Audience Thriller Feedback

We wanted to find out what people thought of our thriller, collect some constructive feedback from them and see what they thought worked and what didn't. We printed out some feedback sheets, asked a random group of teenagers and asked them to watch our thriller then fill in the questions. The questions where; 1) What do you think the basic plot to this thriller is? 2) What do you think are the key strengths of this thriller and why? 3) How do you think this thriller could be made even more effective and why?

For the first question the answers were very similar, people easily identified the rough detective plot (however we should have made clearer the relationship between the detective and the femme fatal because few people remarked on it or noted it) and many mentioned that "it reminded [them] of a thriller from the 1940's" which was exactly what we were looking to convey so we are very pleased and consider our efforts to make a 40s style thriller a success. 

The comments about the key strengths of our thriller mainly consist of compliments about the music, how it fits well with the time and effectively builds tension, Emma Smith said "the music is very atmospheric and effective". Again the set was mentioned numerous times, saying it was well made and realistic as a detectives office.

For the last question there were two answers in particular that were most consistant and that we also as a group agree with, 1) People commented on how the death scene (gun shot) could be made more realistic and if I were to make the thriller all over again I would do exactly that and focus more on sorting out the murder and how realistic and effective it looks for the audience. 2) Many mentioned that they thought the thriller should be put in black and white and this is something that we ourselves are still deciding too, we origionally thought that Film Noirs had to be in black and white however have since learnt otherwise and that many are in fact in colour. We dont like the colours in our thriller at the moment, they look fake and too bright, however we also feel that a black and white filter is too simple and too obvious. We have decided to saturate the film considerably and that a cold blueish filter should be added to make it more eery and look more effective.

Overall I am pleased with the feedback we recieved and have taken into account the comments on the colour of the film and will change this.

Prelim vs Thriller

The prelim task that we did at the start of the year and the thriller we have just done now are both very different. Firstly you can easily tell that the prelim task is very simple compared to our thriller. This is because in our prelim task we used very simple shots such as medium wide, wide and close ups. There didn’t seem to be any extremely noticeable high or low angles therefore its easy to say that in our thriller the camera work was much more effective because we used a wider variety of different shots which just made our thriller more effective.

                   

Simple shots were used like close-ups and medium wide angels, the prelims didn’t have as much variety as our thrillers.

Once again our mise-en-scene was very basic in our prelim compared to our thriller but this is only because for our thriller we spent weeks planning in order to get it perfect. In our prelim task we only had a day from where I remember our group went from a very complicated idea to running out of time and using a car we found in the parking lot. Although I cant say that this was a bad idea, it did portray the message that we wanted across but in our thriller we were just able to make it more effective. For our thriller it was handled completely differently. We had to make our actors look like they were from the 1940's this involved a lot research into that era as well as finding the typical costumes of a noir style film. The props that we had in our thriller also would have to represent this era and much time was put into researching the appropriate props and finding them around the school and looking at home. The set was another thing that had to be carefully planned. We had to look at many different films, website and pictures to find the ideal office for our detective and of course one that we were capable of producing. Last thing was lighting, in our prelim we didn't have any, we did it outside in the natural daylight. For our thriller we had to have certain lights to make sure you could clearly see out actors faces, around the room and to create the shutter light effect for the window.

I would definitely say that the editing in our thriller was much more effective than when we did our prelim. Firstly because we had a lot more time then in to edit our thriller but I think mainly it was because when we were editing our prelims it was our first time using final cut pro, we were only learning about it. When we edited our thrillers we were more familiar with the program and it was easier for us to do the simple tasks. I found that this time we were able to link the shots together in a more effective and faster way but the real difference this time to our editing was that this time we were able to use special effects and this really made a massive difference. In our prelim task the quality of sound also wasn’t very good, some sounds were louder than others and we had some spill of us talking. In our thriller task we were able to add sound effects and edit this in a way that all sounds were even, panned out to both ears and use compression to make sure that some sounds were not much louder than others.

