Thrillerwork - Audience's Feedback

We went around our school and showed people our thriller. Afterwards we asked them for feedback o it. We had 4 basic questions:
 
1. Did you like our thriller - if yes/no, why?
 
The general feedback we got for our thriller was quite positive everyone said that they really enjoyed the humour, the acting and the way we shot it. The especially liked the contrast between the light and humorous presentation of Mise-en-scene  and the sinister nature of the events  happening on screen. As this was exactly what we wanted to achieve, we were quite please to hear that.  
 
2. What didn't you like and could be improved?
 
Some of the questioned didn't like the amount of violence in it. However we were quite please about that as our primary target audience is older and will be less squeaamish. 
Although the feedback was generally positive we also got some thinks the audience didn't and would change, if they could (but they cant! Muuuuuhhhhaaaaaahhhhhhhaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). We initially wanted to use the change of dialogue to present the killer's instable mental state. However the audience did not get that and experienced it more as being confusing.
Furthermore the would have added some effects, such as a 'rec' or 'live' sign in the upper right corner to create a feeling of an amateur video.
 
3. What do you think would the narratio of the thriller after the opening sequence be?
 
All said that it would be a kind of psychological crime thriller about a cannibal serial killer, who is not just the villain, but also a bit likeable. This almost exactly  matches our idea.
Furthermore some of them got this feeling of a society of cannibals actually watching the show to learn something about cooking and being a good cannibal. Another, even though not prioritised,  point we wanted to make.
 
4. Who do you think the target audience is? 
 
The majority of questioned said that they think the target audience is male and between 20 and 30 years old. This matches almost perfectly with our plans as our primary target audience is between 18 and 30 years old.
 
 
 
As we can from this, we were quite successful in producing our thriller as the audience liked it and almost completely understood what points we wanted to make.



Here are some of the the students we questioned:
 

 
 
 
Darcy (17 years old)
- loves 'Games of Thrones' and 'Jane Eyre'

 
 

 
Matt Flynn (17 years old)
- likes Death Metal
- enjoys violence and that's why he enjoys watching violent thrillers
 
 
 

 


 
 

                                                                                                   
Chloe Martin (16 years old)

- likes watching Rom-Coms and Psycho thrillers
- has actually brown hair
 
 

               


Dillon Bauschulte (16 years old)

- german
-produces music
- always has his headphones with him
 














 

Evaluation Task - 07 - What have I learned From my Prelim to Main Task

There is a huge difference between our prelim and our main task. Looking at different Thrillers and representations of social groups in TV-dramas helped me to improve my skills in the key areas Planning and Research, Mise-en-Scene, Camera and Editing and to have a satisfactory result.

Planning and Research
A huge difference between the development of the prelim and the main task was the time we invested into the planning and  of the two projects. We had 60 min to plan and shoot our prelim. We spent about 15 weeks planning our thriller. This vast distinction was caused by the lack of starting material we got from our teachers. A lot the planning for the prelim was already done. So, for an example the storyboard we used was already done for us. In the progress of developing our main task I not only learned how to right dialogue for our thriller, but I also learned how to plan every single shot of our thriller and write them into a storyboard and a shot of shot list.

Furthermore we had more than a sufficient amount of time to do a research into thrillers, that are similar to our's, as well as events, that actually happened. This helped to understand the way we wanted our thriller be and latter to shoot and edit the thriller as we learned how a thriller has to look like. Because we didn't have this research with our prelim, we didn't really know how a thriller has to look like to make it a thriller.

Mise-en-Scene

As I already mentioned did we invest a much bigger amount of time into our main task than into our prelim task. This difference caused a huge distinction between the use and the effect of Mise-En-Scene.

The biggest difference of Mise-En-Scene was the setting. While  we just shot our prelim in one of our class rooms, we did a big research on different kitchens in films and in real life and learned how to use setting to affect the audience and its response on our main thriller. Another differential between my prelim and main task are the actors. In our another group member and I just played the roles. Both of us were not casted for the role and had no acting experience in front of a camera before that. For our main task we thought about who of the actors, that were available, would suit the role best and how much acting experience they already had. So we used casted actors in our main task, which didn't just suit the role and act well, but also looked good in front of the camera and attracted our target audience. Through this I learned how difficult it can be to choose an actor if you don't agree with your partner's favourite and how you can still come to a result that everyone is happy with. As in the similar way to the setting and the actors I learned how to use props, costume  and  professional lighting to create effect and meaning. For our prelim task we just used room lighting, no props and our own clothes we wore that day that day. For our main task we had a 2-point-lighting a huge range of different kitchen props and composed costumes, that matched with the setting in the background and the actor.

