Draft Evaluation- By Bethany Keerie

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

Thriller opening and movies are films that use 'Suspense and tension' taken from wikipedia. Thrillers also create phsycological tension by including mystery and drama in the opening  sequence to get the audience enaged and wanting to know what will happen next. The main conventions of a thriller are camera work, Mise en scene and editing and sound.
Our Thriller opening includes these conventions of a thriller as there is little dialogue which makes tension build up as the sequence goes on. Also over egaratted sound effects help to over empathasize on certain object which could be significant further on in the story line. Also we included a flashback into our thriller piece which helps create a mystery as you don't know any detail about the story or what the flashback has to do with the story so far. Another thing that we used which is a convention of a thriller in our opening is camera work, such as over the shoulder shot and close up so that the viewer can clearly see the characters reaction and facial expression.


2.How does your media product represent particular social groups?

I feel our media thriller opening represents particular social groups such as families, as our main characters shows a strong relationship between mother and a daughter as they have a very common bond to each other. An example of this would when the daughter character shows the mum her painting of them together and the mother then praises her to show that she cares for her.Also when the daughter has a flashback of her mum and her in the park, while her mum is pushing her on the swings suggest a that she is a traditional caring mother. Also the costumes worn throughout the sequence makes our characters come across to the viewer as being quite middle class as they are both wearing quite classy clothes, especially the daughter who is wearing an evening dress. Which comes across as being quite formal and upperclass for just a normal day out to the park. However our thriller also could represent a single mother and we know this because throughout this sequence there is no mentio of a 'father' figure. Another reason why we know this is because when the daughter paints the mother a picture she doesn't paint a dad figure. 

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

• 4.Who would be the audience for your media product?

I feel the audience for our Thriller opening would be teenagers in an average age of 16+ because it should appeal to viewers that are strongly enjoy thriller and the psychological suspense but at the same time it won't have elements of horror in it, and it won't be too  violent for an 16 to watch. Also our thriller opening isn't aimed at an audience of 15 and younger because they might find it confusing to follow the plot and story line as our opening thriller includes a flash back scene so they might get confused between the real time and the past. As well as it being to inappropriate for that age group. 

• 5.How did you attract/address your audience?

I felt our Thriller opening was a good example of addressing and attracting our audience as we successfully created a thriller opening title sequence which created a sense of enigma and made our viewers want to watch more. Also the calm and very ritual  common day to day life normality of the relationship between the mother and the daughter going to the park seems very similar to most families lives so it almost makes it more obvious that something bad's going to happen very soon.  
I feel that the use of our flashback does make our audience more involved as they want to find out what happened too the daughters mum and if she actually did die. You can tell from our opening that its made to look like a flashback as you can see in the screen grab to the right there is an image of the daughter character who is staring at the swings that her and her mum were playing on. Also the editing of the fade overlaps the past with the present as in a way you can see both the images at the same time.
Audience feedback here: ______________________________________

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

From constructing a thriller opening i have learnt a variety of  how to use different technologies, which we included into the construction of our opening. Such as using the HD quality camera and how to set them up and how to set white balance which is an adjustment setting on the camera which is used in wherever there is light to make everything that is white like objects in frame appear white on screen. This is vital because if you don't set it every time you change location or somewhere that has a different light level to before it won't match everything in real life that is white. Instead it will either give off a yellow or blueish tinge to your film. We also learnt about the 180 degree rule which is when two characters who are in dialogue have an imaginary line going through them which the camera must not cross over to the other side because this will be breaknig the 180 degree rule as the shot of the two people having a conversation switched sides.


7.Looking back at your prelim task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?    

Looking back at our prelim task i feel i have learned loads more as we personally have progressed over time to now where we have produced a thriller opening sequence. Probably from producing a more successful story board in a short amount of time however i still think that alot of planning still went into it. 
Although our first thriller opening did cause some problems with location, and camera settings i feel we have learnt from out mistakes taken it on board with us and in a way we've had more experience as we know what went wrong  and we have corrected it so if it happens again we know how to solve it.

We've also progressed in a way that our camera work has more match on action and shot reverse shot compared to our prelim. 

As well as our editing skills such as transitions between shots.  

Overall i feel we succeeded with out task which was to create an thriller opening which was no longer than 2 minutes that had a unique story line.