Evaluation

Any one can watch a film. In the book “how to read a film” written by James Monaco in 1977 he states that “even a cat can watch a film. If we are to make sense of the film, however, we must learn to comprehend the images with which we are presented”. So we decided to choose to make a Thriller as we believed that all the research we had done for it would help us to make the most effective Thriller. This would help us understand the James Monaco quote, as we would understand the use of the images on the screen and why they had been used. Also as it was winter when we began filming we thought that it would be a good setting for the particular genre. So we got to grips with researching and filming. A Thriller is a genre that uses the conventions of things like close ups, dark and atmospheric lighting, quick edits, dingy and isolated settings, minimal characters and sound effects. These conventions makes it easy to identify a thriller. Silence of the Lambs is a very good example of a Thriller as seen in my reseasrch.

We had planned to give this a age rating of 15 but based on the opening I believe it would probably be a 12 as there is no strong language, no detailed violence etc. However if we carried this film on after the opening e would try and add in some conventions of a 15 certificate film. The expected audience for this film would be a person who would enjoy Thriller films and doesn't mind the odd bit of scaring. We put Lizzie who played "Jess" in a pink hoody as pink is a stereotypical girly colour and it seems that it's usually the girly helpless, "damsell in distress" that gets hurt or kidnapped by the baddy.

What did we learn from our preliminary?

We learnt how to use windows movie maker properly and made finer cuts in the main task as you can see by comparing prelim to main. Lighting had to be perfect otherwise it could potentially ruin the whole film. In the prelim the light lit up part of the room which made it look unrealistic. It also blacked out the prisoners face and made it hard to see. We learnt most of all not to leave things until the last minute for example we could not find a location for the prelim film until we had to practically hand it in. But overall the preliminary film was a good leanring curve as we then realised what we had to work on and make better to create an effective opening for a Thriller film.

Problems/ constraints:

Editing:
Adobe kept crashing so we had to use windows movie maker- this was not as advanced or effective as Adobe.
Finding sound effects were difficult as the website with sound effects were blocked by school. This meant that I had to find them at home and put them on a memory stick which to longer therefore wasting time in media lessons.

Filming:
We had to film in the dark so we had to wait until around 5.00pm to begin filming and didnt have long before it got too dark. We had a very tight slot between about 5.00pm and 6.00pm so we had to keep stooping and starting.
Camera wasnt charged sometimes so we had to charge and wait again.
We couldn't find the correct costume that fitted the character so it took time finding that.
Background noise- cars, shouting etc.