Media Evaluation

Yasmin Thompson

Introduction • In my coursework film introduction, my group and I created a film opening called the ‘The

Perfect Picnic’. The genre for our film was horror aimed at 18-25 year olds. The film is a spin off sequel to a well-known Cabin in the Woods horror film, and essentially it is a mad man ex-boyfriend who stalks and kidnaps the main character, Rachel’s new boyfriend. For our coursework task we had to film the opening 2 minutes of the film and we had spent several months planning what we will include. Overall I think that our group did well with our filming as we had to overcome filming issues but in the end we were very happy with the final outcome of our opening two minutes because we fulfilled our aims.

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

• I think that our film opening does use , support and challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

• Firstly our film is a horror movie and we have used a twist of two genres as it uses romance and horror, therefore the storyline challenges forms and conventions of real media products. This is because ‘The Perfect Picnic’ is a horror film but the storyline is of a couple having a romantic picnic which suggests quite the opposite. The title also challenges forms and conventions of real media products because most horror films have quite obvious titles related to horror. An example of this would be the movie Scream, as it is very obvious to the audience that the film is going to be related to horror. Whereas our film is called ‘The Perfect Picnic’ which is quite paradoxical because it is not perfect at all, which indicated to the audience that there is a twist in the movie and foreshadows the future.

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

• Secondly the setting we chose for our film uses forms and conventions of real media products because it is set in a field surrounded by wooded area, this builds on tension as a wooded area is a typical location in horror films as they are dark and eerie.

• How does your media product represent particular social groups?

• An age representation is used in our media product because the actors are 16 /17 and are at that stage of life where they are growing up into adults.

• The representation of this group (teenagers) is positive because they are on a date and they are having a picnic, which suggests that they are quite old fashioned or romantic. This may confuse the audience because you don’t generally see teenagers portrayed this way as they are known to be the opposite in that they are rebellious and have youthful characteristics, displaying a sense of immaturity. As the new generation has developed you don’t normally see people having traditional dating values, and then the male character goes to the toilet leaving the female sat in the fields. As he goes to the toilet she goes on her phone, which then shows a revert from the traditional values the characters were showing and then portrays the female character as a typical teenager, on her phone.

• What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

• I think that a filming production which produces other horror movies may be interested in my media product because as the film is a sequel to another box office hit, this will then help the movie to gain more credits and viewings because people want to watch the next film in the sequel which makes it easier to sell to cinema companies and DVD producers as they will have evidence of sales from a similar film and with it being a spin off this creates great advertisement. I think the film should mainly be distributed in the UK and USA as it is a quite a mainstream film and has features of stereotypical horror movies so people will be more enthused to buy it.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

• The BBFC would rate our film as 18 which means it is only suited to adults. The reason why it has a 18 rating is because it includes ‘very strong violence’ and scenes of ‘strong horror’.

How did you attract/address your audience?

• We attracted our target audience by using actors in the same age range as our target audience (18-25) , and by using people with a similar social class and characteristics to the target audience as it allows them to relate to the situation and characters, and really makes them feel like they are apart of the movie.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

• I found the process of completing my preliminary task very useful in teaching me some key camera techniques. For example I took a shot reverse shot to illustrate to conversation between two individuals. When doing this we broke the 180 degree angle rule, which caused confusion for the audience when viewing it therefore we had to film this again making sure that we stayed on the same line. I also leant how to do match on action , when doing this I showed the match on action skill very well as we were able to capture the actor walking through the door and holding the door knob at a good angle so that it made sense to the audience and so it made the video look naturalistic, after we had filmed this we edited the parts and cut certain parts of the scene so it looks like a constant action and matches the first action shot which made it flow really well into the next scene without making it look confusing. The preliminary task helped me to enable these skills in my opening 2 minutes effectively.

• During the editing stages, I learnt how to use Serif movie plus X6 , which is an editing software which we used to edit our opening two minutes. From this I learnt how to cut certain shots and how to speed up or slow down shots, which enabled me to edit the video to make it better. I also leant how to export music from YouTube onto the video, which made our video much more effective and gave it more tension as we added scary horror music to give it a more horror effect, as that was our chosen genre.

This is a shot from our preliminary task

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

• From looking back on my preliminary task, I feel like I have learnt a lot because from the preliminary task I learnt that you need to be organised with the filming to make sure it goes right because we couldn’t proceed through with our original idea, to which we were following my character through the school from a point of view shot, as we really admired how this worked but we struggled to incorporate match on action, and it didn’t allow us to play with any of the camera angles or edits. In addition we also didn’t get the transition right when I was walking into the room and the shot reverse shot didn’t work as well as we had to try and make it look like the character that was following me through the room without me noticing that he was there. It didn’t work as it was clearly obvious that I could tell that someone was in the room and had been following me so it didn’t look realistic therefore that idea didn’t work and we had to use a more simple idea to get the video to work making it look naturalistic.

• This helped me in the opening two minutes filming because we made sure that we were more prepared and made sure that our plan was perfect before we went out and filmed. Our story board helped the plan because we knew exactly what shots we needed to do making the duration of the filming much quicker and made it ran much smoother.

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Storyboard Pictures

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