draft of Joshua's Evaluation

1. When I came to do the thriller project I new exactly what sort of film I wanted to be. I wanted it to be one of this new wave of gritty realistic dare I say more ‘intelligent’, though perhaps that’s not fair action/thrillers. The best example being the Bourne films, but also the re-booted Bond films with Daniel Craig. This is why I definitely wanted it to be set, out in cambridge rather than in Long Road because it would have lost any sense of reality and grittyness if it’d just been a bunch of people running around Long Road. I also drew on other films which I love in various places. The most obvious example of this is the use of the briefcase as a macguffin, as famously used in Pulp Fiction. (A MacGuffin being an item which drives the plot, without the details of it being necessary to the plot e.g you never find out what’s In the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Also the titles I think are slightly Tarantino-esque with he straight blocks of colour and the names in simple bold print. All credit should go to Ashley for them, he was always our chief artist for the project.
2. There is an argument that runs along the lines of “ baddies are always the lower class people”(of course I’m paraphrasing), whether this is merely upper class snoberry or something just sub-consciously ingrained on people of that class as well as perhaps the snootier of the middle class. To a certain extent one could argue that there is a ligcal line of thought that you can follow to reach this conclusion, that those who are of a working class background are more likely to have less money than other people so are more likely to need to commit crime as a form of income thus making them more likely to become ‘baddies’. And it is interesting that without really thinking about it, we dressed the ‘hero’ of the chase in a smart suit whereas the pursuers are dressed more casually perhaps suggestintg that they are of a lower class. This is the idea of a James Bond figure suavely beating the more ruffian adversary. More often that not these villains tend to be russians, in other films as well as James Bond, and I did make of the fact that Luke does look a bit like a Russian. This may have been my intention without fully realising it when I asked him to where his coat to the shoot. However regardless of whether it was planned it is very appropriate, to that idea of what a baddie should be, whether this is a far representarion or not is another matter. What really pleases me about the opening is it’s ambiguity, you could quite easily see it as Jamie is the baddy and the pursuers are actually trying to reclaim a piece of stolen property. This turns the idea on it’s head and portrays now the person higher on the social ladder is the villain and the ‘working class’ people are now trying to honestly reclaim what had been stolen from them, perhaps symbolic of capitalism itself: that idea that the rich have everything (symbolized in the suit) and yet they still will steal from the poorer people (or perhaps just the russians). It is open to interpretation.
3. When it comes to the distribution of films there are normally two or three ways to go the first and most obvious is a cinema release, this can be to as many theatres as the distributor thinks is economically sensible, they will weigh up how much money they want to make and the likely appeal of the film i.e how many people will go and see it and how much money the film will get because of this. It’s a fine balance because if they don’t put it into enough cinemas they won’t get enough returns but put it into too many and they’ll lose money because of the cost of creating the reels and then actually distributing them. This is why films get pulled from the cinemas if the company thinks that not enough people are going to see it to make it econmically viable. The other way is a Tv movie or straight to DVD. Straight dvd is really for those films which either no one will distribute in cinemas or are aimed at a different market, for example small children. This is also true of TV movies, a company will often put a film on the TV if it’s aimed at small children who aren’t as likely to go to the cinema and then get their returns through merchandising and similar, a good example of this is the first High School Musical film. Straight to tv or DVD are almost always much lower budget affairs that can’t afford too go into cinema. Bigger budget movies needs the return that they’ll get from cinemas, it’s an upwards spiral often: bigger budget, more predicted viewsings, bigger distribution, possibility of more money, so next time bigger budget. However this is not always true some films have very high budgets and don’t make returns. As this is the opening to a action/political thriller movie, it’s the kind of film that is almost certainly likely to be distributed in a cinema as it will have wide appeal to audiences meaning that lots of people will go and see it. This is because everyone likes action/adventure movie type things. It would also be the kind of movie which probably had money put into so would want a cinema distribution to get that money back.
