Final Finished Film of 'Killing Between the Lines' World Premiere!

Here is our audience feedback and views on the final film:

We recieved no negative feedback and everyone loved the improvements we made to our first pre-production like the voice over narration and added sound effects. Overall, our film has become a big success with our audience and proves it can succeed. Through our film and ancillary texts I have learnt many things about different media concepts but if I were to do anything different text time I would... realise that sometimes your audience's feedback does count. I have made the most of this feedback and listened to there ideas. I have thoroughly enjoyed making this project. - Lewis Brookes.

Critical evaluation: 1

In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

We took utmost consideration in maintaining continuity within out film. We researched and observed films from other projects from Youtube (other A2 projects and professional short films) and noted any failures in continuity, which we would endeavour to avoid. We observed that these continuity errors had a negative impact on the film and decreased viewing pleasure. These errors made the viewer more aware they were watching a film rather than being immersed in it.

We researched camera techniques and positions as well as rules such as the 180-degree rule. Using a static camera allowed us to easily navigate the positions with careful planning beforehand. We encountered difficulties with where to place the camera for shot-reverse-shots and match-on-action but with our attentive planning we managed to film these successfully.

Using the HD1000 we could ensure that it was filmed all in the same format. However, we encountered the problem that we had filmed part of it in standard definition format rather than high definition, which was very noticeable and detracted from the film; we overcame this by re-shooting the scene. This affected our schedule, but it was necessary to make, as we believed it was very important to keep continuity. With the heaviness of the camera it was difficult to keep the camera steady when attempting POV shots and therefore we decided to limit the amount we used.

During the editing stage we came across many other difficulties that we had not noticed until we had imported to final cut express. We realised that match on action was not entirely fitting. We noticed that human errors played an impact i.e. I as Andrew Francis had not taken into account how far I should bend over when picking up the papers in the work scene. We quickly rectified this though by reducing the length of the shot we intended and using a different one in place. There were also parts which didn’t look right, for example in the second killing we originally had it so it went into hitting the victim from tapping him on the shoulder. We decided this was too abrupt and chose to include cross cutting to increase the fluidity.

Originally we hadn’t taken great notice to the continuity of the sound, however after paying close attention we noticed ‘crackling’ within the background as well as others speaking in the background. We overcame this by using cleaner audio from other scenes that worked with the shot. There were also noticeable changes in the soundtrack the audience was very aware to this and ruined viewing pleasure and decrease continuity. We corrected this by using fades in and outs to allow it to sound much smoother. We also went for rhythmic editing to create greater impact i.e. music starting fading out when putting the glass down and fading back in after the sound of it being put down.

We originally had several ideas, however we felt it was best to opt with a thriller. However, there are multiple options for a thriller to go with, as there are so many sub-genres and hybrids on offer. We researched many options through youtube, imdb and looked at numerous conventions for a specific style and decided we’d go with a psychological thriller. We analysed the conventions needed and found that a dark, mysterious character was often used and that they often weren’t fully aware of the overall story and that the audience didn’t realise this until the main character did. Examples we found were Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and Trevor Reznik from The Machinist – also, I was influenced by the creepy character of Jon Doe from Se7en. Originally I wanted a schizophrenic character with a double personality as that of Tyler Durden in Fight Club, however it was difficult to imitate this in only five minutes and be able to create an original film.

We used similar elements in our film such as Andrew not aware of being manipulated by his wife and used original ideas such as Andrew’s OCD, I felt this was a good addition as it made the character much more interesting. We used original plot as Andrew’s wife is drugging him and it is in fact her who is committing the murder. We used other conventions of thriller such as attention, fast paced editing and audio as well as sound effects to create edginess and make the film exciting.

 

We deliberately subverted expectations in the film to create an interesting and dramatic twist. The film was built up to imply that Andrew was the killer, however the truth is that it was his wife Maria who was the killer and she kills Andrew. The audience would have originally have been against Andrew as he is presented as a dark, creepy character. However, the audience may feel sympathetic towards him when they find out how he'd been manipulated by Maria. We also used the soundtrack to lessen tension in the work scene and built it up as he is gradually getting more and more annoyed to reflect Andrew's emotion. We also slowed it down when he is walking back into his house and built it up to a crescendo at the point he is shot by his wife. This build up-slow down-build up created an excitement and tension to reflect the overall genre and topic of the film.

Richard Dyer's theory of entertainment can be applied to our film which suggests that an audience is temporarily put into a scenario of utopia when viewing a film, especially those who feel that their life is not ideal. 'Intensity' is a relevant feature in our film as we build intensity through action, music and editing i.e. intensity was formed through the actions of beating up a victim, and the other murder scenes. From editing we made sure there were many cuts and varied close up shots that would stay to thriller conventions that made up tension as well as cutting to the music to further intensify. The music increases intensity as it builds up to an eventual crescendo in the scene where he is coming into his home reaching a peak point just before he is shot by his wife. 

