Sams Evaluation Blog

This essay will be of the opening of my Thriller movie called ‘The Wanderer’. The media that my team and I produced was based on a climax of thriller to emphasise something bad happening. To help me and my team to develop ideas and plans, we firstly watched openings of other thriller/horror movies for example, ‘The Shining’ and ‘Omen’ this gave us a base of ideas which was very helpful such as the type of thrilling music we should have, the camera effects high, medium and low and other effects it produces. We picked out a few points from each thriller/horror movie then reconstructed those ideas into our own form. From watching these opening documentary’s I have learn to not start of with something over exaggerated or scenes where characters jump into position without the audience knowing what he/she role is. By saying role, I mean each of us individually as a group, had a specific task/job to do. For instance Benedict was the main character in the thriller he had to act all throughout, whereas the girls were the producers of the thriller doing the camera works etc. This is to make sure that everything is placed in chronological order to make the thriller opening flow in place.

Firstly, ‘The Wanderers’ only consisted of two main characters who is a friendly guy (Benny Andallo) and an innocent child (Leon). The main male role is in his early 20s, who is in middle class and is a typical Filipino guy. He begins in a very identifiable scene of gravestones, with bushes surrounded to convey the scene as a sense of dead people lying beneath. On the other hand, the little youngster is in his age range of 5 to 8 portraying as an innocent possessed child who has a mysterious mind. The youngster is representing a vulnerable child who uses a happy teddy bear from the well known cartoon called ‘Sponge bob square pants’, to bring across the idea of child vulnerability though the child is portrayed as evil breaking with conventions, however children are usually normally innocent. Patrick being used as an iconography throughout the thriller every now and again.

‘The Wanderers’ would be a low budget working title because it is a British film production company, based in London, England. It will suit this institution as it is not some kind of big or large scale production. In addition, the Warp production could also produce this thriller, as it is also based on creating low budget films and it already has an established distribution network within its own music industry.

The idea type of audience who would fit into my media product is people who are enthusiastic, enjoys watching thrillers and has a good sense of humour. It is mainly open to all types of age ranges, from as young as 12 and over. Since the movie has frightening moments, younger children should not be allowed to watch. The audience’s ethnic background does not need to be for a particular type, this is because the thriller is not aimed at one type of audience it needs to fit everybody’s purpose and meet their criteria. Therefore, class does matter as to whether a person is lower, middle or upper class. An ideal type of audience could be for example, Harry, 23, currently studying films at university and loves watching the latest horror/thriller movies.

The film has a strong dominant male role which fits the genre of ‘thriller’. Usually when a person or the audience thinks about a genre being thriller, it tends to be a stereotype of a guy being the bad person or there could be a feeling of climax building. In able to advertise this film successfully, I would use spin-offs to help me show the audience through TV adverts’ (trailers), some areas around the UK on billboards and through the internet. Appealing parts of the film would be the main character – he is the bad guy and this grabs the attention of something dangerous happening but also the camera effects can change the audiences reaction to the thriller, this could be either a cliff hanger, shocking moments, romantic parts and so on.

Firstly, I have learnt to use the media equipments with careful instructions from the media staff. I have become familiar with the equipments after our first practice session at the very start. Using the knowledge that I have learnt, my group and I started filming in a park around Islington near the gravestones. It was a pretty hard job because not only we had to use the camera on stand but there were also minor moments where we handheld the camera to film. After doing many shots of each part of the thriller, we used a programme called the Final Cut pro to edit, cut and improve the shots we had done. It was very helpful because not only we done cutting and editing parts but also we added suitable music to make sure it fitted in well with the thriller genre. To use the camera we had to remove the black lid in front, fix the focus without any blur and press record.

I have learnt many things when I first started with this task. The time when my group and I drew up ideas for our filming and what our thriller was going to be based on, we had no definite idea. We had a few rejections on each other’s ideas but we took a careful yet safe choice to go for the basic gravestone idea. Although, I had some doubts about how the idea might turn out wrong, we managed to pull it together and productively make it into a thriller opening. Besides all this, we did a storyboard to help us picture what our thriller might be – I must say, it did help quite a bit. The annotations and drawings on the storyboard was like another version of our actual filming. In addition, editing was not so easy, my group and I had to go through each and every part of the filming we took, to pick out the ones we wanted. Then we edited it to do match cuts, effects, sound etc… after combining above all we came out with the end result, which was the thriller opening.