Editing the prelim task and editing the thriller in terms of working together as a team I found completely different. I didn’t have the same group when editing my thriller but I felt that when editing the prelim it was a lot less stressful but I think that because there wasn’t a big final grade relying on it. Also in the prelim tasks we got to choose our groups so generally everybody went with the people that they got on well with. When editing the thriller this was completely different because the groups were randomly picked and I found that especially in our group we had certain views on how our end product should look like and this sometimes lead to a bit of discussion

How we used Digital Technologies in our Thriller

Here is our finished product and also an explanation of how we used digital technologies in our Thriller. 

Hope you enjoy!

Addressing Target Audience

The Perfect Audience

Walking around London you see many different styles of dress sense even styles that were fashionable in the 1940's and 50's these are the types of people that I can see we would be targeting to see our film. But it isn't only because of their dress scenes that makes me think of this because of the cultural places i have seen these people it also makes me think that this movie would be our ideal audience. The thing is that its hard to place these people into a 'tribe' but in my opinion the tribe I found closest was the trendies, even though it may not sound like it. The reason I chose to put them into this 'tribe' is because on the website www.uktribes.com it says that they are well researched in vintage clothing and I think that it is something that you need to be if you want to pull off the 1940's look as well as our ideal audience member could of experimented with a lot of other alternative dress styles and found this one the most to her liking. Otherwise I can call her a Vintage Girl.                                                      Therefor I imagine our perfect

audience member coming from a middle class and very cultured background, with possibly a fascination when they were younger into world war 2. I can imagine our audience liking the old fashioned James Bond films and old noir detective films like L.A. Confidential and The art of seduction. Even though our ideal audience prefers films that come out in the year 2000, films that are coming out now in the cinema such as things like Gangsta Squad, The Great Gatsby and Hitchcock. The TV they watch isn't always about detectives but it is still set in a later era. I imagine them watching things like Mad Men and starting to watch The Playboy Club until it got cancelled.I find it difficult to imagine what sort of music our ideal audience would like but I picture something like adele. I see our audience member as doing things which are very cultural. Going to art galleries, museums and attending festivals as well as her possibly blogging a lot. When going to see theatre pieces seeing things like The 29 Steps. Overall I think of our film as targeting people that are in their mid 20's and upwards. Im not saying that teens will not want to see this film but the majority of our audience will be over their mid 20's. 

Individual Audience Member (Tumblr)

Here is the link to an individual audience members tumblr blog:

                                                                    

http://the-dark-city.tumblr.com/archive

Dark City's blog has many black and white photographs from noir films such as Casablanca and Sunset Boulevard, we can see from their blog that they have a strong passion for noir and neo noir films and thrillers from the 1940's. This blogger is the perfect example of the type of audience we feel would enjoy our film because it is a neo noir based on a 1940's style detective thriller.

Who would Distribute our film??

Because our film is low budget production the company that would most likely distribute and produce our film would be either Vertigo or Warp. Since our film is a 1940’s noir genre our thriller would most likely be distributed into more art house cinemas like Warp films such as Submarine by Richard Arayoade and Tyrannosaur by Paddy Considine. Both of these directors were first time directors which proves that warp are willing to take chances on first time film makers which suits our situation perfectly and even more because they specialize in distributing and producing low-budget art house films. We also think that Vertigo would produce and distribute our films for many of the same reasons why we think that warp would also be good. Like Warp, Vertigo also takes chances on first time film makers for example just like Gareth Edwards who made Monsters and also similar to him who edited his film in his house while we edited ours in school. Another similarity between the two films is that we both used quite cheap cameras to film our films. Edwards using a 2000 pounds Sony EX3 and us using a 3000 pounds Sony NX5 digital HD camera.

The reason we didn’t choose a large company like Universal Studios or Time Warner to produce and distribute our film is because our film is very low budget compared to theirs and is aimed at a smaller niche audience where mostly their films are aimed to the global masses. Secondly we feel that these large conglomerates would also not produce our film because their main aim is to make money from the box office and sell on the merchandise of which does not suite our thriller very well. Our film would probably make more money through DVD sales and television more that anything else because our opportunities are limited because most likely bigger companies will not want to take risks on us. 

