Evaluation

Evaluation

Our opening for a thriller film, “Hostage” is finally complete. We spent about four to five weeks planning, filming and editing it. I think we worked pretty well using the conventions of real thrillers to make it. While making the thriller, we did consider going for "instant arousal", a term mentioned in the documentary, "Watching", which was about film openings. It pointed out the importance of drawing in the audience during the opening. We definitely achieved this because when we watched all of our openings with the rest of the class, some students mentioned it being scary and also, the fact that they were wondering what would happen next, like one of those films that you are scared of watching and yet you can't tear yourself away from it. The one thing we didn't need to worry about after the instant arousal was what would happen next because the project was only about making the opening of the film. Another successful thing in our thriller, according to our classmates, was out use of match cuts to show the flashbacks and the low soundtrack which made the diegetic sounds seem very sudden and it also made the video quite suspenseful. The rest of the class mentioned that it made it scary but that it was also quite cool. I think we were really successful in using the conventions of real thriller films to develop our opening and am quite proud of it.

Our opening offered a representation of a teenage girl, in her pyjamas, middle class, who lives with her mother and younger sister (the pink wallpaper in the younger sister's bedroom was very effective). She might like to go out and have fun with her friends but may also be the good daughter and protective older sister when she's at home. I think we represented her social group quite well and the fact that she’s walking around the house in the morning in her pyjamas shows a sense of vulnerability. That definitely added to the tension quite well and helped with the uneasy mood. It makes you wonder if someone’s going to jump out and attack her, which is why some audience members might find it a bit scary.

I think that our thriller would be a Hollywood blockbuster, distributed around the world because some of the editing techniques that we used isn’t something you really see in small independent UK release but in big Hollywood blockbusters. The first instance of fast track editing adds really well to the sub-genre of Horror Thriller. The other reason why it might be released internationally is because Horror Thrillers generally appeal to large audiences and most that I have seen have been released via Hollywood.

The target audience for our thriller is generally teenagers but really, anyone who enjoys Horror Thrillers. One typical member of the audience might be a 20 year old guy, any class, and works really hard at university, studying film and enjoys making them but also likes going to watch them at the cinema on the weekends with his friends, maybe for a bit of inspiration. I think that this typical audience member might fit under the demographic description of “aspirers”. I’d say that he is part of the mainstream audience.

We would attract the audience first of all by featuring our star, the lead actress on posters on billboards and on images featured on the internet adverts. We’d also possibly make a deal with a popular social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook and possibly the big fast food giants such as McDonald’s and Burger King so that anyone who buys a burger might get two for one on tickets to see our thriller. We’d also make a trailer to go on TV and have it uploaded on a YouTube channel perhaps so that users can be attracted to the film and then go on to watch it when it is released. In the trailed we might have clips from different parts of the film but not too much to give it away. We’d make a trailer that would make the audience think, “I wonder why this happens”, or “what happens to that girl” and so on.

From making our thriller, I have definitely learnt a lot. The filming was the easiest; I think because it wasn’t my first time using the professional Canon cameras and so I’d had a bit of experience which definitely helped with getting our scenes filmed quickly. On the computers, after the filming, we used Final Cut Pro to edit our opening, cutting clips down, match cuts and just putting the whole thing together, really. Once again, this was quite easy to use as I’d had experience using it at GCSE. After the film was put together, we used Livetype, which is a program for making sub-titles and the main titles for the opening sequences of films and so on. This one was a bit difficult to use because I’d never used it before and it wasn’t very easy to use. At one point me and the other members of our group gave up with it and did simple titles in Final Cut Pro but the text didn’t look very good and didn’t fit our thriller. So we went back to Livetype and gave it another try and eventually managed to get some decent titles onto our thriller. The other program we used was Soundtrack Pro; we used this one to add some music onto our thriller. It was quite easy to use. We added in an ambient, eerie synthesizer sound and a very dark and gloomy sound over that, right when our main character starts looking around the house for her mum and sister. I think it worked quite well because some of our classmates who watched our opening said that it was a big scary and I’d say that it also added to the suspense. It wasn’t our first time using it as we’d used it for our Match Cut exercise so it was quite easy to use and we had the sound done within minutes. Before, during and after filming out thriller, we’ve been recording our progress on online blogs. We each added a post every lesson and that worked a bit like a diary to show our progress throughout the project. I think that the internet offers more opportunities for us because we can embed our thriller onto our blog, or upload it to YouTube or even release it via Vimeo. That’s definitely a good thing for us and gives us more chance of growing an audience.

Looking back at the project, I’d say that I definitely learned a lot. The fact that we did lots of little exercises (match cut, storyboarding, etc) before we started filming really helped because if we’d just started filming, our thriller wouldn’t have been very good because we wouldn’t know how to edit it effectively and so on. That really helped us and I think that our thriller was quite successful, given our skills and knowledge.