4. Action/thriller type movie generally have quite a broad audience, because exciting films are usually enjoyed by lots of people. Both males and females definitely. However I think it probably wouldn’t be the sort of films for young children, almost certainly a 15 or 18. This is to prevent a problem which can be created when you try and cater to everyone. In this instance if you made it an action thriller but had very little violence or swearing etc., small children could go and see it but probably wouldn’t anyway and older people teenagers and aldults who like really intense action films owuldn’t want to go and see it either cos they’d consider it stupid and kiddy. So by trying to appeal to everyone you’d actually end up distancing the majority of your best chance at a large audience (in this case older teenagers and adults).And, instead of getting a very borad range of audience you’d probably only get a very narrow one: in this example probably tweens, those who would want to go and see the more violent grown up actioners but couldn’t due to their age. However on a separate not this is a very successful age group to aim yourself at (again see High School Musical). But the target audience for this film would be predominantly male (men seem to like these sort of films more, this may seem sexist but is seemingly true) but also female older teenagers and adults. Probably not older people because they again tend not to like too violent or ‘unpleasant’ films.
5. Without trying to offend said target audience I think it is fair to say that the huge majority of people who go to see actiony/thrillery films are not after much when they go and see a film, you can see evidence of this in the slew of mediocre actions films around that still manage to make money despite pretty average at best, see Bangkok Dangerous. So to attract this audience I would make sure all your usual action film ingredients, gunfights, fight, chase sequences, car chases, explosions etc. However the likes of the Bourne films have shown that if you put the effort into making an action film really good and more importantly really clever you get rewarded with returns. Also it is infinitely more satisfying to produce a really good film than just to make a substandard one to make money, it the people who do that that are destroying the souls of films and the film industry. This is why I’d try and make it an action trhiller that was very clever in turns of plot, and the way it tells the plot. A really good action/thriller will tell the plot through the action, this is what I’d try and achieve.
6. Whenever you create anything like this that you haven’t done before you always learn a huge amount this is only natural. From simples things like I’m now completely confident with the basic handling of the editing software and was able to edit, quite precisely, exactly what I wanted in the opening (the huge majority of the time) something I just wasn’t able to do. A confidence that grew throughout the project, and came in handy in the last lesson of frantic editing. Actually going out into the ‘real world’ and having to shoot the footage also taught me a lot of things, for instance there are a lot of places which you may think are public spaces and you’re allowed to film there are actally privately owned and the people in charge will stop you from filming there. This is exactly what happened in Lion Yard, I just wasn’t aware that a single company could own a shopping centre, I always presumed they’d be a council run thing and would be lenient toward student groups filming: the wonderful of corporisation proved me wrong. This experience also taught that when you’re out shooting a film, things can go not according to plan and quite often do. This meant that we had to on the spot change what out thriller was going to be, something which I’m very proud we pulled off effectively as the alternative footage was able to be edited together almost seamlessly. Also due to the equipment we did, or more accurately didn’t have, I learnt that perhaps some of the more ambition shots I would have like to do don’t work exactly as they do in my head. The prime example is the slight wobbly hand-held camera shots where in a perfect world we would have used a dolly to create a smooth track, but perhaps another time we might be able to recquisition one of make one ourselves. Finally within the editing software, we created titles for the first time, but mostly it was just getting a lot better at everything to do with the editing software, especially really fine editing down to parts of seconds. The best example of an innovation that we thought up and then worked up how to do, was the creation of the freeze frames. We did this by getting the footage in the viewer to exactly the right moment we wanted, turning this into an image and the putting it back into the timeline and then just making it as long as we needed, thus creating the freeze frame.
7. I think the biggest progression I made from before to the present is just how naïve I was before I did this project. I’d always had lots of ideas about filming stuff but never put them into practice. I learnt so much about the realities of actually filming stuff about how when it actually comes to the nitty gritty of filming and how easily and often things don’t go to plan. How you might really want to do a shot but you just don’t get time or you can’t for whatever reason. The best example of this I can think of is me thinking we’d be able to film inside Lion Yard, something I now know we can’t. I also have more general experience of being out and about, the best ways to run a shoot, and how YOU should always get the footage if you don’t have anymore days to shoot because it’s better to have the shot which is not perfect then to have no shot at all. The best thing is everything I’ve learnt between the preliminary task and the finish of this thriller project I can use in the next project, plus I’ll learn the same amount or more next time probably.

