Now I proudly present my AS Media opening sequence 

The Following

Evaluation 7

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

(slight changes in the full evaluation)

Evaluation 6

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

(There are slight changes in the full Evaluation post)

Evaluation 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

 

Evaluation 4

Who would be the audience for your media product ? 

 

Evaluation 3

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

Evaluation 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

 

Evaluation 1

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

Discuss the ways in which your film is similar to a real film of the thriller genre.

I think our thriller movie is similar to a real one in the following points.

our opening sequence low angle shot

We have used typical shots for a thriller movie for example the high and low angle shots of victim and criminal to illustrate the relationship of power between them. 

These shots are used quite common in a modern thriller movie and we used them as well.                                              

Inglorious Basterds Low angle shot

In the example with Inglorious Basterds you can see the effect of a low angle shot it creates the feeling that the person is superior. 

Generally i would say  that the shots we have used are often seen in thriller movies for example the Establishing shot at the beginning to give the audience an idea where they are is often seen in thriller movies. 

           

The first picture is at the beginning of panic room it shows an establishing shot to show the audience where they are.

The second picture is in our opening sequence and its shown at the beginning as well to show where the scene is shot.

An other similarity is that our stroyline.

I think its not particularly common but its still quite obvious that it is a thriller movie but its nearly to a horror movie in my opinion. 

A little similarity is that we have used the for a thriller movie typical prop e.g knifes, tape, sledge etc 

The last one I think is the strong characteristic of different stereotypes, its quite common in a thriller to represent different stereotypes in a strong way.

I think there is a wide range between the two characters one of them look very wealthy with his suit and tie and his massive house and the other one is walking around in trackys and a jumper he looks kinda poor out of the lower middle class.

Another Convention is that i have used typical sound for my opening sequence. 
I used Non-Diagetic sound which is really common in the thriller movie business because it creates tension and gives the audience a clue what could happen next and how they should fell. 

In what ways does your film challenge and/or manipulate characters of a real thriller film. 


 We challenged a real thriller movie in the way that we focused more on the violence to create a unpleasant felling for the audience.
If you compare that to a real thriller they are more commonly focused on the storyline to create tension and feelings.

It can be argued that i have challenged the conventions of trailers showing crime thrillers set in urban locations such as Taken which is set in an French city (Paris) compared to mine which is in an English suburban neighbourhood. 

The last way in which we have challenged a real thriller movie is that our actor's are much younger than usually. 

The victim is still a child and that is not shown to often in a real thriller move because the society doesn't like to see if something like that happens to a child.

How you can See in the picture above is the victim really young and with all the torture that happens to him and the blood all over his face it creates a new level of horror and tension i think.

In Conclusion it is to say that our thriller movie has many features of a real thriller movie, e.g the shots we have used, the storyline and the props used to produce it.

However there are quite a few differences as well e.g the location, the age of the actor's and the level of violence shown.

Producing the Evaluation question 3

What Kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why

What production company would want to distribute your film? Think of other thriller films which are similar to your own. What company was behind the production and distribution of it? Why would they want to back your film? 


For the thrid question i decided to do some sort of podcarst. 
I did a few case studies about different digital distribution institutions. 
For example: Miramax and YouTube. 

The recordings are a mix of trailers, clips of different webpages and clips were I was recording myself.

I really liked working on that question because it was interessting to research the different institutions which actually could distribute our opening sequence,
but on the other hand it was very hard to actually find realistic distribution platforms because in the end we only produced a 2 minute long opening sequence and it would be hard to actually find somebody who would distribute that. 

However I think i found quite a few good distribution platforms.
Which I'am going to represent you in the actuall question

 

Producing the Evaluation question 5

How did you attract/address your audiene

Discuss your audience research (i.e questionnaire, interviews, etc) and how it helped you create a film which would appeal to your target audience. What elements of your film would attract your audience? For example: type of plot, suspense, action, drama, actors, music, location etc.

For this question I did 4 interviews with people in the range of our target audience of 18-24 year old males. 
 

 
First of all i added all the interviews into one timeline in Imovie after that i added my own comments.

It was interesting to see that the most of the people liked the same features of the opening sequence e.g the violence and the music

Producing the Evaluation question 7

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

How did the preliminary task prepare you for the creation of your film? What did you learn abou the equitment, software and from the creative process? How did your Knowledge affect your perception of the main task? Were you excited? Uncertain ? Do you feel the preliminary task was beneficial in preperation for the shot film? 

