Ending Evaluation

 Our Film

    Our film is a modern horror about a crazy, sadistic and angered young man who preys on random people from the public. The film's cinematography is a cross between standard and comic similar to sin city. The film targets a young people audience specifically those who live in England.

 The Plot 

   The first part of our opening sequence starts with a tunnel called Banksy Tunnel; our bored Ebenezer is looking for something to do which is why he delights in seeing Jennifer approaching his path alone. He starts stroking his chin to show he's planning what he's going to do to her. Then we go into Ebenezer's mind as it goes into a flashback of his childhood. This is when we realise the horrible unprovoked abuse he received during primary school, he was hit in the eye by one of the student's tie consequently his eye goes red and only sees things as if they're are red almost as if his eye has a red filter in front of it. Then we go back to what is currently going on and the following actions/reactions of Jennifer's sighting. Ebenezer greets Jennifer and then tells Jennifer he wants to kill her due his polite and calm approach towards her, Jennifer obviously doesn't take it seriously. Then he tries to describe, explain and justify his plans towards her. Once again Jennifer sees a negative view of this and assumes its Ebenezer's way of flirting with her as a part of his technique to get her number so he starts to be firm and makes his intentions clear and warns to run. Then a chase happens as Jennifer runs, out of panic she runs into a dead end by accident and despite being out in the open she's still trapped. Ebenezer catches up with her and starts to slowly approach her, out of fear Jennifer tries to throw a spray paint can at Ebenezer but misses. This makes Ebenezer smile and starts to enjoy his journey to his cruel pleasure while he does this he starts to take off her tie to use a weapon and prepares for his cruel intentions... the title 'Tie' shows and the video ends.

Comparison to usual horror opening sequences

Our sequence uses the conventions of past horror films...

    Our film has strong contrasts of the cinematography of the very first Dracula released in 1931, this film only has a strong contrast because it’s in black and white but it still was a feature that is very effective in our film. It made the film look more dark and sinister because the dark places looked more mysterious and the lighter parts look more effective because of the difference to the dark parts.

    The background music is one song with no lyrics and mellow; this is very common in films of all genres it ensures that the audience’s attention is persuaded in by setting certain moods in certain scenes but still doesn't take away the attention from the actual film. Although it’s a single song the tempo and instrumentals still change to raise suspense in the film making the audience more intrigued to see what is approaching. This is something that is widely used in action films even to adulthood which is what I earlier studied. Having only one track in the background that evolves throughout the sequence allows the video to have an emotional progress as the sequence's mood change is smoother; the increase of instruments matches the increase of tension in the sequence with a calm approach.

    The ant. Is shown as a consistently crazy person this demoralises him as it is unusual to be so mad at such a young age. For example the joker in dark knight is only classed as a great villain because he is crazy but apart from his make-up he does seem to be human. He shows no remorse but has a strong motivation to be the most troublesome 'some people just like to watch the world burn' is what a character says as he describes the joker in the film.

Our sequence also develops the conventions of past horror films...

     Usually horror films make it obvious that something bad is about to happen because we see an obvious sign that the antagonist is preparing to do something such as sharpen his tool or making some progress towards a horrible action. However we were less blatant with our approach we agreed that it would show more skill if we hit the audience with a shock so they could understand how the victim feels. This shock was provided by the encounter of such insanity with no proper introduction to the audience or Jennifer.

  Horror films tend to be unrealistic this often makes the scenes look quite comical because everything gets exaggerated because of this a lot of horrors can be seen as black comedies. For example 'Chuckie' a lot of teenagers my age found it scary when they were younger but now look back it and laugh through it. So he had to make choice of either having the antagonist so crazy that he was funny or a perfect mix of surrealism and if he did look too crazy how can we make it look less funny and more serious. The strong contrast in our film helped establish a comic cinematography which then made our film look like in-between a comic and real-life. This meant that even if our antagonist looked comical the comical look of the film disguised the comical humour because the audience were excepting to see something that belonged in comic book/film theme. So our film was the best in-between horrific comics and horrific films.

 Horror films use a lot of light and darkness they are vital features of film of the genre, many film makers going out there to control lighting such as hiring more scene lights which can be expensive and hours of hours can be spent on editing to do this. However we solved this problem as the tunnel we chose was well lit with bar lights that were about apart that kept our antagonist and our victim well lit. Also when our victim ran into a dead end it was in the morning and there was enough sun light for everything that happened in the scene to be clear.

Our sequence challenges the genre conventions...

