The Observer Evaluation

Before we actually started planning our thriller, we watched some previous thrillers from the past years to get a feeling of what our thriller should be like. In addition to this, we also were told to go off and watch some thrillers of our own, just the first 5mins of those thrillers. At the start I was a bit skeptical about what a thriller was, I had it in my mind that it was similar to horror but I was told the difference and it’s now clearer in my mind, thrillers are more suspenseful and leave the audience asking questions, horrors are more intended to scare the audience.
One film, which really motivated the planning of my thriller, was a film called “Eagle Eye”; this film inspired me a lot because of the way the director was able to create such tension that would just leave the audience asking so many questions if truth be told, it amazed me. It puzzles me sometimes how directors can think of such things, the director of the film by the way was D.J. Caruso. The main emphasis of my thriller; was to leave the audience asking questions and create a lot of tension; I wanted to try to create, to my ability, an atmosphere as similar to that of “Eagle Eye”. Here’s the IMDB page to the film:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059786/ and here’s the official film website: http://www.eagleeyemovie.com/

The way I decided to incorporate this atmosphere into my thriller is by creating various shots, which didn’t really show everything to the audience, sothat they can be thinking more about what they think it is and what it could be, basically just makes them explore their minds about possibilities. We explored different kinds of shots to see what kind of atmosphere it creates, shots like the character point of view shots which really excludes the audience form the rest of the world, so the audience would be thinking what’s going on around them. Another shot was a surveillance shot, we didn’t know we had actually created a shot like this until it was pointed out by someone else; the shot seems like a camera is watching the person and makes the audience think who it might be, watching the main character. Other shot’s we used were panning shots, and tracking sots, the way we used these shots worked extremely well with what I was hoping to get out of them. When we used these shots we kind of limited what the audience could see, like if it was on a character it would show the front of the character only, or if it was a panning shot it would follow just the front of the character to exclude the space behind they character. One thing which really worked well with one of our shot’s was when the main character ran out through the hall and closed the last door, as that door closed it made a particular shut sound, that went extremely well with the soundtrack as instigation of the sound being cut off. At the end of all of that there we some amazing shots captured and all that was left was which shots were we going to be used. We actually ended up with almost an hour of filming, that left us with a lot of choosing to do and took time as well.

One challenge I had while trying to create this tense atmosphere, was trying to make the right music. I really needed inspiration for this part because I really wasn’t talented in creating music and I had never done it before, it really took a lot for me to do this part. I had a picture of what the sound would be like in my mind, but turning that into something feasible was the hardest part. Finding the right sounds that matched the mood of a certain scene of the thriller, and certain sound effects for the right moment like slow tempo orchestra beat in the background, some diegetic sounds like heart beats helped the mood as well. All of this was tricky to do but with a little time and effort, I really pulled it off. In the end, I ended up creating just the atmosphere I wanted, it didn’t quite meet the professional atmosphere of “Eagle Eye” but it met the standards of my ability and that’s what’s most important to me right now.

My thriller I would say was more representative of the teenage social group; mainly because there's only a use of teenage actors in the clip, and to me I don’t think adults would be too eager to go watch a film where it only included teenagers unless it’s very good. It would also appeal to both sexes because of the characters used and the situations the characters are placed in. Furthermore the situation used is also a representative of society, when there is a distressed situation between a man and women, the women is more likely to be in the distressed position and the man creating the distress because of how men are seen in a higher status than women, and men are judged to be stronger than women as well. Also the film wouldn’t’ be aimed at the higher social economic group of society, simply because of how the actors are dressed in th

e clip, the audience wouldn’t really associate that with high status, and the higher social economic group wouldn’t really be drawn to something not aimed towards them. I can’t really talk on the language because there wasn’t any talking involved.

The type of media institution that would distribute my film would

 be and indie type group or English production studios like Working Title, because the film wouldn’t be so big and wouldn’t need much funding, it would be a low budget film with not a lot of effects (CG). Since it’s bound to be a low budget film, the funds wouldn’t be hard to gather and the distribution is more likely to be within the UK, so advertising is low. Maybe it might be distributed in off sea locations in Europe.

The audience for my media product would be in-between the age of 14-24 (10 yr age gap), both male and female of the white, black and mixed race ethnicity, and with a mid-wage salary in the working class, student’s social background. The way that I would attract this audience is by using a type of language, which appeals to that group, since the group is the typical group of society (working class) and are young, then certain informal language can be used lenient towards slang. Even the dress sense would appeal more to the audience as it’s a casual wear and isn’t very hard to buy, so maybe if the audience were to watch the thriller they may be wearing some of the clothing seen in the thriller. Furthermore the location of the thriller, it’s based near computers and in a college (you can tell by the log-ins on the computer) this automatically directs it to a certain group, which are students, they would suddenly pick up on the fact that there’s a log in and say hey I do that as well.

What really made the thriller great was the technology available to make such perfect work. With the availability of the Mac’s, is what made working on these thrillers easy, editing was so swift and straightforward after we were taught how to use the software which was final cut pro. Over time editing clips couldn’t be any easier, Fin

al Cut Pro really stretched the possibilities of things, which can be done to videos, with the aid of Soundtrack I was able to make the great audio. What also made this thriller practical an ease, was the equipment available as well, the camera’s worked great with the Mac’s and are very easy to use and set up, with a little imagination while using the camera and its stand great things can be made.

Looking back at my preliminary task, I can see that I have truly advanced through the stages. My skills on editing have drastically improved, I have reduced the continuity errors to a minimum or nothing at all, even certain rules that had to be followed like the gap over the head rule, and all other rules were followed. In terms of planning, I think we were more organised than before but I can’t really judge on that because before; we had a shorter time to film in, and for this task I can say our planning skills weren’t of the best; we could have got it finished a lot earlier. The group I was in I can truly say was the perfect group for me, but it’s just the lack of focus that sometimes gets to me and not being able to sacrifice some time to help film, but I can honestly say there wasn’t a better group for me. The main thing we lacked in the group was imagination, we weren’t as creative as we wanted to be with our thriller, and we could have produced something a lot more creative only if we had adventured long enough in our minds just to find the right ideas.

The Observer