 
 For the production of that question I decided to film and record myself, it is in a sort of Vlog stlye. 

 
 I recorded myself with the integrated facetime HD camera In my MacBook Pro 2013 edition. 
I was suprised how good the quality of the footage is and how clear the sound is. 

At the beginning I nedded a few trys to record the skript without any mastakes, which was actually pretty hard for me as a foreign student. 

 However in the end I managed it quite well and the most of the little mistakes I made I was able to cut out afterwards anyway. 

I edited the footage with IMovie which is actually pretty similar to Final Cut Pro 10 which i used for my opening sequence, therefore I haven't had any difficulties with the software
 

 
I decided to put a non diagetic song in the back ground just to give the video a bit of a touch, the song i have chosen is quite dark so its possible to associate it with a thriller movie. 
The song is called: 
Robot Koch & Delhia de france - Califronia dreaming.
 

Currently I add all the evaluation questions i produced so far together in one timeline so I'am able to upload all of them at once later on. 
I did this whit Quick time player i just recorded the screen while I was going through my powerpoint, powtoon usw, and after that I recorded my voice and presentet what i had written in the questions. After that I put all the clips I had together in one event in IMovie. 

 

Producing Evaluation Question 1

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



For question one i decided to write a blog post in combination with a PowToon presentation. I think the combination of Text and a lot of information in the blog post in combination with the PowToon presentation which has a lot of funny features and movement in it goes pretty good together.

  
On the Picture above you are able to see my work on the PowToon presentation. 
PowToon is a Web-based animation software that allows users to create animated presentations by manipulating pre created objects, imported images, provided music and user created voice overs. 

I personally really enjoyed working with PowToon it is easy to use and the free version of the application brings already enough features to create a decent presentation.


But now to the blog post it is nothing to special it's a normal post about the question one. 

One problem i have faced during the process of producing the question is that my blog post got deleted once half way through, which was pretty annoying because i had to do all the work twice and that was time consuming. 

Producing the Evaluation question 2

I've started to produce the Evaluation question 2 recently.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

What types of people (i.e.age/race/gender/religion/ethnicity)
are represented in your film and how do you feel this affect your film and your audience' reaction to it. How and why did you represent these social groups?


I decided to use the webpage prezi.com for it, on this page you are able to create your own presentations and flip charts.

I really have to say that i actually enjoyed working with Prezi it was easy to use and the final flip chart looks pretty good i think.

Overall I have used 8 slides with several subheadings e.g age and social class.

I screen recorded while i was presenting the Prezi so now I'm able to publish it later in a form of a video. 

Evaluation Question 6 Process

Lately I've started to produce my Evaluation questions in the following post I'm going to talk about the process of working on question 6.

"What have you learnt about technology from the process of constructing this product"

Discuss in detail all the different forms of media you have used throughout your coursework and how this has affected and influenced your understanding of different form of media technologies. 

The text marked in red was the entire question.
I've used a Keynote presentation for this question I have structured the question in different sub-headings and answered each of them separately the one of the question was for example The filming equipment (Cameras, Tripods)

I've used a lot of pictures which are in context to the topic I'm taking about to make my Evaluation more attractive. 

I have chosen a pretty simplistic style of my presentation because i think it make it look more professional.

Later i will record my screen and play my presentation and than i will post my powerpoint in form of a video on Youtube and than I'm going to publish it here because i think it looks better like that compared to a ordinary powerpoint. 

Consent Form

The picture underneath shows the consent of the people they are going to appear in our opening sequence.

Work on the Opening sequence

Over the last couple of days we made some huge steps in the process of editing our thriller and producing the music for it. 

But first of all let me talk about the editing. We had to film a few more shots that our movie looks complete and that everything makes sense.
Since than we have focused on the different transitions, were we should put the titles and some other effects we put in e.g layered-shots. 

Here u can see the work on one of the layered-shots. I really like this sort of effect because it kinda illustrates that the protagonist is weird, on drugs ( he actually is in our movie ), or just crazy. 

A few more pictures of the editing process. 

First of all we put the clips in the right order and since than we cut them into the right length so that they make sense together.

