Here is our final thriller – STALKED

Evaluation question 7 is, ‘Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?‘. It allowed us to look back on all the stages we’ve been through in progression and the skills and knowledge that we have learnt over the course, thinking about how much more complex our final thriller will be, compared to our preliminary task and all the stages that have got us there. We’ve covered in our video, all the stages, from planning and research to evaluation and feedback, about everything we’ve learnt.

Below is the video of both Ellie and I talking about all the things we’ve learnt:

The evaluation question we were answering here was, ‘What have you learnt about technologies from the process of this product?’. This was to allow us to review all the different stages of production I’ve worked through and to evaluate the technological skills I have learnt. We completed a timeline to display all the different technologies we have used in each stage of production and post production. It is linked below:

Evaluation question 5 which we had to answer was, ‘How did you attract/address your audience?’ and this consisted of going through our shots and considering the audiences responses and feelings towards our narrative symbols within features such as sound and editing.  We went back and looked at the things, in our research for evaluation question 4, that we thought our target audience of females aged 16-25 would want to see in our thriller and how conventions would influence how they might feel towards the characters. We did this by creating a commentary in premiere pro:

In order to complete this task, our overall question to answer was, “Who would be the target audience for our product?”. This would enable us to compile all of our target audience research into a presentation so we could clearly determine and show our specific target audience. We included a voice thread, explaining our presentation, which includes all of the information we gathered from our research such as the survey and the Facebook profile. We have now securely established our target audience as females aged 16-24 and we clearly explain how we reached this conclusion in the voice thread.

The key question we had to answer and evaluate here was, ‘What kind of media institute might distribute your thriller and why?’. We created a slideshow to present our research into this question. By doing this, we were able to discover the sorts of companies that distribute films in the thriller genre and decide which one would be best suited to our thriller. We were also able to look deeper into the distribution section of film making to understand further the steps and strategies of distribution and the role of the distributor. We decided on an Indie distributor, Paramount, as we felt they’d be more inclined to want to work with us, especially seeing as the thrillers they’ve previously distributed seemed to be within a similar category to ours and therefore we felt they would benefit our project.

The evaluation question we were looking at here was, ‘In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?’. This question, which we completed on Prezi, allowed us to look more closely at the typical conventions of real thriller films and understand them and evaluate whether we have included many typical conventions in our thriller or whether we have challenged them. To understand whether and where our product matches the typical criteria of a thriller film.

Evaluation question 2 is ‘How does your media product represent particular social groups?’. I answered this by adding annotations on one of my YouTube drafts on how we’ve represented our characters throughout. We looked at all the elements of our thriller including characters, location, editing and cinematography, narrative and sound and how these factors may have represented social groups such as gender, age, status, power and whether these conventions match the audience’s expectations.

We have now created and uploaded a draft 3 of our thriller, this time including our sounds, the Foley sounds we recorded and also the music which we have now found. We allowed to go back and tweak anything we need next week however, this is roughly how our final thriller should look with editing, titles and now sound. Here it is unloaded to YouTube:

As this is what we have come up with as a rough completed thriller, we needed some feedback from our teacher in order to make sure everything was working and was the best it could be before we produce our actual final product. He recorded himself watching our thriller and giving us some feedback from which we created a list of things we needed to tweak an improve.

Some things we could alter:

• A louder sound effect to emphasize the title coming in
• Add in a fade to white after the camera flashes to signify the action coming back to normal
• Make the footsteps and the twig sound louder
• Maybe have a sound for each character to distinguish them
• Add in some more dramatic music for the chase scene as at the moment, the music remains the same all the way throughout

Here is the feedback video from Mr Gregson , we will work on improving these things:

As we began searching for sounds online and from our provided sources, we realised that we didn’t have all of the sound effects that we needed and therefore we had to go out and record our own sounds. The scream and the footsteps that we found weren’t exactly what we wanted for our thriller so we had to record some of our own as well as a twig snapping as we couldn’t find that online and that is a crucial moment in our thriller that needs to be enhanced.

We manage to record all of the Foley sounds we needed  and uploaded them onto the computer in order to edit them to sound exactly as we want. We used a range of tools to achieve this: amplify the quitter ones, changing the speed on some of the sounds that we wanted to seem more intense , cutting sounds and cutting the bits we didn’t need.

Here are some examples of us working I audacity:

We couldn’t estimate how loud the sounds were going to be as we recorded them so therefore, the amplify tool was really useful as we could easily change the dynamics by reducing or increasing the decibels using the bar. Some of our sounds, such as the crunching leaves, we only wanted as a background sound to create the atmosphere and we were able to make that one a bit quieter whilst amplifying others such as the music which we wanted to be more clear.

In order to make sure we captured the sound within the recording, we left a space before and after recording the actual sound which meant that there was a lot of unnecessary audio that we needed to cut out.  We did this simply by using the cutting tool, you highlight the part you want to delete and then backspace to delete it. This was a very simple but very useful tool for us as when importing our sounds into our thriller, we found many of them were too long, and we were able to easily cut them and then re import them.

Another useful tool for us was the reverb tool. We wanted some of our shots to sound far more intense and authentic as sometimes, when they are pre-recorded, they lose their authenticity as they have become very processed, therefore, by adding some reverb to sounds such as the heavy breathing and the gasp, made it almost echo, which in turn made it sound far more realistic and creepy.

Once we had completed all of this individual editing if all of our sounds, we imported them into Premier Pro. Once they were in premier, we decided that some of the sounds sounded too harsh and not naturalistic so we decide to add some exponential fade transitions between the layers, in order to blend the sounds in with the clips so that they appear more natural and realistic as they fade in and out. We are yet to find any music that we feel fits well with out thriller as we believe that to create different atmospheres, we need two different pieces of music as the tone of our thriller changes throughout, however, overall, I’m very happy with how our sounds have turned out, they compliment our thriller very well.