Evie's Evaluation

Our thriller opening does not challenge many conventions – the only characters that are shown are middle class, able bodied, white, cisgender and heterosexual. The antagonist in our opening kept their face hidden and wore dark clothing.

The decision to adhere to so many common movie conventions was made based on our audience research, where it was evident that most of our target audience would prefer to watch something familiar, that they didn’t have to think about, rather than something which challenges what mainstream media considers ‘normal’.

One common convention that our thriller opening does challenge, however, is the idea of a ‘Damsel in Distress’ – we tried lead the audience to think that the female lead, Emma, would be the one getting attacked and kidnapped, before going against the stereotype and having the male lead, Josh, become the victim instead.

Based on the idea that people will watch any film that they can see themselves being represented in, our target audience is males and females who are aged 16 – 20 years old, able bodied, white, middle class, and in education.

When devising our initial idea, we took into account the results of a survey that we had designed online and distributed to our target audience. From these results, we found that the two sub genres that appealed most to our audience were Action and Crime, so we incorporated these ideas into our final product by creating a fast cutting rate to increase tension, and showed the character Josh being attacked. Over half of the people who took our survey said that the thing that made them most uncomfortable was “the idea of being watched or followed”, and this was something that we incorporated into our thriller, by combining dialogue with shots where you could see a creepy figure hiding in the background to show that Emma was being watched and followed, thus appealing to our audience further.

Our goal was to appeal to Males and Females, and with our survey results being quite evenly split on which of those two genders they’d rather see, we chose to show both in our opening .

We used a variety of different technologies when creating our thriller opening such as different editing software (Sony Vegas Pro, iMovie), however the piece of technology that I became most familiar with through creating our final product was the filming equipment – a Canon LEGRIA HF R506. I felt that this camera was easy to film with, due to its simple design and small structure. It was easy to navigate from filming to viewing previous footage, which was useful whilst on location – we could see quickly whether or not we needed to re-film certain shots. The camera itself was small and the viewfinder could be moved around on its axis, meaning that it was easy to get a range of different shots, even those which would be had to get with a larger camera. The quality of the footage was good, even when it was dark, which was especially useful as our thriller was shot in the evening.

Overall, the Canon worked well, however one downside was that the quality of sound that it picked up along with the footage wasn’t very good – we had to record sound separately and combine sound with footage during post production. This slowed down the process of making our thriller slightly as we had to go out to our location again in order to record these separate sounds.

Another type of technology that I used was the editing program iMovie. Although it is not a professional software, and in many cases is very limited, it worked for what we needed. I used iMovie for editing together some sound clips we had in order to create the voicemail that our character Josh leaves for Emma. The software was easy to use and allowed me to create a good end product.