um maybe a bit too long? :\
tell me what you think and then I'll stick on a powerpoint
thanks

feedback to Thriller final cut

-Great use of camera angles, music and devices in general.
-good prop use and costume
-great setting (mise en scene)
-great editing and continuity.
-good camera shots
-pauses before subtitles were good
-"like the pause with the name VERY EFFECTIVE"
-"run up the corridor and back?"
-dramatic music
-very good editing
-varied camera angles and shots
conventions: dramatic music, relevant, creates questions.
conventions: -chase scenes/running
-mysterious object/something in briefcase
-shots well put together
-music fits well, builds suspense-good range
-subgenre: action thriller
-smooth camera movement
-"action thriller! cool!"
- sound fits well with chase scenes
- a lot of questions, e.g why did he run up and down the corridor?
-creates curiosity
-music goes well
-builds up suspense
-the ending makes you wonder, what will happen next?
- Good use of continuity/variety of shots
- suitable thriller music
- unique use of credit titles
- nice and interesting plot
- good timing with music during chase sequence
- chase sequence-good thriller convention
- clever and well used titles (editing)
- good variety of shots used (camera work)
- sound gets a bit mono-dramatic(?)
- good continuity when cutting between shots of running
- music help builds suspense
- fast pace shows that it is a thriller
- camerawork:"tracks well and shows different angles"
- editing:"links well and doesn't have any gaps.constantly moving"
- sound:music matches what is happening on screen
- thriller conventions: good use of music-relevant, succesfuly created suspense.
- good use of camera shots: wide variety of shots
- creates questions well
- "prime"
- "good editing"
- "nice running"
- "very good sound"
- "chase scene good"
- god use of music with what was going on


We'll be able to use this feedback when it comes to analysing the thriller opening and it's effectiveness.
some will obviously be more useful than others

feedback

Final Cut of Thriller-August 13

This is the final cut of our video, enjoy

Feedback for Ashley's Evaluation

Ashley, for the most part your draft answers to the evaluation questions are extremely thoughtful and very well written. The total word count for the answers should be between 1000 and 1500 words though, so you need to do a bit of editing down as your draft comes in over 2000 words. You could probably express your use of conventions in question 1 a bit more succinctly, and some of the text in the social groups question is not 100% relevant. Also, within your answer to that question, try and comment a bit more overtly on the specific social group that makes up your set of characters. As well as law abiding citizens versus criminals, it is also the case that only white males are used as characters in your thriller. Perhaps you could think about linking this to a point you make later about target audiences. Very well done so far though.

Feedback for Jamie's Draft Evaluation

Jamie, your draft evaluation looks good so far, and you have addressed all the questions quite comprehensively. The answers should total between 1000 and 1500 words though, so you will need to edit it down significantly (at present yours comes it at just over 2000 words). Your answer to the first question is particularly lengthy, so perhaps you could think about expressing your answer to that one more concisely and succinctly. Well done so far though.

Opening Credits

On the left is the design we have decided to use for our opening credits in our thriller sequence. I have gone for a darkened mood using a jet black background. However, the bold, racey colours of red and yellow have been used to bring a feel of action and suspense to the credits. This style of laying out credits is very similar to Quentin Tarantino's in his film Kill Bill. I have used a stencil style font to display the title and credits. This choice of font as used as I wanted to create a bold, in the viewers face, credits. This will help add to the suspense that is built up throughout our thriller sequence.