   Most horror films don't use calm music during action a lot tend to have harder, quicker, more drums to make things more dramatic. However we choose not to do this just to be different, after watching the film as the soundtrack played throughout not having any big changes in the track it gave the video rhythm. This creates a sense of fore
boding because the rhythm signifies cycles which make the evilness seem inevitable and the victim powerless to what is their fate; to be a tool to thrill the antagonist by him killing the victim.

  Horror films usually make their antagonist significantly older their victims as the media usually makes aging seem so negative and keeping young the most important thing in a person’s life especially with females. However we challenge this convention of general media as our antagonist is practically the same age as our victim and the being young in this sequence is seen as bad thing. It can be discussed that our victim's lack of experience makes her more of a victim because she is more naive than an older person may be if a random person appeared from a tunnel approaching with evil motives.

 Social Groups represented

    Our film mainly represents teenagers, as both characters in the film are two teenagers. First the antagonist is a black young male who should be travelling on his way to college but is roaming around in quite an empty tunnel. The victim is a white young female going to school in the morning on her blackberry in a nearly deserted tunnel in the early hours of the morning on her blackberry and walking instead of keeping her mind on what she might learn in school. The young black males in the UK are stereotyped as potentially evil, getting up to no good, self entitled and personal/ancestral grudge holding people.  Our ant. Doesn’t show any violent actions but shows violent intentions towards an innocent person, his motive for his evil intentions are the stored up hurt of his abuse-taking junior years. As a payback almost to the world to keep the cycle of unprovoked abuse to continue to circulate. He is self-entitled because he gets angry this takes liberties; Jennifer misunderstands his greeting and tension arises in his voice, he was forgetting that she didn't necessarily have to stop to talk to him.

 What kind of media institution would distribute our film?

     As we don't have a big budget for the production of our film we won't really want to spend a ridiculous amount of money on distributing it either so we would aim to get the support of an independent film company distributor such as Pathé Pictures International. As they are responsible for distributing adulthood which has similar aspects to our film as the target audience are British teenagers similar to our film. Also adulthood has a lot of explicit violence and some gore in it, so would our film as the film progresses so they would have experience with releasing films such as ours. They would know what to do and what not to do and they would advise us on keeping within the boundaries of our target audience area of interest. They have more than 20 films of experience of releasing film just the UK and recently they released a film called 'Hush' which was a horror/thriller film which is similar to our film Film4 reviewed it as 'A potent and menacing little psychological thriller' which means there's more of a chance of a secure fan base as Pathe would of already distributed to an audience for 'Hush' and the same audience would be anticipating for another psychological thriller.

 How did we address/attract our audience?

 Our target audience are British teenagers from ages 15+ upwards. We have attracted this audience obviously and directly as the antagonist is a teenager and the first victim he attacks is another fellow teenager our plans for the plan was to have the antagonist attack more people but predominately teenagers and the exceptions of older people if he's position or his unknown identity has been comprised. This diverse range of age in the victims will raise tension as they watch the difference between a relaxed killer and a desperate/helpless killer as he will not only be killing people for enjoyment but for protection, making his actions unpredictable this consequently raise suspense because they audience will not be able to guess the outcome of his killing spree.    

We wanted to attract both genders of teenagers however our antagonist is a male so there's a fair chance more males would want to watch the film on the other hand females tend to like 'bad boys' and find them more sexually appealing so the gender reach might balance, as different aspects will meet different entertainment criteria. More black teenagers are likely to be interested in our film as our antagonist is a young black male who has charming but extremely twisted attributes about him, unfortunately as there a number of gangs that are predominately black males, as thrillers are generally violent our film will attract more black males affected by gang violence as they may be able to relate to the antagonists' reasons and mentality in certain situations. There are no clear/direct/intentional indications of sexual orientation in our film as the antagonist could be questioned to be homosexual as he does turn down Jennifer's offer to give him her number but this could easily defended that Ebenezer was too focused/blood hungry to be swayed off from his plans of killing her.Additionally it is clear that Jennifer is not homosexual as she offers her number to Ebenezer despite categorising him as pathetic she still offers her number showing that she wants to meet him again as she is attracted to him, then again she does call him pathetic and some part of the audience could perceive this as her being tired of of males and maybe considering females. As Ebenezer is a black teenager the social class of our target audience is the working class because they may have/had similar experiences to Ebenezer of Jennifer especially due to our graffiti tunnel setting. Also Jennifer is wearing a tracksuit sweater, jeans and trainers and is engrossed in her blackberry  on her way to college which is quite a working class approach to going to college her appearance is quite rebellious to some aspect. However Ebenezer is wearing a shirt and tie while he's staying in a tunnel, this dress sense is out of place to not only his setting but to the fact he's just dwelling in this tunnel with no productive/constructive motive. A middle class audience might relate to Ebenezer as he has the typical middle class attributes such self-respect and focus while some may argue middle class people aren't like this but often when they are positively being represented this attributes always lie in middle class characters. This chance of a mixed class target audience may cause teenagers mentalities to change of one another as the audience get a chance to personally understand Ebenezer. We have aimed for the audience to hate and not condone Ebenezer's actions as he preys on the innocent but to be able understand his actions and be in for a good watch that its unpredictable and reveal some unclear mysteries at the end.

