Task 5. How did you attract/adress your audience?

TRANSCRIPT:

How did you attract/address your audience?

We have taken notes from other thrillers to include several conventions in our opening sequence. During the first few shots of our thriller a conventional close-up over the head shot is shown to suggest she is daydreaming or thinking which attracts the audience as she is looking directly in to the camera and engaging them in her thought process.  The titles we used are also seen to be conventional, as they are expected to be there in all movies not just the thriller genre. Another convention we used was to build suspense using sound, which is seen in nearly every thriller opening (look at films such as Inception and tv shows like American Horror Story).

Narrator-Plot/Enigma

Similar to Final Destination, a thriller based upon a girl who is able to foresee when people are going to die. Considering that the plotline and narrative are easy to follow, the same fan base that would find these types of supernatural movies exciting would hopefully find ours attractive too.

Shot choice & selection

We used a series of shots which would build suspense such as the shaky middle shot of fight, the tight close up panning shot of the girl dying on the road. Also, we used hand held shots to make it more disturbing and to create verisimilitude. Moreover, the Kuleshov Effect was used during the shooting, our plot comprised scenes which follow in a certain order, the implication was that viewers bring their own emotional reactions and connote the plot in the way they want. 

Use of sound

We cut the sound according to the credits. We added a second layer of sound to create a cut up and abstract sound track with an underlying and constant ghostly sounds. Also,we used purely non-diegetic sounds as we wanted to create a dream like and surreal sense for the audience. The sound reaches its climactic point right at the end of the opening, when the clock speeds up and arrows move furiously, the climax of the music stops as the screen blacks out, then the titles are shown in synchronization with the distorted sound again. 

Unique Selling Point

Our unique selling point in this thriller is definitely the storyline, as it is suspenseful, original and has a strong marketable theme “Mystical gift”.

What’s being represented?

Unexpected events which happen to everyone in this life, personal problems and their mystic dawn are shown in our thriller This girl seems to be ordinary however inside everyone has some difficulties which are not conceivable for society and she’s an example for this.

Task 4. Who would be the audince for "Charlotte"?

The target audience of a media product is the group of people that the programme-makers are trying to persuade to watch it.

Our thriller "Charlotte" is targeted on the audience of young people aged 16-25. This is the group of people with a common interest in cinematography.

Here are representatives of this social group, they form our potential audience.

1. The girl name is Amalie Denver. She is 24 years old. One aspect on which she's keen on is cinematography, especially thriller and drama genre movies.

2. The girl name is Maria. She is 16 years old. She's a media student and beleives that thriller is the most interesting and popular genre in cinematography.

3. The girl name is Ksenia. She is 17 years old. She is very polymathic and despite the fact that science is her second name, she's keen on films and prefers thrillers like "American horror story" to a chemistry test.

Task 3. What kind of media institution might distribute "Charlotte" and why?

Task3 from Dasha Zhukova

Task 2. How does "Charlotte" repsent particular social group?

Task 1. In what ways does "Charlotte" use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Convention: A widely used and accepted device or technique, as in drama, literature, or painting. 
 
  

Convention is one of the most important thing in creation and development of a film. Easier it can be named as the audience’s expectation. This connection is usually commonly agreed between producers of a media product and the viewer. Our thriller also involves certain characteristics of common features used in thriller genre. As an example we took an opening sequence of a tv-serial “American horror story”, this product is made in drama and thriller genre.  They used distorted sound which applies to images put in certain order. This effect was made by a Russian film-maker Kuleshov (an article about the Kuleshov’s effect was published previously in my blog). This effect they used to create a feeling of unexpectation, danger and fright.

The font has its own weight, we decided to put titles on a plain black background, so the white colour of font exude and moreover we add the effect of  “increase-decrease” for the font. So, titles in our opening sequence appear, move fast then they increase in their size and sudden decrease. All these if followed by distorted sound which we cut. All together these pieces of editing sum up and we receive many scenes which tie up together with main images and carry the main idea to the audience. This is the unique selling point of “Charlotte”. The audience by watching 3 minutes of this opening sequence will made their own decision and review.

Convention is made to ensure that audience gets the main idea, realises what type of genre the film is and makes certain that the movie will have success.  By convention producer makes sure that  the unique selling point is chosen wisely and correctly. In addition to the disordered sound and titles, we added the effect of cutting scenes, so the images are cut and tied together, the audience feels the effect of interruption into the plot.

