Task 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Picture 1. - . The fist title in our thriller is of a clocks second hand slowly ticking, this shows that time is slowly running out and helps to build tension and suspense, this conforms to the conventions of the thriller because it introduces the race against time.

Picture 2. - we then decided to keep the text and the arrangement of our titles small and compact, this reflects the shot types we captured that all close up and claustrophobic, this reinforces the conventions of the thriller, because it upholds the beginning sequence of a film by having opening credits.

picure 3. - Between each title we wanted to show the different stages at which the bomb is being built,therefore not only does this make the viewer intrigued as to work out what is being constructed but it also helps tie each scene together, this subverts traditional media products by cutting between the credits and action.

picture 4. - In mostcases in the opening scenes of a thriller, you are introduced to the main protagonist. Therefore, in our opening sequence we introduce our main character for our audience to identify with in extreme close ups.

Picture 5. - In the scene which we shoot on location there was a scene which we were influenced by The Dark Knight. We thought that ending our thriller this way was a good way to end it because it build tension and sets up an suspense as to what is going to happen next, this reinforces and upholds the verisimilitude of the thriller narrative conventions.

Picture 6. - We made our final title to be big, bold and make it stand out. This is also the case for many other films, the title of the film is usually at the end and has an impact on the viewer in order to help the viewer remember the title and therefore upheld conventions of traditional film sequences.

Task 2. How does your product represent particular social groups?

1). My film is about a suicide bomber, who has mental health problems and who isn’t physically right in the head, he decides to create his own bomb which will lead to his death. Other films that feature terrorists are vantage point and The Baader Meinhof komplex and Arlington road. These films all feature terrorists, Arlington road is about a Widowed when his FBI agent wife is killed in an FBI anti-terrorist operation gone wrong, a college professor becomes increasingly obsessed with the culture and sub-society of these dangerous groups. The Baader Meinhof complex is about aims is to create a more human society but by employing inhuman means they not only spread terror and bloodshed, they also lose their own humanity & Vantage point is about President Ashton (William Hurt) is attending a global war on terror summit in Spain. Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) and Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox) are two of the Secret Service agents assigned to protect him. This is what happens in my film, it is about a suicide bomber of whom have ocd/mental problems, he has an idea to create his own bomb and go through a shopping centre with it placed inside a teddy bear, and the whole film builds up by him making the bomb.
Steotypically, terrorists are known to be Muslims, therefore in our film we decided to concentrate on the Central European concept of a terrorist, it would be obvious to have a Muslim terrorist in our film, therefore to create more tension and suspense we decided to use a different nationality. This links in to the Spanish terrorist organization ETA, as its not stereotypically a nationality for terrorists. This is how we are similar as we haven’t used the typical image of a terrorist.


2). Terrorists are patrayed in newspapers as mostly always Muslims, the first thing I typed in on the internet was what terrorists are? And the first few things that came up were all included in Islamic terrorists. Therefore we strongly felt to be as different as we could about our actor, and strongly believed in him not being Muslim. We also felt that our actor should be dressed like a terrorist; we dressed him in a hat, which is shown to be seen as suspicious, however at the same time something that wouldn’t be recognizable to be a terrorist. We also made him dress very ordinary so that people would think he is a normal person walking through a town.

Task 3. What kind of media instituion might distribute your media product and why?

I would choose lionsgate to distribute our film as we are making a film that is low budget, not featuring stars, the film deals in serious issues, such as terroism, and is a film more about quality rather than high concept. The type of films that Lionsgate releases are like Saw, Harry brown, and day breakers. From this you can tell that they make quality films that are in different genres and dont all feature stars, however with day breakers, it features CGI and special features in it, this is good because our film may also feature these affects. Our film is similar to films that lionsgate produce because there films are low budget, therefore this relates to our film which is also low budget. An example of this is Harry brown, which was a British low budget film made in 2009, although it features one star, Micheal Caine, it dealt with serious issues. We feel that our film also delt with serious issues , in this case terroism amd therefore the fact lionsgate have made low budget British films like Harry Brown, means that they would be a good institution for us to work with.

A film institution like MGM also produces large scale films like James Bond and Valkyrie so this would not be suitable as this is not the type of film we are looking to produce.

