far, no personal information is revealed throughout the beginning except for a name. We had an over the shoulder shot of Sarah looking around the wall because it was a key moment, the first appearance of our antagonist adding to the tension we tried to create in this moment. I think you create the question "what is round the corner?" because the last time we saw out there (when Michael jumped off the side wall) was nothing so its almost as if to say, what is over her shoulder and round the corner? Why make this such a key shot?.

How the rest of the film is set up: This is a picture of the first sighting of the villain, where he is introduced to us, no one knows who he is or why he's there. The story is set up by the thriller because in the opening the audience is meant to ask the questions as to what's going on in the scene and who are the characters, why are they there, etc. In the opening all we know is what we see; there is a couple going for a walk, they go through the woods into an old bombed, abandoned building where they hear a strange noise and the male heroically goes off to find out what it is reinforcing the stereotype as men being the protector, the stronger gender; while the female waits scared for his return. As he doesn't come back she searches for him, see's the peculiar, unusual man in the woods and gets scared and ends up screaming with fright as he attacks her. This emphasises that within the thriller the female is the weaker, more vulnerable sex which fits the our thriller.

 

If we were to carry on making the rest of the film we would see that the opening would be a flashback moment and the twist would be revealed that actually Sarah wasn't thinking straight and it was a dreadful nightmare that she was having. After this scene where she wakes up and searches for Michael; when she can't find him she would run through the fields to escape and get to the main road yelling for help. It would then be shown that she is having a nightmare and she'd wake up. The rest of the film would be explaining to her that it never happened when she knows herself it did and she, trying to prove herself goes to the scene of the incident looking for evidence. One day she would see him again and she'd again try to prove this; a psychotherapist would give reasons for this until one day its all shown to be real and the villain was playing mind games.

Official Delirium Poster

We've given Delirium a BBFC rating of 15 due to it's portrayal of violence and distressing imagery throughout the film. We think the content would be inappropriate for people of a younger age group due to such content.

Delirium Poster Idea 1

Here is our final poster for our production DELIRIUM:

Extra Footage

This was originally part of the full thriller but it made it too long and didn't make sense to keep it in the opening as it would probably lead on too far; we've already had the climatic moment where Sarah is attacked and the thriller title 'Delirium' appears which seems like the right place to end it.

TAKE 2 - The production process

Before we filmed on the 9th April I had to arrange the date and time to do it with everyone. We had to re-film everything and not all of our actors were available for a new filming date so I also had to find new actors. I quickly asked Michael Ridgewell (previous actor) if he was available, he said yes; then I asked Alex Jobson and Sarah to help us with 'EMERGENCY FILMING'. I explained that we were desperate to film and we needed actors. Once this was agreed I explained to them over a facebook inbox exactly what would be happening on the day. I explained to each person the storyline, the types of characters they would need to be, that we would have to film multiple shots to ensure we get the best we can and to make sure they act fairly professional so that we don't have laughing and messing about during filming; which they all understood even though this was hard to fulfil on the actual day but everything worked out okay.

I put all of the props in a bag; the fake blood, latex and faces wipes. Although as this wasn't in school time we had no way of getting a tripod. I also remembered to charge the camera and clear space for the footage; it'd be a big nuisance if it ran out in the middle of filming.

We and met at Hutton Country Park at 1:30pm and made our way on to location from there. Upon reaching the house, we promptly ran over the shooting schedule with our new actors and began shooting shortly thereafter. We were shooting for a few hours, taking multiple shots with various angles. We had a short lunch break as I had brought food along for everyone; during this time we did make-up. This is what our villain, antagonist looked like in the end.
The only problem during the day was that our camera battery ran out on our very last shot so we had to switch cameras but this was not a problem. Then we took a wide range of shots for the poster.

I immediately started uploading all of the videos when I got home because it takes a while to upload them and make sure the format was right to edit them on Movie Maker. Once they were done; I split it into sections, for example; walking through the field, Michael scares Sarah, etc. This made it all easier to work with because in the end I only had to edit the ending and beginning clips together although this did prove very difficult. The hardest part to edit was 'the hug' because sometimes the hand position would be different or it would look strange or the clip would be ruined by bursts of laughter; editing that out was extremely difficult. I decided to do a zoom reverse zoom on the line Sarah said "oh my god what was that", it was two separate clips put together but the speech has clearly continued throughout the clips. I spent a lot of time trying to find sound to fit into it, it was trial and error but I eventually found some music on sounddogs.com and freeplaymusic.com. I remember that James Hodges, former AS Media Studies student recommended this when talking about the do's and don'ts for our thrillers.

