Evaluation Question 4

 We focused on what our target audience would be for our film and we decided the film would aim to attract an audience from the ages of 16 to 30 and we would want to attract people interested in thrilling/horror movies, with claustrophobic scenes or plots such as 'Panic Room'. 

We would preferably want to attract both male and females, however, only females who are interested in thriller films, as our film would not include many other genre conventions. The target audience member I created is interested in films such as 'Kill Bill vol. 2' and '127 Hours' which include the claustrophobic/thrilling atmosphere our film has, plus he is interested in films made by Lionsgate, which is the institution that we would want to produce our film.

My audience member states that he enjoys Lionsgate films, and likes claustrophobic movies. I feel that our movie could appeal to someone like Vince, as he enjoys the type of genre that we used for our film, however he also mention that he watched and enjoyed '127 Hours' with Mia Wallace. We would want our film to appeal to both genders who enjoy thrilling horror movies.

Our Secondary Audience could be people who enjoy films about crime, or detective movies, as our film would feature a detective chasing down the killer. 

We would want to distribute our movie using both digital and traditional media. We would want to advertise our film during the hours of 18:00 and 20:00 as this is when most teenagers and younger people come home from school or work and watch television. We would want to advertise on channels such as Channel 4 and ITV as the audience of these stations is mainly younger people, while also advertising in cinemas screening horror movies or thriller films.

Although we would want to use television to raise awareness of our film, we would want to use the internet to create an interactive marketing campaign to build anticipation for the viewers already interested in the movie.

Evaluation Question 3

Production Company- Lionsgate

Why would your company want to make your film?

Lionsgate have supported and produced independent films as well as mini-major films. I feel that Lionsgate would be interested in our thriller as we would not need a colossal budget, and the filming would be fairly simple. Plus, we would want to use clever advertising campaigns to create awareness of our film, however, we would not want to spend too much money, therefore, the profit generated from the film could be quite high.

Similar Films To Yours?

In the past Lionsgate have produced several titles which focus on a thrilling horror element, films such as 'Saw' and 'The Descent' are examples of these type of films. While in our early pre-production stage of our thriller we decided that we would like to include horror elements within our films, however after some deliberation we feel that perhaps the films could be more successful if we focused entirely on the thrilling element. With this in mind, I researched some films similar to our own, that either focus on the claustrophobic or thrilling elements that ours has.

1. '127 Hours'

'127 Hours' is a film produced by Lionsgate starring James Franco, the film explores the true story of Aron Ralstone's mountain climbing accident, where the majority of the film is either set in the claustrophobic canyon where Aron is trapped, or within Aron's memories, exploring different events that happened in his life. We felt that this film had the claustrophobic effect that we wanted to achieve within our film, while also adding some thrilling elements which we also aimed to achieve.

2.'The Descent'

'The Descent is another film produced by Lionsgate however this film focuses more on the horror elements. The movie stars Natalie Mendoza and Shauna MacDonald, and follows a group of girls who go to explore a cave system, however, while down there they find much more than they expected in the form of flesh eating monsters. While the film is unlike ours in the fact it is a horror movie, the thrilling elements are still present, and the cave system prove to offer a truly immersive claustrophobic effect, which we wanted to replicate in our filming.

3. 'Buried'

'Buried' is a film starring Ryan Reynolds which explores the story of a man captured by insurgents in the Middle East, who bury him alive, with a cell phone, a lighter and a limited supply of oxygen. While the film is extremely similar to ours, we would want to focus more on the motives of the murderer, and why he is doing these things. However, we took various ideas from the film, as we felt that it achieved the feeling of terror and the claustrophobic feel of being buried, something that we wanted to achieve in our own thriller.

How Would Your Film Fit Into The Ethos Of The Company?

Lionsgate's history of producing smaller budget, yet very successful films is consistent, for example, '127 Hours' production budget was $18 million while it earned approximately $60 million. We would want our film to settle in between the smaller yet successful films, such as the 'SAW' franchise, which originally cost $1.8 million to produce, yet made around $800 million worldwide. However, we did not think our film would be as popular as 'SAW' and with the upcoming 'Hunger Games' movie being released, we felt that our film would be a smaller side project for Liongate, who could use the 'Tent Pole' strategy to generate the budget for our film, after arguably one of the most popular films being released.

http://www.lionsgate.com/ Lionsgate Website Link

How Would You Place Your Product?