 We used Facebook and twitter to advertise our video that we released on YouTube. This was a a smart idea as it made our views grow rapidly. This was a delighting experience as Martin, Paige and I felt happy, proud of ourselves and all the effort was truly worth it. As we have currently have 369 views at the moment I have concluded that we got a good feedback from viewers directly on YouTube and viewers from Facebook. We received a lot of compliments and teenagers were shocked by Ebezener's dialogue which is satisfying as that's what we wanted.
                                                                                 

                                                                                 Here are our Facebook/Twitter responses: 

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

     Looking at our response I find it peculiar how teenagers actually found Ebenezer's dialogue more funny than they found it twisted, this means that we would have to sharpen Ebenezer's character to be more twisted as the film progresses so it doesn't come across as a horror comedy. Our final response did surprise me as people were interested more than I imagined they would be, some wanted it to made into a short/one hour and half film and some wanted it to be an ongoing monthly series that response pleased me the most. This shows people actually could be frequently interested in our film as the idea was different and appealing to the audience. 
What have i learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product? 
 I haven't worked with Macintosh systems for a quite a while before this project it was good to refresh my memory so navigating around the desktop wasn't a problem to me. The thing that I did learn was using Final cut pro, I haven't used the program before and I was happy to find it wasn't too hard to use and interestingly still had more features to learn  such as different plug-ins enabling different features that unfortunately we didn't get the chance to use due to time. Editing was extremely time consuming however I got lost in the enjoyable experience so much that I didn't feel the hours passing by until I was about to leave and I looked at the clock also Martin, Paige and I were perfectionists when editing that's probably why it was so time consuming. At times we had to ask third parties to give feedback/ constrictive criticism as we often would miss mistakes and errors because we were working on it for so long. Filming itself wasn't hard as we were using camcorders but I did learn things about capturing film for example the 180 rule which was vital for the over shoulder shots used in the dialogue scene of our film. I also leant about using surroundings to get more effective angle on shots. I learnt this because there were mistakes when I was filming the flashback scene at the secondary school as there were windows in the shot that were reflecting me holding the camcorder, so I had to use different angles and zooming to my advantage. Also I learnt how final cut pro can allow you to use sounds however you choose with almost limitless abilities. 


Looking back…..

     When looking back at my preliminary task that was with Sonia, things have changed as the project got more complex. Firstly time spent considering that the preliminary task happened in two days of lessons so under 10hours including filming, preparing and editing whereas over 50hours were spent of lesson time on Tie not including the extra after school hours that were spent on the video. So inevitably time managing had to become one of my attributes to ensure that all the time spent on Tie were evident in the quality in the film. The next thing was managing a team; when we was doing our preliminary task we had a few theory lessons before so everyone was happy to do the preliminary as it was more exciting than theory lessons now when you’re working with a team of people with mixed interests and focuses things can get a bit difficult. No names will be mentioned but we had a few lazy ‘slugs’ in our group so as the accidental leader of the group I had to make sure the majority of people were happy as a businessman would tell you happy workers are good workers although I weren't an employer or a businessman I thought the fundamentals still related to a team. So I had to make sure that I didn't get angry with anybody or get rude with anyone, I also had to make sure that everyone played their part and if someone consistently didn't play their part, their part could be handled by someone else so the project wouldn't suffer. Some people were held up in unavoidable situations so filming did get slowed down but then I used any spare time to either involve more ideas in the project or work on my blog. Working with people with different interests and skills was effective to use to achieve a good film for example Paige tended to explore a lot so she knew good settings to set our scenes, Martin loved producing beats/designing so he was making our titles and soundtracks as he was sitting right next to me, so every point of media could sync well together such as the soundtrack of the whole opening. This also helped regarding meeting deadlines as it was easier to reach deadlines through the filming problems because pieces were already finished to fitted together to make the final product instead of dealing with mixed media chronologically. Disregarding the shortcomings in the project I was extremely happy with my group as the majority of us got close with each other and pushed each other to achieve the greater goal. Working with my new team was great and hope I can work with the same people next year especially because I made great friends I was happy to discover I share similar directions as people in my team/media class.