Crisis point

ok final cut deadline is the end of this lesson

and we've lots of work to do

we've decided that from the roughcut we need to do the follow:

- Cover up any jumpcuts with either titles or a closeup of Jamie's face
- Ashley is creating all the titles
- We will then put these into our cut.
-Putting these titles in will allow us to make the video shorter because at the moment it is too long and we are losing the pace and suspense of the opening because quite simply there's so much running.
- We will decide where we are going to put the titles so we can then have larger gaps in the action so the events of the action don't have to flow in a series of events meaning it'll be shorter.

sorry if this is a bit nonsensical, a tad hurried

Jamie's Evaluation (Rough Version)

Thrillers are well known to contain many typical conventions that everyone will recognise and be able to identify. The brief idea of our thriller is that there is a company that is looking after a briefcase containing something very important. Our thriller opening sequence begins with someone from the big organisation realising that the object that they are meant to be looking after has been stolen. We cut to a man very smartly dressed walking casually out of the building with a briefcase in hand. Later two thugs not very smartly dressed burst out of the doors and start running after the man in the suit. This starts a whole chase scene where they run through buildings upstairs where finally the man is cornered by the two thugs. He pulls out a gun. The titles drop down.
This involves the conventions of a typical thriller in many ways. Firstly, the questions we left our thriller very open and we didn’t answer very many questions so that it would keep people wondering about what’s going to happen?, who’s the guy in the suit?, who are the good guys? Etc. This keeps people on the edge of their seats. By having the screen drop down as he is pulling out the gun you do not know whether he shot both of them one of them or himself. Identity and who people are plays a large role in our opening sequence as you never get to know who any of them are. You never know who the good guys are and whole the bad guys are. You automatically think they man in the suit is because he is running away from two people and he looks the most formal but you never know he could turn out to be the bad guy. Another convention of a thriller movie that we have incorporated into our thriller sequence is how the whole series of events is sparked off by a crime of some sort. It all starts with something being stolen and like many other movies this is how they start off the action sequences of chases. By having someone steal something it is an easy way to get straight into the action and draw people in without having to answer any questions about what it is and why he is stealing it. An additional convention that has been taken from a thriller and then put into ours is suspense. The suspense is used when we have the two thugs corner the man in a suit into a corner and you are wondering what he will do. Building this up also he goes into his pocket to pull something out and the title of the film drops down and you hear gunshots. The viewer has no idea where they come from and from whom. This puts the audience on the edge of their seats at the very beginning.
The thugs in our thriller opening are typical working class, they are inn casual clothing and they will be doing all the leg work that their big boss can’t be bothered to do. This shows that they have a big boss and this shows as they nearly catch him their boss will be allot more powerful. This portrays the typical convention of the questions needing to be answered. The man in the suit is a typical middle class person because he strolls out with his head in the air and up until he gets chased no care in the world. He is wearing a suit this gets across his class and how he is more important than the others making it look, before they even get to the end of the chase, that he is going to always come out better. This follows the common stereotype that people in suits are better and allot more important than those that are just dressed in casual clothes. Also by having two of the two of the thugs rather than it makes them look lower down as they cannot do the job by themselves. There is an alteration though in who is in charge usually in normal society the middle class would be in charge of the working class, telling them what to do all the time and telling them where to go and when. This has changed in our thriller, the working class symbolised by the thugs are chasing the middle class symbolised by the man in the suit. This shows how he is scared of the working class making them more powerful than he is. On the other hand though you could say that the middle class man is still in charge because he can decide where he is running so that he is in control of where they run. However, the thugs do choose to run off in the other direction this may be because they have chosen to take an easier root or because they don’t like being led by someone they are trying to catch and kill.
The kind of media institutions to distribute this product would probably be big well known ones. This is because they will have lots of money this will be needed for movies like this because they usually involve many stunts and special effects to make the movies believable because if it doesn’t look believable people can’t get into it and then they won’t be on the edge of their seats. Also when filming a thriller you will have to have certain things done over and over until they are correct so people will have to be employed for longer. Also thrillers are filmed in a number of different areas full of extras as they are mostly based around real life. So people would have to be employed and places would have to be bought and closed for days while the film is being made in that area. This could add up to millions of pounds to make this movie successful and as realistic as possible it would have to be made by top Hollywood film companies.
