Evaluation

M e d i a E v a l u a t i o n

We got the inspiration for our thriller opening from a number of films including Leon and Memento and our storyline was inspired by mainly by these two thrillers. Leon shares similar narrative aspects to our film in that it deals with the effects of dealing drugs and contains characters of a working class background. Furthermore, Memento’s opening is shown through a series of flashbacks which we agreed would be a very exciting and refreshing way to structure the shots, also it would create an interesting and challenging viewing experience for the audience. Moreover, Memento has shots in its opening that rarely exceed 2 or 3 seconds per shot, we chose to learn from this technique as we felt it added further excitement and was effective in engaging the audience. In addition to the length of the shots Memento also uses a wide variety of different shots which add auxiliary suspense and excitement within the narrative structure. In our Thriller we tried to achieve as many different shots as we could so as to ensure that our opening was appealing and engaging for the audience as we aimed for a gripping opening of our film.
We used Leon to research potential target audiences as we thought it was one of the most influential of the films we researched.AverageMales 112,655 8.6Females 14,959 8.6Aged under 18 2,130 8.8Males under 18 1,681 8.9Females under 18 446 7.9
Aged 18-29 84,562 8.8Males Aged 18-29 74,736 8.8Females Aged 18-29 9,505 8.9Aged 30-44 33,491 8.5Males Aged 30-44 29,576 8.5Females Aged 30-44 3,561 8.4Aged 45+ 7,180 7.9Males Aged 45+ 5,788 8.0Females Aged 45+ 1,324 6.9IMDB staff 26 8.3Top 1000 voters 793 7.6US users 35,671 8.5Non-US users 91,649 8.7
From the table we discovered that the age group which enjoyed this film the most where males under 18 and females aged 18-29. Leon being our focal influence, we decided that our own thriller would attract a similar target audience and so we decided it to be around the area of 15-29 year olds as these are the ages that have enjoyed the film the most. Also on IMDB this film was voted 10 out of 10 by 36.7 voters which was the highest percentage overall, this shows that the film was largely very popular. I found it useful to look at the audience demographic for this film being one of many similarities to our own, especially as our film is very main stream and this information would relate to our film.
The soundtrack used in our film was something that we left until last to decide, originally we wanted to use the song ’Safe From Harm’ by Massive Attack until it was made clear that copyright laws would not allow us to use this song without permission. Our alternative plan was to, ourselves, compose the soundtrack for our thriller, this opened opportunities such as being able to mould the song around the narrative action on screen and being able to create a sound appropriate to our film.'Safe From Harm', the title of our thriller opening, is one that contains many conventional thriller aspects. The most profound element that we felt we had to include was the staircase shot, which we included a few times. This was inspired by the Luc Besson film Leon when Matilda is sitting at the top of the stairs with her legs hanging through the banister railings and, again, when Leon pulls one of the 'Gangsters' over the banister to kill him. As both of these were most definitely key scenes we set out to use this convention more than any other. Furthermore stairs connote danger and suspense, especially when being chased up them, and this is how we brought our own take on the convention. The young boy sees his mother get shot and runs towards the stairs to hide, avoiding a bullet, he then runs up the stairs and is chased shortly by the murderer.
Our costume choice, especially for our male character, was thought about carefully. Whilst wanting to create a conventional thriller character our actor was fairly young so we had to chose a costume that would be believable. We chose to use a 'thug-type' theme to the costume and one that would ultimately hide his identity to connote a mysterious and guilty personality for the character. Eventually we took inspiration from films such as Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Adulthood and chose to use a costume compiled of a green hooded jumper pulled up over the head, a grey and black scarf wrapped round the face under the eyes, dark jeans and scruffy trainers. This helped to connote the working-class background of the youth and the conventional behaviour expected of him.
The killing of the protagonist, Alice's, family in our opening was something that we felt was necessary and we, again, took inspiration from Leon. This occurs towards the beginning of Leon when the group of gangsters break into Matildas family home and kill all of her family, we felt that this reflected the typical shock-educing aspects of thriller films and gave real contrast to the other elements of our film.
