Evaluation

Media Evaluation – Lost In Daylight

In the first few lessons of media we learnt about the forms and conventions of thriller films, and then learnt about the differences between a horror and a thriller film.
The conventions of thriller films are that they are based on everyday life situations, and are constructed in a manner that makes the audience want to know what happens next, they usually have a hero or villain in the story line, thrillers also have sub-genres such as; An Action-thriller, crime-thriller, psychological-thriller…etc.
Examples of thrillers are: Psycho, The Godfather, 28days Later, The Sixth Sense.
In class, we watched a thriller called Arlington Road, after we had watched it we had to analyse different conventions to show that it was a thriller film, Arlington Road used generic conventions to show this such as suspense, tension and a false sense of security.

Compared to a Thriller ,a Horror is not based on everyday life situations, as they have things that would not happen in real life happen in the film, horror also has the typical conventions of the ‘last girl standing’, when at the end of the film there is a woman left still alive who gets rescued with all her friends dead, and ‘the black man always dies first’ self-explanatory within films. Horror films play on effect to make the audience scared and excited, were as a thriller film is to thrill the audience and to make them jump.

Looking back at when our group did the preliminary film task we learnt about match cuts by doing a match cut exercise in which we got a series of ‘Bait’ clips, and had to match them together, after we learnt about match cuts on Final Cut Pro, we then went on to do our own two minute film, before filming we planned this by getting ideas together and then storyboarding them onto paper, after this had been done we started to film, as a group we found it hard to plan our idea, as it was difficult to come up with an idea and plan it and making sure it had a good storyline.
Once we had finished the filming we edited our film, first off we had to transfer out footage from the camera onto the Apple Mac Computer we did this by using the ‘logging + capturing’ the needed footage, when we started to editing we used match cuts, and other techniques we had learnt in our final cut pro tutorial, this helped us when we edited our final film, as any problems we came across with when doing the preliminary task, we could fix when doing the final film, it also helped our final filming by seeing any mistakes we made , when doing the final version of our filming that we could fix.

The target audience for our thriller film ‘Lost In Daylight’ would be people aged between 16-35. This is a bit of a psychological thriller in a sense, so you would have to be over the age of 16 to understand the psychological parts of the thriller and to stay interested about it, as a younger audience member, may not find it interesting or understand the concepts of the film. A typical audience member of the film would be;
“Alex from London, 18 years old, full time university student, who love to regularly go to the cinema, reads crime novels, and shops at Topman and Office”.
This movie will be a mainstream movie, of which both men and woman of a working/middle social class background will watch. It will appeal to all cultural backgrounds, because this film has no specific cultural reference within the movie, so it will not appeal to one certain culture more than another will, this movie could be an example of a diverse cultured film.

The way, in which we will attract our target audience, will be by having advertisements on:
-T.V, after 8pm on channel 1-5 mainstream channels with a wide audience range, and on Living TV, Bravo, and Paramount, Fiver, these channels are targeted at a specific audience that watches programmes involving Mystery, Crime and Suspense, so they will be a good channel to promote our thriller that involves a mystery crime of a woman.
-Posters, These will be on the side of London buses, in main area of London for example, Oxford Street, Liverpool Street Station, the reason for this, as there a lot of people who commute and got to these main places within in London regularly so they are able to see the poster advertising our film.
-Trailers for ‘Lost in Daylight’ will be shown in cinemas and shown on the television aswell like stated before.
Viral marketing via the Internet of the movie trailer on teen social websites such as Myspace, Facebook will be used aswell to get a wider age range for the audience.
The main stars of the film will not be an overly famous actor/actress, but will be recognisable stars, for example a person that has been in television such as; Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire and Skins) or Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead and Spaced) this will attract an inherited audience, as the audience will go to see the film, to see what the particular star can achieve and perform too.

The way our media product represents particular social groups, is that the audience can relate to the people who are starring in the film, as they are similar age, gender, and class to the target audience of either a male or female middle/working class person, whom is of the age of 16 or over.
There is no representation of sexuality and religion, as this film is not based on this, it is based on the question of death and how it has happened.

The kind of industry that might distribute our media product, would be a company that distributes around the world such as a Hollywood Blockbuster, this is because our film would be a versatile film that would attract audience members from around the world to see the film, for example a similar film like ours would be ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, as it has a similar ‘Unknown’ Cast, but with a great storyline, and advertising, it will entice people to watch the film.

I have learnt about the technological construction of a film is first of actually making the film.
My experience of being about to make a title sequence and actually being about to film with a camera and using all the conventional rules to make sure the film was correctly filmed to be a thriller, this was hard but enjoyable, and by having practises of how to do this by doing a preliminary task it made it easier to not make any simple mistakes when filming our final thriller. Then using Final Cut Pro, and moving the recorded footage onto the computer to edit, by using ‘log + capture’ this process was hard because I was not used to doing this type of editing and transferring footage and getting the correct points from the filming was tricky but it was useful for editing. When actually editing, it was hard to make sure that all the match cuts were correctly in place, and to make them unnoticeable to the naked eye, for example when Silvestre knocks on the door and then my head turns to react to the knock, then back to him knocking on the door, after getting used to it, it got easier, but overall editing is difficult.

Secondly we used the internet to record what we had been doing lesson by lesson, we had personal blogs on blogger.com, I found doing this was very simple, as it could be written and then be posted instantly, and there were no need for losing papers or any important information. After we had finished out final film, we then uploaded it onto Vimeo, which was a simple step-by-step process, once this had been done; we then embedded our videos onto our blog, which was simple. This modern technology, was very quick and simple, it was not time consuming, and made it simple to move footage from one place to another within minutes. By using the Internet it also widened the potential audience viewers of our film, as lots of different people use the Internet, and people you may not expect to watch out media product, may find it interesting and want to go and watch it, increasing the amount of audience who go to see the film.

Zanele Lloyd-Dawethi