There are many ways in which our media product use and challenge the forms and conventions of real media products. Firstly, after our research into female lead characters in thrillers we discovered that many thrillers’ lead females have the same distinguishing features, most noticeable of all, their dazzling blonde hair; such as Uma Thurman’s character in the Kill Bills or Marion Crane in Psycho. This influenced us into deciding on a blonde haired actress as we saw it as a popular connotation of films within the thriller genre.
We then decided to conduct research into the sort of costume that we could dress our actress in. The idea for her costume didn’t actually come from a film, but from the poster of the Tarantino film Pulp Fiction which features an image of Uma Thurman dressed completely in black. The colour black not only gives our character a dark, mysterious look but also contrasts with her bright blonde hair, making it seem even more blonde and, ironically, angelic. Although we did not want to dress her in an old fashioned style of clothing, as our audience research told us our audience prefer modern style thrillers. Therefore he dressed her in the more modern style skinny jeans giving the overall outfit a more modern touch. 
Aside from the costume that we came up with, our thriller uses numerous other forms and conventions from real thrillers such as the location we chose. Especially the claustrophobic freezer which we used, similar to that used in Essex Boys, which follows many of the forms of thrillers as it gives the audience a feeling of entrapment and panic, similar to that in the buried alive scene in Kill Bill2.
As well as Costume and Location, the props we used utilised the conventions and forms of the thriller genre to a certain degree. After watching Pulp Fiction we were inspired to include a suitcase or bag of some sort in out thriller, similar to the one carried by Jules and Vincent. We also got the idea of filling it with bags of ‘cocaine’ from this film too and the driving licenses and credit cards we thought would give the thriller a modern theme with all of the identity theft that goes on nowadays.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our product only represents one social group and that is women and it does not do so in a particularly positive way. The representation that we have managed to derive from our opening is that women are not as cunning or ruthless as men. We liked this idea because it conforms to the manipulative female being represented as the deadly gender, which is noticeable in many films featuring femme fatales, such as Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction or Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. This representation is derived by the way that the main character thinks she is escaping with her ex husband’s brief case, cocaine and identification, until of course she is captured in the freezer. Thus the female conforms to the negative representation of assertive women.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product?
The only channel of distribution that we could currently think of was by sending the film straight to DVD. Not only because of the funding issues that we would come across, being a students, but because we would struggle to get any coverage in cinemas due to the mass media ownership of the 5 largest distributors. Not to mention our lack of experience or reputation in the industry, making it very difficult for us to find any funding of any sort. We could possibly however take it straight to DVD and that way we could decided where we could distribute it to reach our target audience. This would mean putting it up for sale in shops such as HMV or possibly online shop-spots such as Play.com or amazon.com, both of which are popular with students and other members of our target audience, as they are cheap outlets for films. However if it failed in these regions to make any useful profit we could always distribute it via websites such as Youtube.com or perhaps Hulu.com, when it is full operational in the UK, a US based website similar to Youtube.com. These would be ideal as they are free and would allow us access to our target audience and possibly help us build up a potential fan base so we can sell our second film.
Who would be the audience for your media product?
Judging by the audience research that we conducted, and the audience profile that we managed to build from it, we have quite a common target audience. It is very much based around the student population of the country, it is not gender orientated as we questioned an even number of males and females, the majority of which were all aged between sixteen and twenty, the prime student age. They are all people who enjoy films, thrillers especially, but in small quantities, as the majority who answered stated that they only watch one film a week. The majority of who we asked prefers to watch thrillers in the cinema, this may be a problem for us due to our distribution, however we do not se it as a major threat. Our target audience also features the sort of people who enjoy films such as Kill Bill, modern style thrillers with female lead actors. So to summarise it our target audience are the 16-25 demographic who enjoy films like Kill Bill, or thrillers with male and female characters having equal status in feature films.
How did you attract/address your audience?