While we would not have a huge budget for our marketing campaign, we feel that using social media such as 'Facebook' or 'Twitter' could prove to be extremely useful in creating an interactive campaign to build anticipation for our movie. Taking ideas from 'The Dark Kight Rises' and it's interactive campaign that rewarded viewers for taking part, with small content from the films. However we would need to build from scratch as the 'Dark Knight Rises' already had a large following from the giant franchise.

Do They (Lionsgate) Specialize In Your Type Of Film?

Lionsgate have produced and distributed a diverse selection of genres, however, we would use their expertise with thrillers such as 'Buried' and '127 Hours' to distribute our film as they have experience with making films successful. The films have used the similar claustrophobic element within many of their films before, therefore, we would need to draw from their experience, and use it to our advantage when producing our film.







Evaluation Question 2

While producing our thriller sequence, we wanted to focus on one particular social group by using just one character in our opening clip. We decided that we wanted to use a girl as we could adhere to a particular stereotype; that females are more commonly victimized as they are considered weaker and more venerable than men. We decided that we could use such a stereotype to our advantage using our choice of costume. By dressing our protagonist in a muddied wedding dress, we emphasized her innocence and reinforced the connotations associated with women to portray our killer as a coward who victimizes individuals weaker than himself.


As our protagonist wakes up we see that she has painted nails, and curled hair. This adheres to a common stereotype concerning females, that they take care in how they look. We felt that this effectively contrasted the bruises and dirty white dress, which indicates a struggle or a fight, which subverts the stereotype that women are more easily preyed upon, while the white dress contrasts the dirt and stains as they represent loss of innocence, which subverts a stereotype that women are more innocent and are subjected to far less. As our protagonist looks around the coffin, we used her facial expression and the shot duration to demonstrate confusion and uncertainty, which subverts the typical stereotype of younger people being bright and quick thinkers, as she has trouble defining where she is.

The use of diegetic sound was also helpful in representing our chosen social group, we used monologues such as 'Please help me!' 'Please let me out!' to portray our protagonist as venerable and helpless, which adheres to the stereotype that women are venerable. We also used the diegetic sounds of the atmosphere to show that our protagonist is taking in her surroundings, which we felt subverted the stereotypical victim of a killer, as a conception is that the victim would panic instantly and use no logic. However, we wanted to quickly subvert the stereotype by using the actors body positioning. As she sat up and started to hit the coffin we felt that we subverted the common stereotype of women being weaker and unable to rely on strength, while the energetic, frustrated side of younger people was adhered to with these actions. As the scene's pace slows, the protagonist calms herself and accepts her fate, which we thought showed bravery, as she was not afraid of her death, that she was accepting it. Which subverts the common stereotype of women being cowardly and frightened. We also used our editing techniques to subvert and adhere to various stereotypes within the media industry. For example, we used slow shot transitions to show that our protagonist was thinking, which we felt subverted the stereotype that women are always frightened and panicking in life threatening situations, while we began to speed up the shot speed as we felt that the pace reflected her emotions, which adhered to the stereotype that after becoming frightened, the victim will resort to screaming and aggression, which we portrayed through use of a close up of the victim's hands hitting the coffin. Overall, I feel that within our thriller we both subverted and adhered particular stereotypes within society, especially focusing on gender and age differences.

Evaluation Question 1

<Our Thriller              127 Hours>




Our media product used inspiration from the title sequence of 127 Hours as we felt that the central, white title against a black background was striking and caught the attention of our audience. However, we challenged the title sequence from 127 Hours as we used a smaller, sharper font, which we felt looked more dangerous, and gave the impression of a blade, which resembled the serial killer in our film.