Camera

Over the past two terms I learned a lot about the use and effects of cameras and different shots. We used a Sony NX5 camera for both, prelim and main task. However the way we used the camera has improved tremendously. For our prelim we just used basic and quite boring shots, such as Wide-Shots, Mid-Shots and Close-ups , which didn't really create the feeling of suspense and tension we wanted to create. Although the shots in our main task are still quite simple, because we wanted to present the show as a self-made one, we still had a much bigger range of different shots, such as mid-close-ups, close-ups, extreme close-ups and many more variations of the basic shots. This lack of creativity in our prelim was not just  caused by our poor camera skills at this time, we were also limited in our shots through the storyboard that had been already made for us. In our main task we used our own storyboard and were able to add shots at the shooting day if we wanted to. So, for an example, we made a shot of our actor biting into a carrot. The shot wasn't in our storyboard and had nothing to do with the storyline in our thriller. However it created humour and so we decided to put it into our final product.
Furthermore, in contrast to our prelim, we didn't just want to film the events happening like we did in our prelim. We also wanted to make it look good. In Because we didn't have extra lenses to give the film a cinematic depth, we used different  placements of objects and protagonists to create both, a variety of different shots and a feeling of watching a real film. Because we didn't see the set and all the props before the shooting day, a lot of the cutaways we used were improvised. This helped me to learn how to extemporize react with the camera very quickly and how to make decisions under the pressure of the time, that we had to shoot the whole thriller in. The time we had for the prelim was much shorter. However the amount of actions and the variety of shots we used to capture these actions was much smaller. Therefore we weren't under a big time pressure.

Editing

The huge difference between the ways we have edited our prelim and main task already starts with the huge distinction we have organized our shots. While we were just using a 'crush' and a 'log' bin for our prelim, we developed a whole system of different bins for our main task. This vast differential was cause by the different length of footage we had for the to task. While we had about 30 shots with a total length of about 15 min in our prelim task, the 114 shots we produced for our main task had a length of almost 2 hours. 
This massive distinction between these two tasks was caused by the difference of length the tasks were supposed to have (prelim 30 sec and main 2/3 min).
Another huge difference between the tasks is the accuracy of cuts we did. At the beginning of the year we had no idea how to actually do good and fluent cuts. Over the past year we learned how to properly edit a thriller. In our main tasks we used editing conventions of real media products such as match-on-action and others. This made the thriller look much more professional and fluent. In strong contrast with the prelim shot, which looks messy and amateurish.
Furthermore we the editing process of our main task had three parts.
Organizing and Discarding the shots, which was a huge step, the picture cut including cutting the length down and finally the sound cut. The sound cut made the biggest difference between the two tasks as it was the only thing we didn't do in our prelim. Although the other steps we not that hugely developed in our prelim, we still organized and cut our thriller.
We didn't have much extra sound in our thriller. However we needed to cut the sound to create a fluent image of cuts. Moreover we added sound effects of knife stabbing to reinforce the violence in our thriller and used a dark and sinister non-diegetic background music to create a serious atmosphere.

Evaluation Task - 06 - How have I used digital technologies in my product?

Evaluation Task - 05 - How have I chosen to attract/address my audience?

Evaluation Task - 04 - Who is my target audience?

 

Primary Audience

 

 

To find out who our target audience is, we looked at rating reports of films that are similar to ours on the IMBd website:



 

 

 

Firstly we looked at Man Bites Dog, who is our main inspiration in our thriller. In terms of film style as well as in terms of the killer: 

 

 

The main audiences of "Man Bites Dog" are male between 20 and 40 years old. 

 

 

 

Then we looked at "Silence of the Lambs", because Hannibal Lecter, a character in this movie, is one of our main inspiration for our killer:

 



 

 

The main audiences of "Silence of the Lambs" are male and between 20 and 30 years old.