Another theory in which can be applied is the Laura Mulvey's scopophilia theory of narrative ("love of looking" to me and you). The audience will be greatly interested in seeing the perception of another person and how their character is presented and the ordeals in which they go through within our film for example, tricked and drugged by his wife, OCD and is then eventually murdered. The setting of the film will greatly add to the audience pleasure as there are some nice shots especially at the beginning with the clouds that present an eerie pathetic fallacy accompanied with the eerie music. Also, variation of shots and sound effects with tense moments and fast cutting. 

Though our film I feel is an orignal film, it would be ignorant and untrue to say that it was from our own imagination completely. We were influenced by a number of films i.e. Se7en, A Clockwork Orange, American Psycho and The Machinist. Se7en influenced us for our title sequence with the flickering text and writing in the diary. The narration of Andrew Francis was influenced by the character of Alex from A Clockwork Orange, using speech that would be comparative to his character. American Psycho; how he is perceived as a psychopath, but with our own twist - I would have liked to have created a character like Patrick Bateman in my own film but 5 minutes was not long enough to create this convincingly, same goes for Trevor in The Machinist as I'd like to go for someone who has insomnia and split personality (similar to Fight Club). There were many of favourite films that I'd have liked to have taken bits and pieces from but we knew it had to be original and I feel we accomplished this with a unique narrative. 

Critical evaluation: 2

Lewis Brookes: Evaluation Question One

1) In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/brookiebuzzin/1-in-what-ways-does-the-media-prezi-12630331

(Unfortunatly the presentation I uploaded to this site dosen't allow you to listen to see the effects and my audio of the essay.)

1) in what ways does the media prezi

View more PowerPoint from brookiebuzzin

Continuity was observed thoroughly by us both to ensure actions were matched and overall increase the fluidity of the film. After viewing many projects from other colleges on Youtube we noticed films that failed in some aspects of continuity and thus having a negative impact on the film and viewing pleasure; therefore motivating us to ensure our film didn’t fail on the same aspect.

Using the HD camera we were able to take care with continuity by making sure it was in the same format. However, we came across the difficulty that part of the filming was in a standard definition format rather than a high definition format therefore we had to re-film the entire scene. We came across complications such as keeping the camera level and steady for over the shoulder shots. Also match on action and reverse shot, but careful planning and consideration allowed us to find the appropriate camera positions which obeyed the 180 degree rule with these two shots.

Within the editing phase we came across other difficulties, such as the match on action not entirely matching in different shots. We overcame this by use of either cross-cutting or editing that allowed for continuity to be in place. An example is in the film, the character Andrew kneels down but in another shot he doesn’t kneel down far enough, this was rectified by simple editing.

We also had to take notice of sound continuity, we hadn’t paid as clear attention to begin with and there was often ‘crackling’ and background noises which interfered with the continuity. However, through editing we managed to solve this problem, replacing bad audio with audio that worked. Also, there was originally noticeable changes in audio i.e. soundtrack. This was easily solved by using filters such as fades in and out, this made the transition much more smooth and wasn’t too obvious. Also we cut different shots in time with the beat of the audio in the office scene to make the transition smooth.

There were many ideas of a film originally, but we made a joint decision to choose a thriller. However, we were still left with a plot and whether we were going to choose a hybrid of a thriller or a sub-genre of thriller. We analysed many films and decided psychological thriller would be best, therefore we researched what made a psychological what it is. The dark mysterious character was influenced by characters used in other films i.e. Jon Doe from Se7en and Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. I was interested to create a character similar to Patrick Bateman after watching American Psycho and seeing his characteristics. However, it was difficult to replicate a character such as him in five minutes and keep it original.

We used elements such as Andrew not knowing everything that was going on which is a common convention of psychological thrillers and there were other uses such as crime and murder. However, to make it unique we gave Andrew a characteristic of OCD and that he was being drugged by his wife all along and that it was in fact she who was committing the murders. We used tension which is associated with thrillers to give it an exciting edge and the narrative was quite dark, but we used it minimally to ensure the audience didn’t guess the twist in the end.

We deliberately subverted expectations of the film; the film was built up to imply that Andrew was the dominant character and the killer; however we had a twist where Maria was in fact the killer. We also gave a more bouncy relaxed soundtrack, when Andrew is at work to play with the genre s code and intentionally lower some tension however we did this to show Andrew's fustration as the music got louder and quicker, with close-ups of his anger. Then we quickly built back up to the tension with the second killing straight after to thrill and shock the audience.

We can apply Richard Dyer’s theory of entertainment and Utopia to our film. Dyer explained that if your life is not ideal then a film can take you away from this and place you temporarily in ‘Utopia’. ‘Intensity’ is a feature of this theory, in our film we use a build of tension and action i.e. the killings and fast editing that creates an intense atmosphere. If the audience feel that there life is boring/mundane, watching our film will temporarily allow them to feel excitement. Initially the audience may feel contempt towards the character of Andrew and would think he is perhaps a sociopath, however once they find out the truth of his character they may feel sympathy towards him.

