Media Studies AS Level - Evaluation Amelia King.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The use of mise en scene creates suspense in thrillers, for example; an extreme low angle can be used on a particular character to give the impression of them being more powerful, and this character will usually be the antagonist.

Our group produced a thriller opening using unrestricted narrative, this keeps the audience up to date on everything that's happening and it means that they know more about the characters. At the beginning of our opening sequence we decided to use an enigma code to create more tension with the audience, I think that was good to use because in most thrillers you have scenes that leave you hanging on what's happening and it raises questions. We also used this technique at the end of our sequence as well; we did this so the viewers can wonder what happens to the protagonist.

The other techniques we used to add suspense to the opening was when the protagonist was being chased by the antagonist, we decided to use short, choppy and fast clips of her running past, this was to emphasise the mood and atmosphere of the two characters.

We thought it was a good idea if we kept the antagonists identity a secret until further on in the opening sequence. We did this by filming the characters legs and arms, to keep the audience interested we thought we would use a significant item to connect the two characters, this being a bracelet.

In my opinion the use of sound we had worked well with our scenes, we recorded bits of people's conversations in a noisy environment and then rewound it, this created quite an eery background noise.

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our opening sequence fits in with the standard stereotypes because we chose to have a females as our protagonist and women are generally always seen as the victim in thrillers. However, we didn't want to stick to this stereotype to much as we wanted our opening to be unique, so we decided to have a female playing the antagonist as well.

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
As a group we looked through a website that had a list of small distributors, as our opening sequence is a low budget film we were looking at distributors such as "artificial eye". However, there was a lot of films that we didnt recognise so we carried on looking and saw "focus features". We chose this because they had a range of similar thrillers.

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
We thought that 12A would be a suitable rating for our opening sequence.

5. How did you attract/address your audience?
Our films storyline is complex yet realistic, i think the pace of our film at the beginning was good because it was snappy and it keeps the audience interested.

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
We used; sound recorder, red head lights, DV camera and tripod, Imovie, final cut pro and garage band.

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?
For our preliminary task we broke the 180 degree rule a few times, we made a big effort not to make these kind of mistakes again. Although, while we were paying attention to this, we didn't concentrate on using a variety of camera angles, I think we could have improved on this more.