Evaluation Question 4 - Who would be the audience for your media product?

When we were planning our sequence, we thought about who wanted to appeal to. There are several audience groups that we wanted to target. The core group was female, young adults; a typical member of this audience would probably be something like this:

As well as this, our film would have several other, more broad audiences. The three audiences that I think would like our film the most are:

1. People who enjoy non-mainstream films
2. Students older than the age of 15
3. Fans of the thriller genre, but not of gore

Evaluation Question 3 - What kind of media institution might distribute your product and why?

Our production companies were Reverse Pictures and Papercut Productions.

Reverse Pictures makes artistic, stylised, independent, British films. The name comes from the idea of reversing roles and conventions.

Papercut Productions specialises in British independent, crime and psychological thrillers. The name has connotations of injury.

With these two production companies, we would aim to reach a market of people who are grown up and enjoy a thrill but do not like seeing blood or gore (which is why we deliberately didn’t use any broken glass, fake blood, etc.) We would also want to reach a British market because of the themes that may not be popular in internationally.

Ideally, we would want another company to distribute this film for us. I believe that a British-based company that has distributed artistic films would be ideal.

I think a company such as Icon Film Distribution or Momentum Pictures could distribute our film to cinemas. This is because they have both distributed films similar to our own (not mainstream, artistic, independent, thrilling, etc.), e.g. Momentum has distributed Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Lost In Translation; Icon have distributed The Butterfly Effect and Paranormal Activity.

Because our film isn’t mainstream, it would probably only be shown at an independent, British cinema such as The Phoenix in London which describes itself as having “a renowned film programme of new releases, independent, foreign-language and specialist films”.

Alternatively, we could release our film online. Due to recent technological advances such as faster broadband speeds and more internet websites, it’s possible to distribute a film on a whole array of sites for very little money or absolutely free. The best site for this in my opinion has to be YouTube. It has an incredibly large reach and has users of all preferences in film genre and style. The evidence for this:

• One video on YouTube has more than 172 million views.
• YouTube.com reaches about a quarter of all internet users.
• Recently, YouTube added a section for filmmakers to upload their films.(See below)
• When I uploaded a video to YouTube and didn’t share it, etc. it received over 21,000 views.

Evaluation Question 2 - How does your media product represent particular groups?

Our opening sequence goes against several genre conventions; one of which is that in most modern thrillers, with a killer, they are almost always male:

Our sequence however is closer to an older style from the ‘40s or ‘50s - femme fatale; films like Sunset Blvd., Double Indemnity and Vertigo where the killer is female and the victim is male.

Despite this, we followed some gender stereotypes with Dawn:

These are stereotypes because female characters are usually presented as:

• Liking the colour pink.
• Liking flowers.
• Being passive.
• Being distressed damsels.

Evaluation Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our fiction – film opening sequence is meant to come the beginning of a psychological thriller. Because of this, we had to follow various conventions, such as setting up enigma for the viewer. This is why our sequence follows Barthes’ theory of the five codes; the action, semantic, enigma, referential and symbolic codes. For example:

To make the plot of our film different, we decided to experiment with Todorov’s narrative theory; how films start in equilibrium before a disruption occurs. Our sequence goes against this; a man has been killed and Dawn is trying to deal with the corpse.

However, the difference between our film and others is that most thrillers (especially horror and action) begin with somebody (usually female) being killed, such as in the film Scream (1996, Craven)

Additionally, because we wanted our audience to know that it was a thriller, we had to include some genre conventions but to keep our film experimental; we deliberately subverted some of them as well:

• Conventions we followed - disturbing music, somebody has been killed and the killer doesn't want to get caught.
• Conventions we subverted - set at daytime, the killer is female and the killer is not alone

As the brief was for an opening sequence, we also had to follow the conventions of an opening sequence. I believe that we achieved the four main conventions that I previously wrote about:

1. Both characters are introduced, Dawn the protagonist and the dead body she has to deal with.
2. From the shots of the curtain, it shows the reader that the sequence is set at dawn (which we further anchored with our film’s title.)
3. Our sequence has titles; each of us has a title for a role we helped out with. Tom Rivlin is the name of my friend who was our test actor on the second shoot.
4. Our soundtrack suits the content of the film, it is slow and calm but is unsettling in the context of our film about a dead body.

When thinking about the project, our group decided that we wanted our opening sequence to have an art-house, calm and slightly unnerving style: