Zoe Rutland - Question 6 - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Zoe Rutland - Question 5 - How did you attract/address your audience?

From our audience research results, we delivered on their preferences to a great extent. Our distinctive narrative and interpretation of this through our use of colour, fast paced editing and intimate camerawork will attract our young audience, and we’ve referenced many of their preferences, such as the theme of isolation and suspense.

We also decided on a 15 rating for our film, appealing to their age range and allowing us to include certain features, such as strong language and mild violence.
However, it was also clear that the comedy genre appeals to our audience, and so we could have included elements of humour in our opening. Despite this, it was a hard thing to do and we didn’t want to ruin the dynamics of the opening and so didn’t use any humour, possibly hindering our audience’s perception on the final product.

Audience Pleasures

As a group, we wanted to achieve an opening that consisted of strong supsense and tension, as these were not only our audience's preferences, but the strong audience pleasures the Thriller genre always offer.

Thrillers propose many audience pleasures, including:

- tension

- suspsense

- a thrill

- being misled

- a sense of fear

- allowing them to uncover clues

We've made use of a select few of these within our opening through the use of constant cutting towards the end and the simple soundtrack, building suspense and tension. However, we’ve also tweaked some of these pleasures considering our target audience, as our film is rated 15 and so imposing a strong sense of fear and thrills on an audience as young as this wouldn’t have been suitable considering the bffc guidelines.

Final Product vs. What we'd hoped to achieve

We were hoping to achieve a product that imposed a sense of fear on our audience, yet this isn’t as prominent in our opening as it is in our narrative. Despite this, I feel the strong success of the tension and suspense created overrides the need for thrills to be present, and if we were to create the rest of the film, we would include this audience pleasure dominantly.

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

In order to find out who our audience was, we conducted audience research via a questionnaire. We came up with questions that would help us understand the psychographics, including their attitudes and interests, demographics such as their gender, age, race and occupation, and their lifestyle and consumption of media, in which such results helped us construct our opening so we could appeal to them as much as possible. Our film is recognisable for our audience, and we've catered to much of their preferences in order to attract them.

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

Mainstream or Independent?
I feel our product fits in with both mainstream and independent. The low production values, realistic set with naturalistic lighting and complex plot in which challenges the audience enables it to fit an independent production. However, we’ve made use of stereotypes, such as passive, stressful women who are conventionally the victims in Thriller films, and so this offers ‘Mind Clock’ a more mainstream approach as it makes quite straightforward use of genre conventions.

Our audience feedback showed us our audience prefer both mainstream and independent – the top two choices of music genre were RnB and Indie, and so we tried to include aspects from both independent and mainstream in our opening. However, our film touches on the independent production style more, as it explores universal themes, such as paranoia, in quite a complex way that would attract more of a niche audience, yet the mainstream aspects would still allow our product to reach a wide audience.

We felt Lionsgate would be the perfect distributor for our media product, as it’s the most commercially successful independent film distribution company in North America, and whilst our film consists mostly of independent aspects, it would be exhibited in mainstream cinemas and have a widespread release due to it's cross-over into mainstream.

The money for our film would come from Lionsgate, as their revenues have increased during the past 10 years to $1.6 billion. They’ve recently distributed new Thriller film ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ and major new phenomenon ‘The Hunger Games’, a big budget mainstream film which set the record for the third best opening weekend box office sales of any movie. They clearly have success with their films, which is why they would be the perfect distributor for our film in order for it to reach mainstream cinemas globally.

Zoe Rutland - Question 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The three social groups we represented in our opening consist of school students, young people and females.

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

After looking at Thriller conventions, it was clear what we needed to include in our opening in order to fit with the genre and engage our audience.

1. The title of the film:

‘Mind Clock’ reflects our plotline, representing the issue of time alongside our protagonists’ unstable state of mind, offering the audience hints at the narrative, conventional of film openings. The use of the colon makes it appear like an digital clock, a simple trick also used in the film title Se7en, where they’ve incorporated the number into the name itself. The contrast of the white against black suggests the themes of conflict, good vs. evil and corruption of innocence in our film, used in many Thriller films such as Donnie Darko and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo to suggest similar themes.