Vertigo is great because it specializes in films of our films genre and since Vertigo has a partnership with BBC and BFI this could really be a benefit financially and distribution wise for our film. Combining with other companies through cross- media convergence mean that we will be able to share the cost and perhaps get extra funding to spend more on marketing for our film. This then benefits us because it minimizes the risk by sharing the cost and help us also distribution wise because the BBC would be able to show it on TV which could help promote our film across the UK and Europe. For example having the BBC associated with the film The Kings Speech this helped sell the film to be distributed in the US because they consider it a worthy and venerable institution.

How our thriller represents particular social groups:

In our thriller we decided to represent a variety of different social groups such as gender, age and how detectives were represented in the 1940-noir films.

 We chose to use a stereotypical beautiful women as one of our leads of whom the audience could fall in love just by looking at her but instead of having her play the damsel in distress role we made her the femme fatal which is an attractive and seductive women who will bring disaster to any man that becomes involved with her. In some ways our thriller is similar to Billy Wilders 1944 noir film Double Idemnity. The film involves the femme fatal wanting her husband dead so that she can collect the insurance money. The film starts with lust and ends in murder, somewhat like our thriller. We have chosen our female to represent as close as we can possibly get the ideal femme fatal noir women although this is also made easy to portray through our leading man.

 We have chosen him to be older than our femme fatal although she still seduces him in order to stay on top. Normally you would expect the middle age men to have more senese than the younger women and in our thriller you can see that we suberted the dominant ideologies to make the man fall in love with the younger women. A film that does this for example is American Beauty where the older middle aged, married man falls in love with his teenage daughters best friend. Another film example is The Big Sleep where Humphrey Bogart is seduced by the much younger Lauren Bacall which is also a film noir made in the late 40's about lies, deceit and crime. We have chosen to represent our detective in the typical noir style with the detective suit, trench-coat and hat, the suspicious way he walks around checking his steps before he walks anywhere. We have also chosen to have our thriller be in black and white, typical of the noir style.We feel that our thriller would be more believeable

Overall we have tried to get our thriller as similar as possible to the way that typical noir films are done by having similar characteristics such as the detective who falls in love with the beautiful femme fatal but just ends up in a much worse state. 

In some aspects as well our group has also represented disability and mental health because obviously no person with the right state of mind would murder unless for self defence and in our thriller since our detective has no gun on him, clearly it is not self defence. We represented our female lead as a women on the verge of a nervous breakdown and forced to kill to protect herself from the male character who through jealousy and despair has forced her to this act. Violence in the family home was more prevalent in the early part of the 20th century hence we made our film in black and white. In some respects an example that is similar to this is the unfortunate murder by Ruth Ellis in the 50's.

Ruth Ellis was a night club hostess in the 1950's who seemed to have many abussive boyfriends. In the end she ended up murdering her boyfriend David Blakely of whom was also extremily abussive and was responsible for her miscarriage after they got in a fight and he punched her in the stomach. Ellis murdered Blakely after firing many shots at him on the street. She became the last person to be hung in the UK. Although this was a miscarriage of justice because she had been abused she had to pay for his crime.

Conventions of our thriller and other noirs

Editing Evaluation

Soon after we had finished filming we went straight into editing our thriller. Firstly we started looking through all the shots we had taken on the day and deciding if they were worth using or not. Our group would judge this on things like if the camera shook, how good the focus was, continuity, etc. With all of the shots that we decided not to use we made a separate folder (which we called “bin”) instead of deleting them, just in case there might have been something we could use later on. With all the shots which the group thought were good we labeled and the ones we especially liked we would put a star next too or even two if we though they were really that good.  Whilst we were doing this we were thinking about all the different directions our thriller could go and determining within the group what shots we could use where in order to make our thriller opening sequence more effective.

