Evaluation of Final Project

How does your media project use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In our final project, we wanted the style to fit in with the film 'Seven' which is a popular psychological horror/thriller and follows the traditional codes and conventions (shown on our blogs) of quick cuts, close ups to hide elements of the killer for example, his face in our case and in 'Seven' to do the same but also create an uneasy feeling as we see the various acts he does throughout the opening like slicing of his fingertips etc that we coupled with shaky camera effects to help boost this eerie atmosphere. All these effects were used in our film to help covey the horror aspect of our film as we obscured our killer's face, revealing little about him to make our target audience more afraid of this character as we are more afraid of the unknown then the usual shock tactics traditional horror films present as they can't see or explain whats happening until the very end. We used other films for inspiration like Hannibal but not in the terms of effects or direction but to add greater depth to our character by creating a disjointing element to him as he looks and seems to be acting normal within the opening with the normal kitchen environment but when we see him kill and harvest the organs, it slowly builds up a more disturbing image of him until it almost slaps the audience in the face when its finally revealed that he is a cannibal serial killer through the dramatic change in music, along with the black and white effect to connote that particular sequence is possible a flashback or a flash forward of what he might do to his next victim. All this remains faithful to the codes and conventions we researched about our chosen genre but to a point also takes it to the extreme through the great emphasize we had on the effect to the audience and the camera work we used which fits the frame of "Seven" very closely. The effects used help enforce the jarring feeling as it breaks the shots up and adds to the atmosphere create in the films we all analysed. We wanted to capture this feeling at make it the focal point of our film since unlike traditional horror films which rely on constant freights, psychological horrors extended the horror and drag it out for one giant shock at the end as most of the fear element is created through what the audience think and thought they saw within our film through the conclusions they draw themselves. We also took similar elements from when Craig analysed 'Dexter' which showed close ups of the character cutting up meat, preparing fruit etc that all connoted more violent tendencies of the title character being a murder but were much more subtle way compared to ours which takes it much further and also less comedic in ways. it also showed us how close ups can be used to hide elements of our killer as well, adding to earlier sense of mystery and fear through the lack of information generated by the close ups which gives the audience more questions then answers, increasing the participation of the audience and the engrossed feeling they would get from watching our film.

How does your media project represent particular social groups?

Due to the limited number of characters within our project, we have few representations of groups but still some. Our primary representation focuses predominately on Craig's character by highlighting the more darker side of human nature and how humans can be capable of things shown in our project like murder and even cannibalisation and its the lack of explanation that frightens the viewer the most as sometimes, there is not explanation and it is just the way some people are and thats what frightens them the most. As said in the codes and conventions, these type of films focus on the repressed and deeply hidden parts of human psychology which lead to this behaviour and all of us have had some feelings that we don't dare to admit. Not ones displayed within our film but it gets at how some people have these particularly demented feelings and this shocks the viewers much more since they don't want to admit that humanity is capable of such things.  With Lauren's character, there is little time to represent a particular group but we tried to have it as a motif that women were the victims for this killer and would portray them as weaker in this sequence as we have a small shot of another victim but do not see if its a man or women. Allowing some audience suggestion to the motives of our killer as that is one of the main codes and conventions of this genre, keep the audience guessing till the end.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product?

For our film, we thought that Lionsgate would be an appropriate choice of distributor due to them being a well known distributor of low budget/upcoming horror films like Saw being a prime example so they would known to market the film in the best way and where the best places to screen it would be to achieve the highest number of viewers.

Who would the audience be for your media product and how would you attract them?

For our piece, the audience will be predominately males between 18-26 years old so that they can actually watch the film and be horrified by it but with their mature attitude, will not be completely terrified by it and not make them walk out or never see it again.They will have seen and enjoyed would other films of this genre like Seven, Silence of the Lambs and Saw. The elements of horror are definite within these films but do not show a over exaggerated amount of blood or gore like Hostel. Psychological horrors tend to focus of frightening the viewer in very different ways like playing on human fear and utilising elements of the human psyche that frighten people or that have been repressed or hidden (mentioned in our codes and conventions research). Our audience would also enjoy a certain amount of mystery and the idea of being able to work out who/what the killer is along with the detectives in the show, making it a more rewarding film to watch then a gore filled bloodbath. The audience will predominantly be male with the horror genre being stereotypically aimed at more of a male audience, there will have be a niche in the female market whereby for women who do enjoy the horror genre.

Our audience would be attracted to our film due to being of their favourite genre but also mixed the suspense and enigma created throughout film as we leave many questions unanswered in our film since we want the audience themselves to make their own assumptions to who the killer is, why he does what he does or is he really a killer even since we may hint at that particular path but we don't spell it out plainly. We create that sense of doubt within the audience to keep them guessing and second guessing themselves until the usual twists at the end give them the true conclusion like seen in Saw where the body stands up and reveals himself to be the mastermind behind it all, we wanted to recreate that well planned suspense but in a different way to it through glances at our killer through close ups and point of views to make the audience much more engrossed with the film.