The audience I think for the thriller would been teens up to about 40’s I think this would appeal more towards the teen end though. This is because they are mostly all action storylines with a few things to think about in between. One of the traits of a thriller is that extra-ordinary things happen in real life places. So teens will think ‘Wow if that happened to him and he was just a normal person it could happen to me.’
To attract the teens and over, the opening sequence has allot of action from the very start the questions are raised. So this will draw them in from the beginning as I said at the very beginning there will be someone stealing something. This is affective because you don’t need any explaining beforehand it can all come later. People will become very bored so to drag them in at the beginning will mean they won’t have to sit through allot of rubbish before there is a decent chase scene. Curiosity and impatience plays a big part in getting people to watch our film. We have the start where it jumps straight into a chase scene. Curiosity helps because people will see our opening and by the end they will have 101 questions that need to be answered and they need to know. This will entice them to come back and carry on watching the whole film.
There are many different things used in the making of the thriller. It starts with the story board this is where the sequence is planned out and all the ideas come together. It is important that the images you draw for the storyboard get across the camera movement, the scene and the person in the shot without making the frame too crowded and too confusing. This is because when you come to the animatic it flashes up. If these frames are overcrowded then you get confused and don’t focus on all of the essential things. The technology that we used to make the animatic was the digital SLR camera and the iMac’s Final Cut software. I learnt how to get the clearest picture using the focus ring, and how to import the images taken off the camera onto the iMac and then into Final Cut. The next stage was uploading the images to the thriller blog to do this we had to convert the video we had created on final cut using QuickTime converter then selecting the option from the blog menu selected the file we wanted to upload select ok. This took a while as we had quite a long video as we had many frames for our chase scene. The next part in the sequence of creating our opening sequence was the camera and taking it out to location and shooting. We already knew how to use the cameras from the preliminary tasks. When uploading and capturing our video from the camera we learnt that as long as while we were uploading the video the video on the screen of the camera was ok then the video would come out correct. We were told this because the video kept stuttering on the screen and we kept restarting the capture wasting precious editing time. Editing was another aspect of the process that we learnt a lot about. We first of all learnt how to change the aspect ratio from widescreen to normal. We had to change this back because we were editing the two videos together and it would look un-professional as the aspect ratio would change from shot to shot. The camera we found very easy to use as it was just point and click. But when we were filming we had to take into account if we had enough battery and that people weren’t going to walk into our shot.
I have learnt many things from the preliminary task. I have firstly learnt about how the storyboard frames do not need to be overly detailed and they don’t need to be followed to strictly. I have learnt that when you have your storyboard and you are out filming your sequence and something comes up that would look a lot better or work easier it is not essential that you stick to your storyboard. The story board is there for a rough guide. Other things that I have learnt from the preliminary task are that all the time you get with the camera is precious so you must not waste it messing about and filming anything. Now that I am doing a bigger task the aspect that most jumps out to me now is the continuity of everything. Learning from the preliminary task the continuity of it is very important it doesn’t have the same effect to the audience if the person in the shot is wearing something completely different in the next one. Another very important factor about the process of making a video is the saving of it. We learnt the hard way during our preliminary task that you must save it every five minutes because it could suddenly close for no reason and you could lose your work we have been using this in the making of our latest video and we now save it every five minutes and every time we do something bug that took a long time. Another essential that is needed in the video is lots of shots of the same thing over and over so you can pick the favourite. In our preliminary we had a few shots that didn’t work as well as we wanted so we wished we had taken more. We have taken this into consideration and now in our thriller video while filming we took a lot of shots from different angles so when we came to the editing process we had a few shots to play with and to see which one worked better. Something that we found extremely useful that we didn’t find out in the preliminary task was how to add sequences to the video project. This helped immensely as we could now edit cut copy and rearrange each section separately keep them organised and only drag and drop the sections that we needed one at a time. This sped up the editing because we didn’t have to search for clips they were always in one place or another.