A problem I had with Movie Maker is that when I had finally finished editing all of it; one of the key videos (the hug) had "broken" and was not compatible with the rest; I attempted fixing it but in the end I had to re-upload the video and star again. By this time all of the music had jumped around so I had to fix and reposition that as well. Once this was all done and saved with no glitches or jumps; I uploaded it to YouTube and then embedded it on to the blog site. A small glitch had developed here but it was nothing to do with the editing it was a small buffer when uploading. Apart from that everything went smoothly.

Editing

Delirium Version 1 Evaluation

This is the first edit of our AS Media production 'Delirium.' Unfortunately we found this particular edit unsatisfactory and decided to refilm it. The final product can be found here

The above piece does not contain music, as we decided we weren't working with it before we sourced the music for our current piece. There are areas that are muted, this being an indication that music would be in place of it (0:00 - 0:25). The camera at the beginning is also noticable shaky, which is something that we remedied in the second piece.

The match on action shot at 0:32 is also not perfect and required a re-edit. Match on action throughout the rest of the piece, however, is not bad.

The disappearance of a character at 0:39 was also an aggravating factor, something that we revise and made much more slick and less confusing in the final product.

Dialouge throughout 0:49 to 1:10 was also unsatisfactory, as it appeared fake and almost cheesey.

The cut at 1:07 was really noticable, and unfortunately we didn't have a sufficient amount of shots to fix this. We would need to re-shoot to achieve this.

At 1:12 as Kieron pulls out the ring, a stifled laugh can be heard in the background. This was a problem as it ruines the immersion and tension that we were trying to achieve.
Following this is a long period of silence. (1:15-1:27) Initially this was a kind of first person perspective of our protagonist with their eyes closed, and the atmospheric sounds were to build tension. However, the clip didn't cut so we were left in the dartk for much longer than we intended (6-7seconds) and ultimately it didn't achieve what we wanted it to. This part was scrapped completely in the end.

The clips from 1:29 until 1:36 were blurred to indicate confusion in our character, however that didn't realyl work so we were lift with clips that just looked out of focus and out of place.

We intended to overdub appropriate dialouge over the clip from 1:44 until 1:55, however this never came to fruition.

Following the fade-to-black at 1:55 we wanted to have it fade back in to Louise lying on the ground and discovering blood and markings on her body, much like you see HERE in our final product. (EDIT: This part was eventually cut out of our final edit due to time constraints, however it is still visible at the link above.) However we couldn't film this during our first day of filming due to loss of light, a drop in temperature and one pissed off dog (leading to the exclusion of it's role in the final product.)

Despite all of these problems, we felt that we had some good shots that we recreated in Delirium V.1

 

 

There were also shots that we originally shot that we couldn't use

 



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But then there were also shots that we didn't think of in the beginning that we really liked

 

Sound

Due to copyright we had to find alternative music. We browsed the web and looked through youtube and it proved hard to find decent music that wasn't copyright protected. In the end we got our music from the sites below:

freeplaymusic.com - rest of the music and soundtrack. - A level student James Hodges recommended using this website as he'd used it when he was doing this AS video last year.

Sounddogs.com - for the sound effect of Alex slashing Sarah with the knife.

Audience feedback

We did the audience feedback via Facebook because most of our target audience are around the age group that use Facebook; so I thought this would be a different yet effective way to get people to view the thriller opening. I also thought that it would help with marketing and attract more of an audience.

Update!

Schedule!

This is what will happen when we take our final trip to the thriller location.

 

(Behind the scenes make-up - video & pictures)

 

Film Louise waking up on the floor with blood and symbols on her face - get a long shot then film her from bottom to top to show off the symbols

 

Extreme close up of her eyes opening

 

She stands up and looks scared - upper body shot - she screams

 

Paint the walls with satanic symbols

(Behind the scene - video & pictures)

 

Take pictures of Louise's face standing on front of the the wall, looking forwards and looking up - wide eyes for the extreme close up

 

Upper body shot of her looking outwards - (see symbols and blood on arms too - test shot)

 

Re-film libby with her eyes shut looking around - hands over camera (like hands over eyes)

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Update!