Our location, especially at the beach, was one that we put a lot of thought into. Not only did we want an isolated setting, to add suspense and further conventional attributes , but we also wanted one that would look striking on camera, this is when we decided to chose Holkham Beach on the North Norfolk coast. This beach has been used before in films such as 'Shakespeare In Love' and in an All Saints music video which swayed our decision towards using the setting in our opening. This definitely the ideal setting for our 'present' scenes as opposed to the 'flash-back' scenes shot at the house. We chose this coast-line in particular because it has a vast, sweeping beach surrounded by pine forests. We felt this was ideal to reflect the isolated feeling of the girl and to add a sense of misery and loneliness. Further reasons for choosing this beach in particular were that it was fairly accessible and a place that all in our group had visited and enjoyed.
I think that our character representations are very stereotypical, for example, our protagonist Alice is very much the female victim. She shows no signs of strong emotion and she is a victim of peer pressure and bullying. Throughout the opening she is perceived as being weak and shows no kind of personality, all of these are very typical of female roles in films. Furthermore, our male character (the murderer) is a very stereotypical working class youth. He is troubled and has probably committed many offences in the past. He uses bad language and is rude to people he doesn’t know and he wears sports clothing of bad quality. Typically, the male is the villain and the female is the victim this was not a conscious decision but was just the way the narrative structure took form.
In our film we have used conventional thriller characters to show the genre of our film, this helps the audience to identify the thriller genre. The female in our film is quite a typical victim apart from the fact that it is her own fault that her family have been killed. We took inspiration from Leon as the girl played by Natalie Portman also experiences her family being killed so we decided that this would be a good conventional aspect to have in our film. The villain in our film is also quite conventional as you don’t see his face in the film and he wears clothes that make him appear very anonymous . We also have a voiceover at the beginning of our thriller of the man who leads the girl into drugs talking to her; he could be viewed as a conventional character as most “villain” type characters are usually men for example the gangsters in Leon. We also decided to have a young boy in our film; this is also present in Leon when Matilda’s four year old brother gets killed, we chose to use this aspect in our own film, Alice’s younger brother gets killed, as it is quite a shocking aspect.
To open our film we decided to have a voice-over-black because we felt that this was effective in engaging the audience and providing an initial interest in the plot of our film. Also speaking to people who have viewed the film they found that the flashback style of the film intrigued them and that it made them more interested in the film as it instantly grabs your due to its fast pace.
Our film would ideally be distributed into multiplex cinemas such as Odeon and Vue in Norwich as it is a main stream thriller with a big plot and conventional characters. Then it would go onto DVD to be sold or rented in most outlets for audiences who enjoyed the feel at the cinema and to attract further audiences once the film is out of cinemas. Similar to films like 'Leon' and 'Snatch' it would be shown after watershed on Channel 4 if it was ever shown on television.
When I began doing A level Media Studies I knew very little about film making, in the first few months we were introduced to digital cameras and equipment like tripods. Using a digital camera I can record footage and watch it back, zoom in and out on the desired objects. I understand about camera angles and shot types such as high/low angle shot, tilted horizon, medium/long shot, extreme close up, close up, two shot, over the shoulder shot etc. I know about camera movements like zoom, tracking, panning and single-shot-cinema. This has all been very useful and has definitely had a great effect on the quality of our film.
The editing was the most satisfying part of creating the film I discovered, this was mainly because you got to put all the shots together into the correct sequence and you could watch the film being built. It was, however, the most important and crucial procedure because the continuity had to be perfect otherwise it would disrupt the viewing. This meant that we had to cut every shot down to the last mille-second to make sure it was smooth. Regarding the fact that we had flash-back shots in our opening made it even harder to make the narrative structure clear to the audience. We left small spaces in-between the present shots and the flashback shots to allow a small flash of black to divide them like someone blinking.