 

 

For the same reasons we looked at the rating reports of "Silence of the the Lambs" we looked at the reports of the TV-drama "Hannibal"

 

The main audiences of the TV-Drama "Hannibal" are male and between 20 and 30 years old.

 

 

 

 

We learned out of this research that the main and primary target audiences of thrillers with the same sub-genre as our thriller are male and about between 20 and 30 years old.

So we are going to use an attractive, young woman as our victim, to lure men in this age range, who will fancy her. 

So will cast a young, female teacher or an A2 girl for our thriller.
 



 

Primary Audience


I've created a model of our perfect audience member:

 
 This is Robin. He is 21 years old and our optimal audience member. He is a huge fan of thrillers and his favourite film is "The Silence Of The Lambs"
He lives in London, where he studies film at the King's College.
His girlfriend, Sarah, likes the same kind of films. They are often going out to the movies. Mainstream cinemas as well as independent cinemas.
Because he studies film in England he has close contact to the independent movie business in Britain and knows other people at his university, who are interested in niche-audience, low budget independent films.
Moreover his father is rich, shares the same enthusiasm for thrillers about socio or psychopathic serial killers and really likes our movie and is willing to financially support us distributing our thriller in other countries.

Secondary Audience
 
In order to wider our target audience we did a research on secondary target audiences. As secondary target audiences are often build out of family and friends of the primary audience we tried to also wider it to a younger audience of lower and upper sixth students as they are more open for  new and independent idea and will like the black humoured and violent side in it. Moreover they are more familiar with the internet, the main place of marketing fro our thriller, and are so more likely to find and to get interested into our thriller.
Questionnaires given to AS and A2 students at our school supported our theory as they are generally very interested to watch a black humoured thriller about cannibals.


Here is the Questionnaire:

What's your favourite movie genre?
















What is your favourite thriller sub-genre?
















What are your to 5 thrillers?

Here a list of answers, that occurred more often than the others:

- The Departed
- Seven
- Shutter Island
- Memento
- Insidious
- Silence Of The Lamps
- Inception
- Black Swan
- Basic Instinct
- Taken

What was the last thriller you saw?

Here are just some examples of answers:
 
- Prisoners
- Gravity
- Hanna
- Reservoir Dogs
- Seven
- Leon
- Sweeney
 
What do you except when you watch psychological thriller?

Here again some answers that occurred more often than others:
 
- To be interesting and scary
- Mind Games
- Insanity and crazy characters
- Manipulation
- Plot twist
- Something that confuses you and makes you think
- leaving questions in the audience 
 
What do you except from thriller with black humoured elements?

Here again some answers that occurred more often than others:

- To be scary but also to treat the fear in a funny way
- Making the audience unsure whether they should laugh or not
- Contrapuntal music
- Making you to want to throw up and laugh at the same time

Would you watch a black humoured psychological crime thriller about a cannibal?

Evaluation Task - 03 - Who would distribute my product?

To find a production company that is likely to distribute our thriller, I looked at films, that are similar to ours and so found some possible companies, who could successfully distribute our thriller: 

The perfect film production company for our film would be "Universal Pictures". They have done movies like "Red Dragon" and "American Psycho", which are very similar to our thriller as they include black humoured elements and are mainly focused on the psycho- and sociopathic serial killers. As "Universal Pictures" is distributing movies all over the world, working with them could bring us out of the British Independent Genre and would help us entering the global market. Moreover Universal is both horizontal and vertical integrated, which is a massive bonus as it avoids key cost for marketing, advertising and distribution.

However their are quiet a few reasons why this company or other big American companies wouldn't distribute my film.  Firstly I'm an inexperienced first-time  movie maker and "Universal Pictures" more likely works with experienced film-makers, who already have made some movies and were successful. Although our product includes the successfully pre-sold cannibal element, we have no well known actors or a bankable star, like Anthony Hopkins, to strongly emphasize sell these elements to the audience. Moreover our product is a low budget independent film and "Universal Pictures" or other big film companies rather doing two very high budget blockbusters in a year than thousand low budget independent movies. So "Universal Pictures" or other big American companies are not going to make my movie.