 

The first day of editing

Today is the edit day so we had an opportunity to look at our footages and choose appropriate shots. We used Cut Pro program and made a folder where we put all sequences which we will use in future for our thriller opening sequence. Right now we have an objective to finish our editing in 2 weeks and while we’ ll do it, we need to produce the soundtrack for it.

Shooting day

Our shooting day was on the 24th January, however on Monday, the 20th January, we decided with Megan and Bella to shoot one scene because we were absolutely sure that we won’t have enough time on Friday. So, we went to the Cranleigh Leisure Centre and film one of the scene from our thriller, for this scene we used Go-Pro camera and film under water the scene of drowning. So now the process started. 

On Thursday we were a little bit in a rush because on Friday we needed to go to the cemetery and film there one of the next scene, the problem was in the lack of actors and we did our best to find them and ask their teachers for the permissions to miss lessons. 

The next morning I woke up in the morning thinking about all the props which we needed to get from Hurtwood theatre although I felt a little bit nervous I was ready for this hard-working day.

At 8:30 am we already were in the top-studio room and ready to go to the cemetery but suddenly the problem of getting there occurred, we did not know that there will be anyone to drive us there, in 10 min we dealt with this problem by asking Adam to go with us and he agreed. So, we went to the cemetery, the first place on the shooting day schedule.

The cemetery was located near our school so it took about 7min to get there. A local small church has on its area a small but with very old graves cemetery so this was out location for the second scene. The idea was to film people who came to the grave of their relative, they had to have flowers and put them next to the grave, the scene had to carry the emotional weight of loss, we had to shoot it in the way to show the audience feelings of relatives who sorrow. The main purpose was to shoot as many as possible good shots which can carry the main idea. So, we took about 20 different video sequences starting with a long and wide shot and finishing with many close-upshots of eyes, arm holds and faces in common. Also, we took several sequences of the cemetery in common, we used (перемещение камеры слева направо) to show the audience thу location go this ceremony. 

After this, the next location of our shooting was the studio in Hurtwood. We films in different places inside and outside, mainly inside however twice we needed the sheet location so we did the shooting in the back yard.

On the cemetery I was filming and Bella was directing and telling actors what to do, meanwhile Megan was responsible for props and she choose the location of filming, where it was more comfortable to put the camera. Also, Paul, who ruled the whole process helped us, he was not involved in shooting but he advised us how to film and recommended to shoot more sequences just in case.

When we arrived to the studio we changed with Bella and now she was filming and Megan and I were responsible for make-up, props, actors and locations of shooting.

The most tragic problem which we thought had been solved was in the lack of crew, we need more people to act in out triller. So, for the scene inn morgue I asked one of the fellow next to our school to get involved in our shooting and he agreed. The next problem occurred when we realized that the possibility to break the bottle equals to 0 if we will just throw it on the floor, so we spent a lot of time trying to do something with it, to break it and finally we broke it with a brick so the idea of a fall of the bottle with poison turned to be impossible and we rewrote it and shoot as the bottle was already broken when the police finds the dead person.

The most successful part of out shooting I found the cemetery scene. Actors were great and the location and props were just brilliant. Also, we took many legible and needed shots for our thriller so I went from there full of proud of our work.

Personally, I think that we could do more shots in the studio and work with them more properly, the scene on the street with a dead body was filmed in a big rush and I think that if we’ll be not pleased with how it’s done we will redo it one more time.

I enjoyed the most the scene in morgue, the lightning and the way of shooting we uses mainly close-up shots was amazing, I loved it and I was pretty happy the way we did it, we film several videos of different types of people whose faces a doctors was covering with a white sheet.

However, the idea of filming the fall of the bottle was spoiled, we managed to film the close-up shot of the arm moving in dying movements and I’m looking forward to see it during the editing process.

Finally, I can say that our team worked great during the whole week, we managed to do this work in a short period of time and I think that without helping each other, without our communications and  discussions during the lessons we won’t be so successful as we are now. Moreover, Paul’s job during this long shooting day was to help us to improve our skills in using the camera, setting up lightning, choosing better locations for our scenes and increase our perseverance during the shooting, so I think that during this day I learned many things which will be useful in my next shooting works.