The main features of our thriller that we used to attract our audience is the choice of a desolate undefined rural location, a freezer which has sinister connotations of entrapment, a generic convention and its cliff hanger style. We decided to make our thriller like this after conducting research into our target audience and being told that the majority of whom we asked prefer cliff hangers. Many of our fellow students, who have watched our thriller, stated that they liked the way it left them at a point where they did not know what was going to happen next in the film. But because of the opening they wanted to find out what happens to the girl in the freezer next. Another appealing feature is the action featured in the opening sequence, the character is constantly running and shots are always changing, keeping the film alive. In our opening there is constantly something happening and never a dull moment. The main character goes from running in the woods, to arming herself in the kitchen with a tool at hand, to getting locked in the freezer and finding the dead body. This action mixed with the low angle shots and the luminous ambient noir lighting contrasted with the interior shots of the girl makes it a truly exciting opening.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Whilst making our thriller I have learnt a lot about new and different technologies that I had not used in the past. I had used digital cameras in the past, however it was during the process of making our film that I discovered how useful certain shots can be at portraying people in different ways; such as how a worm’s eye view shot can make someone look important and powerful. However as I took the main seat when it came to editing the thriller, I learnt a lot here about something that was completely new to me. I now can successfully take a short video or film and cut it and change its order and merge the change of different pieces together with different effects, such as the cross dissolving effect. More so than the film, as I was in charge of the music arrangement, I learnt how to successfully cut and arrange a piece of music so that it sounds different and fits in with the mood and rhythm of a film, as you can hear in the thriller. I have also learnt how to use software to edit diegetic sound in a video to make it louder and quieter, such as when the freezer door slams. I have also learnt about creating blogs as prior to this project I had never created one and I now use them for numerous things.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
Since the Preliminary task, which taught me a lot itself, I feel that I have learnt a lot, during the process to having a completed film. The preliminary helped us as a group work on not only the technical side of film making but the social side too. The social side of it included how to work in a group on a project like this which involved listening to other people’s opinions and being honest about them and coming to compromises where you disagree. It also helped us prepare for the scheduling that we would later rely on, when actually making our thriller, to get everyone together in the right place at the right time. The technical lessons it taught us were all mainly based around the camera work and editing of film making. It helped us develop the skill to use different camera shots to express different moods and how they have an effect on the quality of the film. This involved learning about all the different shot types, eg: close ups, establishing shots, tracking shots, etc, and about the 180 degree rule and how breaking confuses the audience and ruins the film. As well as the camera work it helped us develop our editing skills to insure that we can make our film run smoothly and use appropriate effects.
Since then I have also learnt a lot in the field of how to create the thriller mise en scene using all of the general aspects associated with thrillers. This involved us researching into other thrillers and picking u on any generic features that we could use in our opening, such as the blonde, female lead role, inspired by Kill Bill, or the black brief case, inspired by Pulp Fiction. This especially since the preliminary as it was not until after we had created our preliminary film that we started to really research into other thriller films.
There are other factors within film making that I have learnt about too such as casting actors, thinking of a title and finding an appropriate soundtrack, all of which I originally thought to be easy tasks, this however turned out to be incorrect as all 3 tasks were problems for us. Firstly we had quite a lot of trouble with casting actors as the original girl we had casted pulled out last minute, leaving us without an actor. Luckily last minute a friend of ours from high school, who is now doing a drama course at a nearby college, stepped in and she was perfect for the part. Next we had the problem of thinking of a title, which proved to be a problem as we had a disagreement with our teacher about the name we had thought of. We did not think the name was important so we were just going to call it Running, we soon however discovered that the name is important and not just to determine the classes’ films from one another. So we then tried naming it Corriendo, Spanish for running, and introduced that the character running is Spanish. We soon however realised that this would be an issue to the majority of our audience as it may make the film sound like a foreign film, spoken in Spanish. We however came to the compromise that we would call it The Corriendo Case. Finally the soundtrack, this caused a great issue as we did not originally want one, as we had seen absolute diegetic films that worked really well, such as No Country for Old Men, we also had the problem of not being able to find any suitable music to go with our modern theme, due to copyright laws. We did however manage to overcome this when we learnt about how to edit songs and rearrange them, this gave us the chance to make our own music to a certain degree, so we did exactly that.