Task 4. Who would be the audience for your media product

My target audience is mainly 16-25 male's , i noticed that most people who go to watch thriller movies are usually teenage boys, or people who are in relationships and want to take their girlfriends. Other areas in which relate to people who watch thrillers , may enjoy the music involved in horror/thriller films such as Heavy rock/metal. Other ways in which 16-25 people watch the films is because they have disposable money and are working / lower middle class, who are studying for their qualifications. Also, boys like to watch high concept films which include special affects, therefore this relates to our film which also includes CGI. Secondary audience, may be 25-34 these could be fans of the thriller genres, vantage point and other thriller films.

Task 5. How did you attract/address your audience

Task 5 , How we attract our audience

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Task 6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product

Task 7, looking back at preliminary task

Looking back at my preliminary task, there was very little preperation and planning towards it, however in our thriller, we spent weeks planning and had much longer to do so, it was also a lot more complex and much more into debth with what we were trying to achieve, compared to our preliminary task as we just got a week to prepare. Another way in which the preliminary task was less complex was because we got handed a sheet of instructions with what we had to do. This was different to our thriller because we had to come up with everything from scratch, and start from the begining and even draw our storyboards. However, I did find that individually, we all had different ideas, and we all found it difficult to overcome which ideas to use, therefore a big task for us was to learn how to work together as a group without arguing, therefore to fix this we all sat down and talked about all of our problems.

In the studio we built a really realistic set that looked like a really run down shabby appartment, our aim was to make our actor have OCD, however we didnt want him to come accross as clean, therefore we made sure the mise en scene made it appear really dirty and run down. This targets people of the age of 15-25 as they seem very untidy too. The next problem was building the bomb, all of us came up with lots of ideas to make a bomb seem realistic, and in the end we had to break all the ideas down, the end result turned out really well, a main source in what we used for the bomb was margarine as it looked like explosive putty, however as the day progressed it started to loose shape and go and sticky. One change that did happen that we changed the fact that the bomb was going to be strapped to the main protagonist and on the day we decided to use a teddy bear. During the opening scene of the Dark knight, the joker is introduced by carrying a briefcase and the camera slowly pans upwards to his face. Similarly, this is what we attempted to capture replacing the briefcase with a teddy bear which supposedly had the bomb in, we did this so that it would create tension and suspence towards the audience.

From day one, it was obvious on which kind of actor we were looking for, slightly dodgey looking, european... I thought it went down really well and that the actor fitted our prefrences. The lighting in the planning was not really thought of, so on the day we experimented with the lighting and looked at which looked best, at first we shot lots of close up shots with normal studio lighting, but throughout the day we decided that it looked better if the lights were constantly flickering and swinging.

On the bases of our thriller, we had lots of problems in choosing themes for it. We had to consider what pace we wanted it, what type of writing we wanted to use, colour codes, etc. After much brainstorming we decided that we would edit our thriller to be short, fast clips which are split up by title credits. By having shorter clips, the tension would gradually increase and then be broken in the title clips only again to be built up. As all our shots are close up, it is difficult to tell what exactly is going on , but our sequence shows the bomb is gradually being built throughout the whole thriller. We felt very strongly about the music in our thriller, we thought that this would help build up the suspence in each sequence, our music was made by ben, he based the music around the some of the music from the Dark Knight, we decided to use different pitched sounds during our title credits to break up our thriller and build up the suspense of what is going to happen next.

When choosing our title credits, we decided started off by planning to have our credits in a very unorganised layout but soon found this had the tendency to look messy, amateur and was sometimes hard to read, therefore we had to change the whole layout and start from the begining , & after looking at other examples from other movies, we then changed our titles to be very small and compact and constantly in the same place.

Ben created our soundtrack, & originally we planned to have an ambient sound playing along with the soundtrack, however in the end this did not all match up therefore we stuck with a none diegetic sound. Our soundtrack was based around the soundtrack from the Dark Knight , with high to low pitch.Another element that we had to consider during the period of editing, was the sound into our thriller and the title credits. We decided to use different pitched sounds during our title credits to break up our thriller and build up the tension of what could happen next in the scene.

I found story boarding and thinking about telling a story relatively easy, however during the whole process of doing so, i found that it changed dramatically throughout the whole time, by our end result, our storyboard had changed so much compared to how it was in the first place. I also feel that my development towards film making has improved, i feel this because in my preliminary task i was very unaware of how everything works, however in our thriller i found that i could understand a lot more rather than before.