Our final production: Safe From Harm

Method 2 Audience research

Britney Spears album promotion: Circus

•Circus is the sixth studio album by American pop singer Britney Spears.
•Jive Records with Zomba Label Group and Sony Music Entertainment, released it on November 28, 2008.
•Sold over 505,000 copies in the United States in its first week, Circus debuted on the Billboard 200 at number one, making it Spears's fifth number-one album.
•The album made Britney the only act in Nielsen SoundScan history to have four albums debut with 500,000 or more copies sold.

Promotion
•To promote the album Jive Records set up a hotline where fans could leave a message for Spears, with some of the callers getting a return phone call from Spears.
•Some tracks off the album were previewed via the website of the New York radio station WKTU and Amazon.com.
•MTV aired a 90-minute documentary titled Britney: For the Record November 30, 2008. The show was about her return to the pop music spotlight. Spears's official website released a series of posters to promote Circus.
•A pre-taped holiday greeting from Spears was shown during the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree on December 3, 2008.

Live performances
•Spears's live comeback began on November 6, 2008 at the Dodger Stadium show of Madonna's Sticky & Sweet Tour. Midway through "Human Nature", Spears joined Madonna on stage.
•The week before the release of the album she did more performances in several different countries. On November 27, 2008 Spears performed "Womanizer" live at the Bambi Awards in Offenburg, Germany, where she received an award for "Best Pop International Artist". The following day, Spears again performed the song live on French show Star Academy. In addition, she performed "Womanizer" on The X Factor, in the United Kingdom, on November 29, finishing the European pre-release promotional tour. Her performance on The X Factor was watched by 12.8 million UK citizens, becoming the most viewed episode in the show's history.

Tour
Main article: The Circus: Starring Britney Spears
Shortly after the New York radio station Z100 played her new song, "Womanizer", Spears made a surprise appearance on the show and announced she would be going on a worldwide tour in spring of 2009 to support the album, and that rehearsals would begin in January for a March start.Spears signed a deal with live entertainment company AEG Live to produce the tour. Jamie King will serve as tour director and Simon Ellis will be musical director. Spears announced on Good Morning America that her concert tour would begin in New Orleans on March 3, 2009.

Singles
“Womanizer": On September 15, Jive released a statement announcing the title of her sixth studio album, Circus as well as the first single. The single was released to radio stations on September 26, and the release date for the album is December 2, Spears's 27th birthday. On October 15, the song made a record-breaking jump to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, breaking the record set the week before by T.I.'s "Live Your Life". It also garnered first-week download sales of 286,000, the biggest opening-week tally by a female artist since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking digital downloads in 2003. It marked Spears's first number one single on the Hot 100 since her debut, "...Baby One More Time".
"Circus": On October 31, 2008, it was announced on Spears's official website that "Circus" would be released as the album's second single. The song debuted at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. This was Spears's highest debuting single on the Billboard Hot 100 to date.
"If U Seek Amy": On January 7, 2009, Spears's official website announced that "If U Seek Amy" would be released as the album's third single. After the album's release and before it was released as a single, the song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 86,The Music Video was released on March 12,2009.

Storyboards

Reflections and amendments from our original plan

As expected our original plan took some changes in the process of creation. Most crucially, we had to change protagonist actress at the last minute after finishing all filming at the terraced house location. This was due to the fact that our original actress was not able to film at the second location before our filming deadline, our only option was to find a second actress and start filming again. This ended up being a positive thing as we were much happier with our second filming at the terraced house and the shots produced were more proffessional.

Our second amendment was that we had to change our soundtrack as originally we wanted to use Safe From Harm by Massive Attack, however, we couldn't due to it being copyrighted. Instead, we decided it would be good to compose our own music and therfore mould it around our plot and ambience.

Finally, we decided against making our actress walk into the sea at the end of our opening as on the day of filming it was about -4 degrees. Alternatively, we decided not use the shot at all as it was not key in the plot.

Titles

We wanted our titles to be fairly simple so as to not distract from the other narrative present, however, we did want our titles to be noticed. We used a white font over the black voice-over at the beginning and over a black background after the dialogue has finished. Our titles included our film production company 'Reel Films Production', 'Directed and Produced by', 'Music by' and finally 'Safe From Harm' at the end of the opening.
Our titles are very minimalistic and are comparable to titles such as Alfed Hitchcock's 'Birds' or 'Pyscho' which also had very simple titles.