2. Setting/Location:

The isolated setting, conventional of Thriller openings, was used to project the idea that our protagonist is alienated from society. Using a school classroom appeals to our audience, allowing them to identify with this location. Such a location isn’t that identifiable in Thriller films, however the school setting is present in Donnie Darko, a film whose protagonist has similarities with our own.

3. Costumes and Props:

· Once again, using a black and white colour scheme foreshadows the conflict and theme of good vs. evil later to come in the narrative. Such continuity of colour helps our opening flow, and gives it quite a modern yet bleak outlook.

· We also made use of clocks and numbers to highlight the characters inner conflict with time, and such iconography is used in many Thriller films, such as Psycho where the birds are symbolic of death. Our continuous reference to numbers, such as the writing of them, is something I found worked well in The Number 23 opening credits to convey the 'evil' force that will commence in the narrative, and so we wanted to include such iconography to portray a similar effect.

4. Camerawork and editing:

· We felt highly influenced by the Se7en opening, and so our own opening is dominated by close-ups and we've made use of fast paced editing towards the end of the scene. Our initial storyboard included a range of shots, yet we changed this to one including more intimate shots to get across our character and really involve our audience. Despite this, we have still included tracking shots and pans to really engage our audience, and such camerawork and movement are conventional of the genre in order to get across a 'voyeur' feel.

· We also used the cutaway tool to add the newspaper headlines in smoothly, engaging our audience. We also cropped certain shots, allowing them to cover 2 frames, suggesting our protagonists paranoia.

5. Title font and style:

We wanted the titles to flash in and out like an digital clock and keep in time with the ticking in order to get our narrative accross even more. Such an effect links with the Memento opening, as the credits themselves slowly fade to correspond with the protagonists own memories fading which the audience will become aware of as the film begins.

Using dafont.com, we looked at a range of digital fonts, yet all agreed on Segmental as it had more of an edge to it, much like the font used in Se7en.

6. Story and how the opening sets it up:

The use of newspapers overlapping the characters thoughts suggest the disasters to come/what she’s anxious of. The iconography of the clocks and numbers suggest the importance and occurrence of time in the narrative, again linking with Memento as polaroid photographs are used in the opening to suggest the importance of memory for the protagonist. The ticking sound builds tension and again highlights the protagonists constant reminder of time, and the isolated setting foreshadows how separated from society our character will become.

7. Genre and how the opening sets it up:

Using a black and white colour scheme suggests themes such as conflict and good vs. evil. Our use of fast paced editing alongside a series of climactic moments through the use of short shots, accompanied with amplified sounds of chaos in her mind suggest the Thriller genre. Despite this, most Thriller openings use a non-diegetic dominating or eerie soundtrack, whereas we've simply used a constant ticking to set the narrative up and create tension, and so challenged conventions in this way. Such a simplistic sound links with the Hard Candy opening, as the melodic piano playing is simple yet chilling, possibly thrilling the audience more than a domineering soundtrack would.

8. How characters are introduced:

An innocent and vulnerable young girl working in an isolated setting, with the consistent cutting between different shots conveying her anxiety and paranoia. The close ups of different parts of her and consistent fidgeting further suggest her nervousness, anxiety and fear. We repeated shots used at the very beginning near the end to suggest a build up of tension and time running out for her.

9. Special effects:

Cutaway tool to suggest what she’s thinking and give the audience an insight into her confused mind, by overlapping newspaper headlines onto shots of her eyes and head.

I feel our narrative did slightly restrict us from developing conventions, yet we worked the locations available into our plot and so as our character is an isolated teenage girl, there was no other way of presenting this than the conventional isolated setting.

Final Editing Touches

We made our own newspaper headlines on photoshop as we found difficulty putting in original headlines from news sources such as the BBC due to the size and copyright.

We found trouble overlapping the newspaper shots in the beginning, yet used the 'cutaway' tool and lowered the opacity of the newspapers, and felt this worked really well.

We also found trouble matching up the ticking with the title transitions, and so edited this to the best of our ability in the time we had.