In our use of camera, i feel our developments and improvements have made our thriller look a lot stronger than before. Most of our shots were close ups , which gave the feeling of OCD as everything was trapped close together, it also gave the feeling of creating much more tension and suspense. Many of our shots types were close ups, apart from a genie shot which was a birds eye view. Also some shots were altered to give the feeling of a vibrating shot. Probably the most important shot we had to capture was the bomber featured walking down a busy high street, for this we had to tilt the camera slightly upright and keep it in direct view of the rain, however we found this a lot more challenging because of the rain as we were not used to shooting in those conditions, never the less we did it and our shot turned out well.

To conclude, i found that our thriller had completely changed since our first plans, and in a much stronger way than it was originally. All the new editions to the thriller made it create much more tension and suspense

to what it originally had.

Account of shoot day

Our group shot in the Studio throughout the morning, till around lunch time when we shot in an external location Guildford. We wanted to create the image of a really run down bedroom. We managed to print of images and maps of things relevant to local bombings and locations. We spent most of the morning touching up the set and putting the pictures up, making the beds etc. As most of the other people followed there storyboard throughout the day, unfortunately our plan changed quite dramatically and so we didn’t follow it up at all. I feel that we were very much prepared for the day, we had all of our props ready and had sorted actors and locations early on. However it would have been better if our idea had some relevance to our storyboard.

Our shot choices varied quite a lot throughout each shot and therefore we ended up with a huge amount of shots at different angles etc, most of which were extreme close ups of the actor making the bomb, For our external shots we followed the subject by the method of tracking. We also found that playing around with the focus made our shots look like a lot of panic and tension, therefore it worked well. Overall I think our shots went well, however we did have a lot of extreme close ups and could have done a few more which weren’t in this genre.

We chose our location in the studio because it wasn’t actually anyone’s room, therefore we could change it to however we wanted it to be, we painted the walls, and had someone build us a set. We could control the lighting and sounds in there too. We then chose Guildford as our other location as we wanted a busy street with people walking through a city centre. This was done to show the tension of the man walking through the streets, without people knowing he was an actual bomber. It created a lot more suspense in the film. However, the down side to this, was that people who know we were filming could have made faces towards the camera and stared at us, therefore could make it not look as good as we wanted it too, luckily know one was like this and it all turned out like we wanted it too.

For our props, we made a bomb constructed out of wires, an old mobile phone taken apart, and marzipan for the explosive. The room consisted of a laptop on the desk, a bed on the floor with a sleeping bag, images on the walls, a teddy bear, desk and a pillow. Clothing was kept looking normal, which gave the audience more chance of believing he was a suicide bomber.

For our casting choices, we wanted a slightly older actor, who would be more realistic in making a bomb … we felt we wanted someone who looked middle Eastern, however we didn’t manage to find anyone, therefore we made do with our original actor and made him wear a hat. At the end of the shoot I felt that it all worked out well and that our actor looked really good.

I did the lighting in the shoot, at first we just had it on a dim shoot, and however we then discovered that if we swung the light from side to side, and had it from light to dark it looked really well. It looked really different and created a lot more suspense rather than how it looked before the flashing lights.

We didn’t record any sound at the time as we plan to cover it with our own soundtrack.

In the shoot I did the lighting and put the props together in the set, I then helped on which shots we should do and in which angles etc. I tried to be as creative as possible. I felt that our group worked well as a team most of the time; however certain members of the group tried to take more responsibility than others and didn’t give other people a chance to try things. However apart from that it went well.

I was relatively happy with the overall result at the end of the day , our footage didn’t meet our storyboard, however our new storyboard fits it very well.

Reasons for changing the idea

Basically, we have had to change our idea again because the critics didnt match up with our plans, we realised that the ideas we had, wouldnt actually work out. Therefore, our idea is now completely different to how it was, and the whole idea has changed. We decided to do our new idea because its more contemporary and in the media therefore we may have a wider audience and be able to turn it into a wider production, there has already been other films like this which have done well in the box office like vantage point.





Our idea is now based on a suicide bomber of whom lives in a shabby apartment, he is trying to create his own bomb by using a various kind of different materials. We are planning on making the bomb as realistic as possible. Throughout the scene we are making shots of him making the bomb. We then choose to film in a busy location, with people in the town. Therefore by doing this it creates suspence as more people are around and unaware of whats going on. We also plan to take things from The Dark Knight, by hiding the bomb inside a teddy bear.