4. Who would be the audience for your media product.

Our film is about a man who has his child and wife taken from him and he is on a wild goose chase to find them. It also involves him taking orders from the captives to save his family. I think this falls under the "On the run" category of thrillers, well at least under the criteria of sub-genres on Box Office Mojo. If you click the link you can see the highest grossing film of this sub-genre made a lot of money, therefore the "On the run" sub-genre is pretty popular. Another thriller sub-genre I think ties nicely in with this film is action. This genre comes in many varieties but the film series that I think greatly corresponds with the audience we are trying to entice is the James Bond series. The newest release from this series "Skyfall" has all the heart pounding action and intricate plot lines that our film would have. Films like "Taken" also are under the "On the run" sub-genre and action genre, we wanted our audience to be people who enjoyed these films but also came to see something different. Both these films also were very successful at the box office, so we thought "choose a genre that people will be interested in the most" and the charts don't lie.

The sub-genres are known to interest 20 year old males up to any age really. But the same can be said for the female audience, we aimed to make our thriller suit the general age ranges for the thriller genres mentioned earlier. By doing this we would have to give our film an age certificate to make it able to show the gore or heavy language that is used in most thrillers. The BBFC certify films, games and downloadable internet items. They are a non-government funded company who would set an age limit on our media product to protect minors from it.

If I had to choose an age rating for our media product I would give it "15". I believe it would be this rating because of the strong language that would be used by the criminals and the main character (out of desperation from the loss of his family). Also the film would have drug references/use and strong violence because of the criminal activity side of the film as the main character tries to find his family and gets mixed up in gang crime. This would all help to make the narrative realistic and engage the audience more in the film. Swearing, violence and drug taking all help to add realism and enhance the thriller experience by making you cringe and heart race. Most thrillers carry the age rating of 15 for those exact reasons.

3: What kind of Media Institution Might Distribute your Product and Why?

What kind of media institution might distribute your product and why?

Film distribution has normally been done by large companies or global companies, it is the process of releasing a film in a market place and keeping it there. Hollywood has the three stages of getting the film to the audience; production, distribution and exhibition. They have often been part of a company which is vertically integrated and all the stages are in control of one company. However in the UK, distribution is more about ‘marketing and sustaining a global product in local markets’

In the past, this had been all about getting 35mm prints to cinemas and also big budget films. However with the new digital film production, digital distribution is becoming more common as it is far more cost effective than 35mm prints. These days the distributor only has to send computer files to cinemas. This means the cinema’s may have shorter runs as the films can be given a second run or followed by going onto DVD quicker than in the past, or sold as downloads, which is a fast growing method of distribution.

Digital production has allowed for a big development in user generated films, from films presented on OpenFilm.com, who claim showing members films on Tivo, Boxee, ‘Our partnerships with third party platforms deliver your films directly to televisions in more than 11 million living rooms’

My film is not a big budget, high profile production. It was made on a very limited budget and no big name stars, so it falls into a completely different band of user generated material, which is growing fast. This type of material is uploaded to sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. Wikipedia identifies all these sites for user generated sharing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_websites

2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

My media product represents two social groups, the first one is an average working/family man. The pictures below are of this first social group represented. 

The man at the beginning is seen wearing a coat and a plain blue shirt. He also has black trousers on and all this emphasises he is a working man. As he enters the house he says "Honey I'm home!" which is a very stereotypical way of a husband greeting his wife when he returns from work. This also tells us that this man has a family. 

The man is seen picking up clothes and looking suspiciously at them, this shows he has a sense of worry because he would expect everything to be normal when he comes home much like any husband or father. We find out later in the opening that he is a father when he says "Susie?" as he enters her room. 

We see the man turning off the television and this further emphasises the fact that he, being a husband/father, would clean up after his family if there was anything left on. This also emphasises the working man social group because he is saving energy costs. 

The man runs fast through his house because he is worried about his family's whereabouts. This further emphasises that he is a caring father. The fact that he gets to the location where the note indicated shows he is dedicated to finding his family, this can be seen below.

The next social group that is represented is criminals. Below you can see the criminals apparel which is dark and hooded. This is a very stereotypical outfit for a criminal, because it would be hard to see in the night and covers his identity slightly. He also carries a weapon but one that would not be seen as a weapon, a hammer. This can deal damage but is not seen as a weapon in many peoples eyes because of it's construction use. This emphasises the criminal social group by making the man carry a weapon that is ambiguous and not straight forward aiming to kill. Also many burglars carry tools to rob houses and the hammer could've been used for that by him in the past.

1: How does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Eradication final film and improvements.

Here is the final cut of our thriller opening "Eradication". There wasn't much to improve about the rough cut except some feedback said the music should match the footage on screen for example making a title credit come up when the hard distorted violin note strikes. So we took the advice and did that, we also fixed some colour correction that was not constant with the rest of the film. It now has fluid colour throughout in a blue tone but still keeping a realistic look.

Thriller Improvement - Colour Correction

These screenshots show the stages we went through when colour correcting the thriller opening. When watching the thriller opening, the colour is light and doesn't fit well with the style and genre of the story, to change this and make it look more erie and darker. To do this we decreased the saturation and whites and blacks. However the shot was then too dark and was hard to see some small aspects of the scene, so to fix this we focused more on the saturation and the colours on blue. I think the it looked nice to finish with and the last screenshot shows the final choice for the colour correction.

Credits - Thriller Improvement

We decided to add to the credits: "From the book 'Path to Eradication' by Charles L Jacobs" and "and New Line Cinema present" to follow the conventions of a thriller movie more so than we had previously. We also added executive producers in the credits and ordered all the credits correctly. Below is the final list of credits for our thriller opening we also removed a couple to make the credits work with this new order. The credits now are true to the conventions of any thriller opening.

Hard Winter Studios

and New Line Cinema present

a Lord Tiberius II Production

Abby Peake

John Nicholas

Alec Thomas

Music by Sam Garbett

Editor Jake Wootton 

Cinematography Kalvin McTavish

Executive Producers Martin Price, David Hart

From the book 'Path to Eradication' by Charles L Jacobs

Directed by Sam Graves

Eradication

Font and Cuts - Thriller Improvement

We decided to improve upon our thriller movie by changing the font we are using for the credits, we also are cutting the running sequence to make it a more dramatic thriller. We also decided to add narration to the thriller to add to the dramatic aspect of it.

 Here is the new font:

New Production Company Logo - Thriller Improvement

This is the improvement we made to the company logo, we made it look more professional and artistic. This ties more with the conventions of a production companies logo that produce thrillers.