The majority of our thriller only involved our male leading being alone in the room, this is what we decided on anyway while editing.  While he was alone in the room we kept the pace slow but it gradually became quicker which lead up to when female lead would walk into the room. Although firstly when we he was alone in the room we used editing techniques like match on action when he is putting his gun in the draw, looking through papers and calling a number on the old fashioned phone. We did this to build up the suspense and try and suggest to the audience that he was panicking and something was about to happen. When our female lead entered the room we used an eye-line match to show that this was what the detective was looking at and then a shot reverse shot when she points the gun walking towards him. We used this technique in order to show the perspective of both of our characters to our audience. Another thing we did while editing was increase the pace of when Dyanna walks into the room by once again using match on action by quickly changing through a number of shots.

In our thriller we clearly wanted to show that Dyanna was the stronger character out of the two. We did this by using the low angle shots looking her looking up at her giving her more power and status than we used with the Detective when all the shots we high angles looking down on him making him look inferior to her, giving her all the power. We also used close-ups on their faces to try the expressions which could hint to the audience more what was going on.

With adding in the sound our group seemed to really struggle for various reasons. Firstly we had to make sure that the sounds such as the clicking of the typewriter, dialing of the phone and Dyanna’s one line that this could all be heard over the music which we wanted to put on top without sounding out of place and then on top of this we had to make sure that the music matched the action that was happening on screen. The all the speech that we had within our thriller we made sure that they were equally balance to both the left and right speakers, then balanced them by deleting all the ones that weren’t good of which we copied and then panned so we had the same amount of volume coming out from both sides. With our gun shot we first looked through a a lot of different effects , once we found one we cut it and panned it to fit the way we wanted to sound this also involved taking out some of the reverb. We then added it into our thriller making sure that it was in perfect timing with what was happening on film. For the music we struggled to find a suitable soundtrack. We spent time listening to many and some of them would of gone great but the only problem was that many were protected by copyright so therefor we couldn’t use them in our thriller. Therefor we decided to make our own modern version by using elements of what we heard in the others. We didn’t want the music in our thriller playing very loudly so therefor we cut it in some shots so we could hear the typewriter, dialing and some of the dialogue whilst doing this we also made sure that it matched the pace of our thriller. Insignificant moments within our thriller we used certain keys to highlight the importance of it to the audience to be able to build up the tension to the climax, which is a common technique used in many thrillers.

There were certain parts within the editing process which were easier than others. I personally think that the slower paced parts within our thriller were easier to edit because the places where lots of action happened you had to edit it so that nothing looked too jumpy or out of place but I think that it was good that we used Final Cut Pro to do the editing because it is a program where everything is quite straight forward and easy to use. I personally think that if before we had started filming had learned how to use final cut pro a little bit better and looked at all of the effects that can be used we would of done our thriller a little differently because knowing about the effects could of made it easier to do certain things of which could of made a big difference to the quality of our thriller.

I think I enjoyed the editing process much more than the filming because the editing was where you saw everything come together. When your filming you just have a bunch of shots randomly placed everywhere whilst while your editing its almost as if you get to see the thriller come alive because its what you have been working on for so long and you finally get to see the way you have imagined it but in some ways better because before you start you think of it as some huge complicated task that is set before where in reality it actually is quite simple to make it look professional and effective if you put a lot of time and energy into it.

In our group we didn’t seem to have any specific roles we kind of all did whatever interested us whether it was a particular scene, sound effects or sound track. Whenever a certain member of the group felt that a scene should go a different way we would let them show us what we thought, sometimes everyone in the group would like the changes but sometimes no and we would decide if we kept them or not by a group decision. I worked on some of the body of the thriller and also gave my attention to the detail and the continuity of our thriller.

Editing our thriller was extremely different to doing the prelim task, firstly if you compared to the amount of footage we had then and now its significantly less which made it a lot easier to edit. But I thought that editing our thriller was much more enjoyable this time because we could go any way we wanted with it unlike our prelim task.

During this process I didn’t only learn about how to edit but it made you realize how much time and energy can get put into just a few minutes of the film. I really enjoyed doing it but it also made me realize that probably in the future as a career I wouldn’t want to take up editing although it was so much fun do to and learn. I was really surprised about how easy using final cut pro was especially because I sometimes struggle when using programs such as this. I don’t think it was very hard to make our thriller appealing to our target audience because we used all of the elements, which we found through our research, were in