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

The main program we used during our editing process was Premier Pro and while it offers a great range of effects and freedom to edit precisely, was prone to a number of problems throughout our experience with it. One such problem was the endless amounts of crashes we had suffered while editing our project. Lauren actually has a blog post that has detailed every time the program crashed on us, with some being 6 times in one lesson which brought our project to an almost standstill and even threatened to make us miss the deadline if Mr Earl hadn't reformatted the files to AVI to shorten the render times. This was also a problem originally as since we were filming using HD cameras, the file size for each clip was quite demanding to render. Lengthening the editing process again which made us worry about reaching the intended deadline. This is were a problem with the camera came in as well. Nothing to do with recording or handling of it but when we set the camera to the 30 frames and then closed it to move locations, it reset to 60. This made every shot we filmed longer to rend as we forgot to put it back in 30. It didn't make any difference to the footage itself, just made it inconvenient during editing. Another problem caused by the original file type was the long wait for the actual project to open. It sometimes took 10 minutes to even open, reducing the time we had in lessons to finish our project and forced us to spend more of our free time to get it finished.

What have you learned from your preliminary task into the progression of your final project?


We have learned a lot from our initial projects, The Prisoner and our continuity task, "A Day in the Life of Craig". The first being how important the variety of shots has on a move as our Prisoner project suffered from only using one static shot during the dialogue so we made sure to mix our shots, adding different effects depending on the shots used like point of views and close ups to make the audience see through his eyes and give detail of the various actions he is doing. We also learned to check through our footage more careful to avoid glaring continuity errors like in "A Day in the life of Craig which had one obvious one of Craig's hood up in one shot then down in the next. It has taught us to plan more effectively by using storyboards, shooting test footage etc. as our other projects did have a lack of planning which contributed towards a less effective or professional final project so in our Final project, we wrote the screenplay, made a storyboard to ensure it would work when we visualised it and got test footage for a variety of locations to see which would suit our film the best. Lastly, when Mr Earl says shoot more then you need, defiantly follow the advice as it can save you from re shooting or bad shots like we had a potential problem with the bowl and knife switching hands but luckily Craig shot more then enough and we found a usable shot. In all, thanks to all these problems being addressed earlier we were able to make a much more faultless production. it still has a few problems but a lot less then we would have if we didn't address them and learn how to improve or work around them if its unavoidable. We are very pleased with our project due to the quality and finish of the final product which will hopefully achieve us a suitable grade.

Final Cut

Final Cut Finished

We have now finished the final cut of our project and are currently rendering and exporting the clip which hopefully will not encounter any problems with Premier Pro, due to our past experiences with the programme. Overall, we as a group are very pleased with the final product espicalley with the way the music and the addition of titles have boosted the overall quality of it. There are still a few minor problems with it but they were difficult to fix as it would require some detailed knowledge of Premier Pro to create some of the effects would have orginalled liked. Once its finished exporting, we give it one more view before uploading it, ready for our evaluations.

Progress of Final Cut

Now that our files are reformatted, we have a much better time rendering our files and can continue our progress of completing our final project. We had to relink our video clips to our original timeline and replace a couple of sequences to improve some of the quality in them like our opening scenes had the traditional yellow hue when filmed in artifical light so we adjusted the various settings like hue and brightness so the lighting could match the rest of the clips filmed in more natural light. Since most of the order is intact, we can focus more now on adding effects to titles, select approaite music for our piece and more time to view our video to see if any glitchy edits remain.

*Update*
We  have now mangaged to select some various music tracks that would fit well into our piece and add the overall atmoshpere of it. Also Mr Earl has showed us how to add some more detailed special effects to our titles which will enhance the project greatly.

Reformatting

Due to the numerous problems that have been evident throughout most of our editing process, Sir had decided to reformat our original HD clips into a more suitable, less demanding file type so it will result in smoother running and editing. This is because of the decreased file quality which is more comptabible with Premier Pro so it will decrease the likely hood of mid-work crashes from the program and also it will take less time to open the file itself thanks to the decreased file quality and size, along with shorter editing times for the very same reason. However, the only problem with this solution is that we will have to reorder and redo our sequence from scratch as the reformatting has only changed the origianl files, not the ones with our project so even more time will need to assigned to this project to avoid missing the final deadline. We will need to use our old timeline as a template for our new sequence so we can ensure we keep the same order.

Rough Cut of "Animous Messor"

Finally we have posted our rough cut for our title sequence after numerous delays due to problems with Premier Pro like crashes during exporting, slow rendering and opening. So far, we are pleased with our sequence as its close to how were originally pictured our sequence and some parts of it are done well like the ending with the music adds tension and fear to it, making it a good way to close the sequence (still needs minor work on timing etc). However there a few problems to work out. One is of course the audio as we forgot to take the original dialouge out in our rough cut and haven't chosen the music to replace it yet so thats the first thing we need to correct. Also some of the editing is choppy in places and jumps to far in terms of narrative (too much even for our concept similer to Seven's which jumps widely) so going back and improving the editing to make it look more professional and smoother is a priority. We had ideas to implement effects like flashes or inverts to recreate the style in Seven but its proving difficult due it either not fitting the part of the sequence and also danger of suffering from overuse which will dampen the overall effect and quality of the sequence itself so we need to micromanage the amount of the effects used within our project.

Please watch our rough cut and if you have any comment or constuctive feedback please post it beneath so we can boost the quality of sequence and also eliminate what you don't like about our sequence.

Half Term Post - Update

Due to the problems we experienced before the half term holidays of not being able to finish our rough cut and upload it, we missed our deadline and wouldn't be able to get any commentary off our peers and Mr Earl. During the holidays, we emailed Mr Earl about the problems and missed deadline and we were told we were not the only facing problems with the technology so we were given to the end of the first week back to have the rough cut of "Animous Messor" finished. All we have to do in terms of editing is add the titles we need and bring the order of clips together then all is the rendering and exporting to finish. It will hopefully be on our blogs around wednesday if there is no more problems with Premier Pro.