Question 7: looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Question 5: how did you attract/address your audience?

Question 2: how does your media product represent particular social groups

Final Product - Pariah

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

Question 6: what have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Question 4: who would be the audience for your media product?

Our film utilises standard filming techniques, however it also draws on the 'found footage' idea, made popular by the Blair Witch Project and still used by thriller and horror films to this day, such as Cloverfield and Chronicle. 

Using the Chronicle's Demographic Breakdowns page on IMDB, I discovered that Chronicle was viewed mostly by people aged 18 to 29 - 81297 people. A significantly larger portion of these people were male: 68768, to 12529 females. Taking this into account, I think that our film should be aimed at (but not limited to) males aged 18 to 29, given that this was the age bracket in which most of Chronicle's viewers sat as our film draws parallels to Chronicle in more than that it is a thriller that incorporates a found footage element; it is centred around a character who is something of a social outcast.

Despite 18-29 being the most popular age demographic, the most user reports for Chronicle on IMDB came from males under 18, meaning that males under 18 were the group that most rated the film on the IMDB website. This indicates a significant interest in the found footage genre with this age group, and so if it were to be released then inevitably it would be viewed by males under 18. However, we have not aimed it at this age demographic because our film is more plot driven than other found footage films, with more emphasis on character development and character nuances than traditional 'jump scares' and other techniques synonymous with films that incorporate found footage. 

An example of a character in Cloverfield directly addressing the person holding the camera, in found footage style.                           

An example of the same thing in Chronicle.

Although, given these statistics, it is inevitable that our film would be viewed by under 18s eventually, and so we would not be totally excluding some archetypical features found in other found footage films, such as the use of long, single handheld shots to help build tension.

The 'user ratings report' for Chronicle on IMDB.com

Question 3: what kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Filming

Last weekend and this week, we completed our filming. We begun on Sunday the 23rd of March, where we went to our location and filmed everything but the titles. The weekend prior to this, I had gone down to the place where we initially wanted to film - the old Dairy Crest milk factory - but it was inaccessible due to the fact that new fences had been constructed. So, we elected to film at the Ariel Centre part of the local Kevicc School. We then filmed the titles on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 26th in the basement of the school 'manor'. We managed to get everything done, but I feel like we spent too long on very simple things - some basic shots took almost an hour to get right.

Script

Here's the finished version of the script:

Sean Connor Joel Screenplay from MissMoore866

Props, Costumes & Roles

Today we decided who will be playing who in our film. Connor will play the killer, I will play the Police Officer, and Joel will play the colleague. Given that only the three of us will be working on it, we will all take it in turns to operate the camera, as there will be no more than two characters on screen at any one given time.

Props

 - Polaroid photographs

 - Knife

 - Camera killer uses to film himself will also act as a prop when the other camera dominates

Costumes

 - Killer will be wearing ordinary, casual clothes. Naturally they will be a bit ragged from his time spent living in seclusion.

 - The Police Officer will not be in uniform, but rather some smart-casual office clothes.
 - The colleague will be dressed similarly to the Police Officer.

Plot Synopsis and Explanation

The basic premise for our film introduction is that a killer lives in an isolated, deserted area through his desire to be forgotten and ignored by the rest of humanity, due to having a troubled and unfortunate childhood. He told no one that he would disappear, and so whenever somebody comes to look for him he kills them, so as to avoid them returning and telling everyone that he is still alive and living in isolation.

His childhood has effected him mentally, to the extent that he keeps a kind of 'video diary' after he kills someone, describing who they were and how the killing took place. Our film introduction will end with him being visited by a police officer who has presumably noticed that people who leave to look for him don't come back, and has managed to locate roughly his whereabouts. Our film will end with the police officer killing the antagonist. As this is just a film introduction, we imagine that the rest of the film would be either the antagonist's life prior to this event leading up to it, or just how the aftermath of his death and the police officer discovering that he killed the people who came looking for him affected the people his victims were involved with. This idea of the whole film's events not happening chronologically was inspired by thrillers such as Memento, and the idea of an event that occurs at the beginning having an impact on the lives of the characters for the rest of the film was inspired by Brighton Rock.

We have included the 'video diary' as it would allow us to intercut two different types of footage; the still camera and the handheld camera. We felt as though this would make for an interesting confrontation scene between the police officer and the antagonist. 

Film Pitch

            

Audience Profile

In order to be able to create a relevant and useful audience profile to be used on our second film, I analysed the IMDB page for the crime thriller 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo'. I feel as though this will be a suitable film to inspire ours as it features many conventions of thrillers yet is a little more unusual than most with one of the two protagonists being something of a social pariah. I would like to explore having an unconventional protagonist on our next film in the same way that 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' does, so it could also prove to be a useful piece of reference material.

It has received a rating of 7.9 out of 10 from 234,135 users. As the graph below indicates, significantly more males had rated this film than females: 167869 to 46762 at the time. More specifically, the age bracket that had most rated this film was 18-29, which could prove to be useful in conducting our audience research as we now know roughly which age demographic 

                                   

These things considered, I interviewed my Dad about thriller films. From this I learnt what his favourite thriller films are, what he likes about them and why, what he expects from a thriller soundtrack and what his perceptions of a thriller protagonist and antagonist are. I also interviewed my classmate Matt, who at 17 is almost within the most popular age bracket of viewers for 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo', so his opinions would be useful to take into consideration when producing our film. Lastly, I interviewed our teacher Ms. Moore, who I thought would be useful in providing a professional opinion on what to expect from thriller films. Also included is an interview Joel did with his Dad, and interviews Connor did with his parents:

After conferring with the other members of the group, we all came to the decision that the most appropriate target audience for our production will be males over the age of 18 (we will not aim exclusively at men, however, they were just the gender with whom thrillers proved to be most popular when we were doing our research). We came to this decision through each analysing statistics for a different film on 'imdb.com'. As mentioned, I researched 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo', Joel researched 'Goodfellas' and Connor researched 'Now You See Me'. We chose these three as we felt that they are as different as films could possibly be within the 'crime thriller' subgenre, and so would provide a varied set of results. imdb.com allows one to view a visual representation of which age demographic a certain film is most popular with (as seen above), and for each of the three films we researched, it was a male group over the age of 18; this is why we have elected to choose this age demographic.

A Scanner Darkly

For the first part of our 'A Level Film Enrichment', I borrowed 'A Scanner Darkly' (Richard Linklater, 2006). Simply put, it's a near future sci-fi film about a group of friends addicted to the mysterious drug 'Substance D', focusing heavily on the theme of identity. 

The film is stunning visually, employing a 'rotoscoping' technique which animates the actors in a very realistic manner. However, there's no glaringly obvious reason for this; it just seems as if Linklater thought it looked cool and couldn't think of a reason not to. In places, it can make understanding some of the characters quite tricky (talking quickly, as paranoid drug addicts do) as it's very hard to lip-read them.

A still from 'A Scanner Darkly', demonstrating the 'rotoscoping' technique

Having said that, I thought 'A Scanner Darkly' was a totally engaging film - the philosophical and thought provoking is balanced perfectly with the comical and quotable. Not one of its 100 minutes felt wasted, and while the plot is slightly tricky to understand instantly, the viewer will be left trying to piece the plot together for the rest of the day, and if a film can have as much of an effect on a viewer as to make them want to figure it all out, then in my eyes it's been a success. 

8/10