Conventions of Film Noir

This is a piece of research where we looked at different noir movies and commented on the shot types/angles, costume, lighting, mise en scene, etc.

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

Websites/Blog
Before starting media as an AS I had never been near any software involving film editing, sound, font types or anything media related so coming into the AS I was nervous to say the least. The first thing I tackled was my blog. My first view of blogspot.com was frightening, it was all very new and daunting to look at, however once I got started, I found the blog to be the easiest thing to handle. What I like about the blog aspect is that it's very modern, you get a sense of community as you can share information to anyone and through cnsmedia.blogspot.com you can look at other previous AS media examples as well as your own classmates. Not only this but it's relevant to the industry as, as the world of technology is progressing more and more information is being publicised over the internet as, unlike books, this can be updated all the time to fit with the constant change that days bring.
Firstly, I started by copying and pasting pictures and using text for a blogpost. From this I progressed into converting Youtube videos onto my blog by taking the embed HTML code from the site and converting it onto my blog. Progressing further I experimented with different websites to strengthen my blog posts and make them more interesting to look at. From this I used sites such as: scribd.com, prezi.com, screenr.com, photopeach.com, beeclip.com, dafont.com etc. 

The two sites that I have use the most within the making of my thriller opening are: prezi and scribd. Prezi is a really intricate and exciting way of making a power point presentation much more diverse. It allows you to be free with creativity making video, images and text all combine together with different paths of looking at them. I find prezi quite simple and effective to work with as by making different levels within the prezi (for example starting with one picture, zooming in to a section and we have text, zooming further out and we are introduced to a different image etc.) you make a simple presentation more pleasurable to watch so to speak. 

The editing process of prezi

With the use of scribd.com I was able to embed powerpoint presentations and word documents in particular to my blog to show multimedia uses within one blogpost. So for example in one blogpost I could use a word document, with a few images and text, powerpoint and a prezi to combine all together the strengthen my multimedia aspect. 


However, during the evaluation section of my thriller project I started to tire of using the same websites for my blogpost's and wanted to stretch my knowledge further and challenge myself with different software's. This is when I experimented with the websites: photopeach.com, beeclip.com, dafont.com and screenr.com. Photopeach.com was an aspect completely new to me as it was a website that made a video that you could edit with text and image, similar to edit like my thriller opening however a lot more simplistic. Beeclip.com was a updated/progressed/different version of a powerpoint, I used this to show the aspects of the character of Edward and this came as a useful presentation technique. I used dafont.com to research the fonts that I was going to use within the titles and opening title sequence for the thriller opening and this was a easy and simple website that I would use again as it has multiple choices on different styles of writing. Finally, screenr.com was a website that allowed you to add a voice over to a section of your screen. I elaborated this by making a prezi and then adding a voice over to expand the bullet points that I had on the prezi and allowing more in depth analysis (micro analysis). 

Shooting/Editing Thriller

Research Resources

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

Examples within thrillers

Here we have the opening of the first Saw film. This is a great example of enigma which was commonly used within my own thriller: 
What I like about this clip is that it uses the same sort of technique that we used within our own thriller. Although we don't have a half dead man, with two strapped up to the wall, we used a less extravagant starting. With the same concept of what's in the bag? why is Edward there? to Saw as we are asking: What's on the tape? Why are the men there? The same sort of shock at the beginning to the situation the people are in is used and to effect.


Next we have a film which grabs us with a hook at the very beginning, and one which we took a lot of influence from when planning our own thriller: 
 Here we have a great example of an opening with a hook. In this opening we have the introduction of the whole movie, an introduction to the mysterious cube that many people will soon be trapped in. The importance of the hook is to make the audience want to watch the rest of the movie, and with this opening it introduces a unique concept for a movie. We took the same approach with our own, trying to make a unique starting so that the audience will be more than intrigued to see where the movie will take this idea.


A film that could be used as an example in reference to cinematography and costume, one in which took specific detail in doing so is Zero Dark Thirty:


Not taking a direct copy of the costume used, taking notice of the detail they made helped us within our own thriller. With lots of rich settings, the surroundings help to bring the film alive with a lot of the settings in foreign countries. The use of different colours with the sharp images is something we incorporated into our own thriller. I think by paying attention to little details such as costume can make a rather big impact upon the outcome of the whole movie. This could be further explained with the help of macro and micro analysis. In the context that the macro side of the picture (the wider look) is intensified by the micro attention to detail (the finer details).


A modern gangster film that was previously released in 2012 relates most to our own in terms of the gangster genre. This film is Looper:


This is a more modern take on the gangster genre and is the approach that we were going for on our own thriller. Within this movie you still have the classic 'mob' and gangster like characters however the costume choices and dialogue is a lot more updated and original. This is a unique take on the gangster genre and was definitely a starting point to look at when constructing our own thriller. 

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

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

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

Our thriller is a potential mainstream project, covering many of the conventions of thrillers. However, the target audience is very male orientated (due to the heavily male population throughout the movie); shows a lot of violence; quite fast moving and has lots of things going on. In the graph below we can see how Grip contrasts to a movie that's very female orientated like Sex in the city, although not in the thriller genre we can see just how much it varies in a demographics sense. 

Where we can see that Sex and the City is very large, indicating that it is very mainstream as it's celebrated a lot among the older women category as we see it is placed high within the age line. However with grip, it's on the complete other end of the scale contrasting significantly to that of a 'chick flick'. Not quite as mainstream as Sex and the City, it still however has potential and therefore the circle is of a medium size. On account to age, Grip is aimed more at teenager/early twenties, more for youths than an older market. This is because the older the market the more specific and niche the movies become, with the exception of Sex and the city however the reason that Sex and the City movie sold so well was because it had a number of series behind it.
In a more psychographic sense, the story line can be generalised among the teenage population therefore is why it has the possibility of becoming quite mainstream.

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