So I need to look in England for institutions, who would distribute my thriller. I researched some English produced or co-produced movies similar to ours and ended up with the film company "Film4", which has produced a wide range of movies. They have made black  comedies like "Shawn of the Dead" and "Seven Psychopaths" or psycho-thrillers like "Trance", which wouldn't completely fit with our concept, but because "Film4 productions" has made and distribute a lot of different movies from dramas like "127 Hours" to Comedies like "Happy-go-lucky", I'm confident that they will distribute my film.  Film4 has also produced and distributed low budget independent films as my film is ("A Field In England). Moreover Film4 is often working together with big American institutions, which could fundamentally help us to get in contact with American distributers if our movie was a success in the UK and Europe.
Film4 have their own TV-channel, where they can show their own movies and advertise for them. This would avoid a lot of costs that would have been spent for advertising our movie.
Because our thriller fits into 'Film4's concepts of movies, I'm confident that they will distribute our thriller

Evaluation Task - 02 - How have I chosen to represent social groups in my thriller?

Our Thriller presents two social groups:

Gender

My thriller presents the stereotypical ideology of men being superior to women through having a male killer in a powerful position and a female victim in a weak position. This confirms the audience's expectation as they expect the man to have power over the woman.

This film-ideology of genders is a very widespread and common one as it has been represented by media since the invention of film-thrillers.

                Hitchcock's first thriller, The Lodger (1926), is about a male serial killer in London killing blonde and attractive women. This presentation of vulnerable female and powerful male characters has been continued through the years with other Hitchcock's classics like  Psycho (1960) and thrillers like Wes Craven's Scream (1996). Although there have some iconic strong female characters occurred in the past years - Lara Croft, Hermione Granger and most current Katniss Everdeen - there all have moments were they get physically defeated by men. Moreover almost all of them have a male supporter, who helps them in dangerous situations.

However these strong female characters are very few and the main domain of dominant and powerful characters in thrillers are male.
More current movies like  Craven's Red Eye, Nolan's The Dark Knight or Harron's American Psycho continue this presentation of gender, that Hitchcock has started in his thriller's. And the ways this ideology gets presented are often very similar. - How you can see on this pictures:

But this very strong trending representation does not come from anyway: In the past 100 years 90.7% of all proven serial killers were male and more than half of the victims were female.
Studies found out that women and men are not that different in their levels of aggression.  However women handle this aggression much more passively and less physically than  men do, who are much likelier to show their aggression in 'explosive' and very physical ways.  

 We used different low angle shots to give our killer power. This and the fact that the killer was standing represented him in a position of power over the on the ground lying and through low angle shots presented victim. This is a stereotypical representation of gender and confirms the audience's expectation as they expect to have a powerful male killer and a weak and vulnerable female victim.
This representation is reinforced by the killer obviously enjoying having power over the totally desperate victim while he is feeding her.
Moreover we wanted to reinforce the victims innocence and vulnerability through dressing her in white and rather scantily.



Alice Heappey in my thriller

    




Drew Barrymore in Scream

The most iconic representation of the male gender having power over the female. This is a perfect example of how we wanted to present gender in our thriller:

Disability
In our thriller we presented disabled persons  as being superior and in more powerful positions  than abled persons are. This could subvert the audience's expectations as they think about disabled persons like in the TV-Drama 'Breaking Bad or the film 'What's eating Gilbert Grape' disabled persons as being weak, helpless and depending on abled persons.

However we present our protagonist as a highly functioned, narcissistic psycho-path. In this term of mental disability we confirm the audience's expectations as they expect psychopaths being in powerful positions. Films like "Silence of the Lambs", "Seven Psychopaths", "Man Bites Dog".

We used low angle shots to present our mentally disabled  protagonist in a position of power. How I already mentioned did that confirm the audience expectations as they expected the killer to be powerful.

Furthermore we showed the protagonist's narcissism using shots showing him doing his hair and having the actor directly addressing the camera. While the hair shots confirm the audience's expectations as they expect the killer to be narcissistic knowing this feature from other media presentations such as "American Psycho".

Though the happily addressing to the camera subverts stereotypes breaking the theatrical "fourth wall" and bringing the audience close to the action, it clearly demonstrates the killer's mental disability through him obviously enjoying and presenting what he is doing.