<Our Thriller           Kill Bill V2>







Our media product both challenged and used elements from an existing media product: Kill Bill Vol. 2. As our protagonist wakes from her sleep, we see that she is groggy from her confused and dazed facial expression. While in Kill Bill 2 the protagonist is also dazed, as we see from the facial expressions, yet instead of panicking, like our protagonist, we see the protagonist use logic to escape from the coffin, from the concentrated expressions on her face.

<Our Thriller         Kill Bill V2>






We took inspiration from Kill Bill V2 for our character positioning. We felt that having two hands up against the roof of the coffin agreed with an existing media product, and that it showed the audience desperation, and a pleading nature to escape the coffin.While her lying on her back makes the protagonist look helpless and submissive. Both our product and Kill Bill 2 used a light source within the coffin, however we challenged Kill Bill, as we had our light as an industrial use portable light, we felt that this would make the audience wonder why the serial killer would want the victim to see where they were.

<Our Thriller      Lovely Bones>





Our media product also used inspiration from The Lovely Bones in regards to the choice of character. We both used a young teenage girl, as we feel like we can attract a target audience who will empathize with the younger generation, be it an older viewer or a younger viewer of around the same age. Both characters die in the films they are protagonists in, however we challenge The Lovely Bones as we do not follow the story of our opening sequence protagonist.

<Our Thriller              127 Hours>





Our thriller challenges the conventions of normal thrillers such as 127 Hours, as we do not include props within our thriller as we felt that props derived from the complete isolation and helplessness that our character was subjected to. While the protagonist in 127 Hours has been given several props that eventually help him to escape, while our character does not manage to get out of the coffin.



<Our Thriller                     Se7en>





Our thriller challenges the various conventions of a film about a serial killer, by keeping the murderer secret from the audience, we feel that this will inspire them to become enthralled within the chase to find out who the killer is, and then lead to a more satisfying ending when it is revealed. Films such as Se7en however, do not follow this contradiction of convention, and show us the killer and his processes early on in the film.

Thriller Sequence Edit

After reviewing our footage from our thriller shoot, we separated the shots that we wanted, from the shots that had less important content, or mistakes within it. We dragged down the rushes we wanted onto the timeline, in a chronological order, to avoid confusion, while saving our work using 'command S'. After previously having a few lessons using Adobe Premiere Pro I was already fairly familiar with the software, and knew the basic techniques required to use the program. We created a bin for the collection of rushes that we wanted to use, and named the folder 'Thriller rushes'. We watched our clips through and made a brief outline of which clips we thought would fit within a certain part of the scene. We firstly organized the rushes in order of shot style. For example, we started by organizing all of the 'mid shots' into the bin of shots that we could use.

While we may have had the correct shots, many of the sound clips accompanying them had us shouting. We had to uncouple the sound clips, then delete them. We used the razor tool to cut out the parts of clips that we could not use.
The order of our clips was vitally important in creating a coherent opening sequence, we felt that dragging our clips onto different levels in the timeline helped order our clips, so we would not mix up the clips, and so we could zoom in using the + and - buttons to focus on just one of these clips, when we needed to fine-tune and cut a specific part of it.
We had problems creating a sequence that was long enough, overall, after editing all of our footage our clip reached around 1:40, we needed to find a way to make our sequence longer. We decided to make our titles appear against a black background which gave us the 20 seconds that we needed, however, our titles had to carry on within the beginning of our scene, we moved the titles to the far corners of our sequence, so nothing was derived from the original clip.

Background of our killer and our vicitm

After deciding that our protagonist would be the victim of a cereal killer, we felt that we should explore our character's background and lifestyle, hoping to gain some extra knowledge which could help us when it comes to filming. We decided that our protagonist should be a teenage girl, as we feel that a younger audience could relate and empathize more easily if she was young. We feel that she would be fairly popular within her school and social group, therefore, after being kidnapped many others are affected by her disappearance and a search would be enacted.
However, for our killer, we would want his character's background to be mysterious so our audience would be intrigued to find out the killer's alibi and his motives. We would want the audience to slowly uncover his troubled background and almost begin to sympathize with the killer, which would provoke conflicting thoughts and emotions within the audience.

Storyboard