And now we focus more on the real editing how i already said. 

Another part that I'am working on at the moment is the Music/Sound of our movie. I tried to create a scary type of music that fits to our movie i had some issues with that because i literally created the thriller stereotype music, and i don't want that i want to have something special you that you won't find in every thriller. 

I really liked the Modern Rock Clean Guitar 17.3.1 (Sound on Garage Band) but that is the type of the sound that creates the stereotype so i had to get rid of it, But i already found another sound i really like.

Two other screenshots of the process of producing my music. 

Sound

Sound is one of the most important features in a thriller movie it can produce Tension, fear , dead and a lot more.

In the opening sequence we are going to produce is literally no sound so we have to create the points from above with music.

But now back to Sound underneith i will list a few of the most impotant types of sound.

Diegetic Sound: Sound that comes from a person or object in the world of the movie and seen within the field of vision.

Ambient Sound: Background sound belonging to the diegesis but not always in the field of vision.

Non-diegetic sound: Sound the comes from nothing within the field of vision and has ben added in afterwards in the editing process.

Synchronous sound: Where the sound is synchronised with the object emiting that sound.

Asynchronous sound: This is where the sound track is deliberatley out of sync with what we see.

Sound effects: Sounds added to the visuals in editing. They may be naturalistic.

e.g: the sound of traffic outside the window added to a shot filmed in a studio

Dialogue: The sound made by characters talking to each other. Sometimes this is re-recorded in a studio with the actors attempting to lip-sync to the footage: this is called foley recording.


This video illustrates how important the right choice of music is:

Final Cut Pro 10

Final Cut Pro 10 is a video editing app for OS X from apple. 
It was released in 2011.

Final cut pro 10 (FCPX) is an all new application, written form scratch.

It supports up to 5K resolution. During import it can analyse footage and audio for automatic sorting into groups such as close-ups, medium shots and two shots. 

What was great for my movie because i had all the different shots i recorded already sorted so I haven't had to worry about it. 

Overall i would say that FCPX is a great software for the production of movies, from hobby amateur producer to professional Hollywood movie, it can be used by everyone. 

So far I haven't faced any bigger problems with the software. 

Garage Band

Garage band is the software we are using to produce the music for our opening sequence. It is a application for OS X and iOS that allows users (us) to create music or podcasts. It is develped and sold by Apple Inc. 
GarageBand's music creation system enables useres to create multiple tracks with premade MIDI keyboards, pre made loops, vioce recordings, and an huge varitiy of instrumental effects.

We are going to produce the song we gonna put over our opening sequence in Garageband (Non-Diagetic).
I haven't got a idea at the moment in what way I want the genre of the song to be, but I will figure it our pretty soon I guess.
I can alrady say that i want the music to be in a dark and scaryfing tone, because that should be the very best for my opening sequence.

In the picture above you can see the user interface of Garageband. 
The interface is of a good design and easy to use in my opinion.
During the preliminary task I was able to get my first expiriences with the software and I thought it is quite easy to use.

However I'am looking forward to produce my own peace of music, which really should be interessting.

Producing Our Movie

A couple of days ago we started to film and produce our movie 
we already have 95% of the shots we might have to add a few more because of the editing but we are not sure about that yet. 

The Picture above shows the main location of my movie the most of the scenes are filmed in here. I really like this location because it looks quite scary and in several thriller movies/series i really like the protagonist tortures/kills his victims in his garage as well so i think thats quite a nice idea.

As you can see on that picture its not the biggest garage but for my use it was definitely enough and i quite liked it because the lighting in there was perfect for the shots I've done in there.



I used a lot of props in my sequence the main ones you can see in the picture underneath there is for example a knife, the fake blood we have used, different torture tools, a flashlight and a few other things.

On that picture you can only see the things I've used to illustrate that my protagonist tortures someone.

One of my favorite props was the fake cocain we produced it looks quite realistic and in the shoots it just looks awesome. 

Overall i can say that i really enjoyed the progress of filming all the different shots i have in my movie it happened once that i was inspired by the moment and just filmed a shot that was not on the storyboard and that one is now the first shot in my movie.
I already started to edit my movie and got all the clips in the right order in final cut pro 10. 
At the end of the filming process i can say that i haven't had a big problem during the entire progress of filming i actually really enjoyed it.