Friday 14 March 2014

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

As our media in particular is a very small scale production an independent distribution company would be who we’d have to go to for distribution of our media product as big scale companies would be a lot less likely to do so. Soda Pictures are an example of a company that deal with independent films in particular, so this is more likely the kind of institution we’d work with to release our product and for a lot cheaper than a mainstream company such as Warner, on top of this it’s also a company based in the united kingdom so it’d mean it’s distributed to a local audience. As opposed to a company such as 20th Century Fox as they’re extremely well known and are guaranteed to be working with mass productions that will undoubtedly bring in a large number of views and revenue. As it is not professionally produced with a large crew managing each factor like sound and lighting, then it could easily be distributed through YouTube and become a partner to result in income per so many views this means it’ll be available for everyone to view for free and we’d still get a small amount of profit.

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

How did you attract/address your audience?

Tuesday 11 March 2014

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


There are many codes and conventions that stick out in thriller films; these can be in the form of characters, themes, thriller narratives, iconography and feelings the thriller can give off.  
In terms of characters we have innocent citizens that get put in a dangerous situation; the narrative is generally similar to that in many thrillers in which the tension begins to arise when the protagonists are placed in a threatening situation where the chance of a lucky escape isn’t inevitable; we have suspenseful and potentially supernatural themes running through; the theme of suspense leads to creating the feeling of anticipation and uncertainty partnered with tension building music towards the end. 
In summary the ones we included were:
  • Suspenseful music
  • Dim lighting
  • Build of tension towards the ending
  • Using tension & suspense to draw in audience 
  • Threat to protagonists
We didn’t actually do much to challenge or develop the thriller genre in our media product as we wanted to stick to the conventions that are readily associated with thrillers. Although there is still more we could have done to improve the link to thrillers like adding more features such as low key lighting and suspenseful music as we have our film set in the outdoors in very natural lighting, though luckily due to the weather it gave a very dim and gloomy effect, and we only include suspenseful music towards the end. High and low angles are used
a lot throughout thrillers so we changed this up a little bit, this is the only way we challenged the forms of thrillers, we stuck to mainly a range of medium shots, though we did include a point of view shot in the very first scene followed by an establishing shot of the location. 
A particularly favourite part of mine within the opening sequence is a part right at the end of the clip, after the title animation, in which there is a large amount of uncertainty and tension is a swinging broken barn door; it successfully creates a really eerie and creepy atmosphere which is what we thought would look really good when we saw the clip for the very first time after it was filmed. The mixture of the clip and suspenseful music is what works together to build the right amount of tension and atmosphere; moreover from this it also creates the potential underlying supernatural theme that could be included further on in the film.  

Ending clip of the barn door

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Monday 10 March 2014