Also the audience will get pleasure by scopophilia meaning 'love of looking' by Laura Mulvey's pleasure and narrative theory. Our audience will be interested to discover someone else's life from there perspective, in particular Andrew's. To achieve this we created voice over narration to give the audience a secret glimpse of what goes off in his mind and allows them to interact within 

his life. We are confident we have achieved this with the different types of mise-en-scene presented such as dark clouds and clothing, eerie music and dialogue, a variation of shots with moody lighting and the shocking suspense at the end of the film.

Though we feel we have an original idea, it would be false to suggest there were no influences from other films. The voiceover for Andrew was influenced by the character of Alex from The Clockwork Orange; we used ideas/thoughts of Andrew that were comparative to the character of Alex. There were techniques i.e. camera techniques that were likely to have been subconsciously influenced from many other films like Hide and Seek (2005) with close-ups being the key to a psychological thriller. The writing in the diary was influenced by the opening credits of the Se7en, we felt that the jittery text effects and writing made an effective title sequence and so used elements from this film. However despite of these challenging conventions we have developed our own original ideas and used these to create a gripping genre.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEZK7mJoPLY

Lewis Brookes: Evaluation Question Two

VIDEO

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?

Different ancillary texts should take time and great detail to produce as these are vital to promote our film in many ways. After having a written idea for our film and what we wanted to represent and convey to our audience made this an important media concept.

Once we had completed our film, I researched many posters of similar storyline and ones that looked like they would fit into our genre such as, The last house on the left, The decent and Se7en.

After analysing these different posters, I used my experience from ones I have seen in the past we used our creativity and unique ideas to create our own.

We believe the poster we created greatly complements the film and is effective in a dark and sinister way. This gives a strong contribution to the films overall promotion. The main character Andrew Francis is sat writing in his diary giving dark sinister look. This suggests to the audience he is the main character with a dark, mysterious personality. With Andrew being placed within the centre of the poster it suggests that his character needs to be the main focus for the audience, playing a large part in the film.  The bubble effect around Andrew connotes his unpleasant thoughts and emotions when he is writing in the diary. 

We chose the background colour of the poster as a simple and effective dark black. This suggests the genre of our film to be a thriller that is tense dark and fill of suspense. We made the title big and bold so the audience quickly knows what the films called. We made the word ‘Killing’ the colour red for two reasons:

11)    Because the colour red suggests blood, violence and death. And…

2 2)     The word ‘Killing’ is a pun on the word writing, showing a twist to the audience on what is happening within the storyline.

Therefore it makes the audience aware on what they will be watching by still keeping the suspense and mystery elements.  We also gave the certificate of the film to confirm the seriousness of the violence in the film. We also included the actors in the film and directors with our company logo to get our film in the public eye.

Our poster was created to catch the audience’s attention by giving them little glimpses of excitement without giving the storyline away and I believe our poster does this by creating dark mystery.

We then started to create the radio trailer which was fun and easy to make using Garage band. We wanted our radio trailer much like a film trailer to have important moments within our film to give the audience a little taster, without giving the story away. To achieve this we gave some voice-over narration from 


the production and many sound effects like the punching and the gunshot. This will let the 
audience know someone has been killed but creates mystery as to who. Also we added new eerie music giving the audience a sense that the film will be a tense thriller. 

I also voiced-over additional information that wasn’t given in the film poster such the release date of the film and what various other media concepts said about our film such as The Guardian giving our film 5*. This would have hopefully targeted a wider audience to see our film to a different class of people who may not be interested in psychological thrillers.









Looking at the three different types of media we created shows our diverse creativity to target a wider audience. We were dedicated to make the public see our film through these advertising techniques. Finally both ancillary texts compliment the film perfectly by giving the audience the genre and intriguing points of the production, without relieving too much of the storyline.

Lewis Brookes: Evaluation Question Three

Voice-Over

3) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The main principle of a films success is based on the audiences feedback. When we were creating our film we had a good idea on how we wanted our audience to feel such as suspense and emotions we wanted to betray. We knew that for our target audience to tell others about a film they had to enjoy it therefore we were providing tense music and intense sound effects like the gunshot, when hoping for good audience feedback. 

Once we finished the final draft of our treatment, we felt it was necessary to get feedback on our film, the initial point of this was if our audience didn’t like the idea we would think of something else. 

I produced a questionnaire, which I asked various people to complete.  This allowed both of us to gain feedback on whether our film would be interesting enough, for many people to see it. We were then able to customise our film around this feedback such as the different genres of film they were interested in and there opinion on the certificate they thought the film would be.

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.gblogID=8751492390644401569#editor/target=post;postID=1356088383301738487


We also undertook research by filming other people, by asking further and detailed questions therefore giving more detailed feedback. Such as what they thought of our idea and what films are if any, similar to our own.  People compared our film to saw as this has really tense music and keeps you in suspense. We wanted to create this in our own.

By using all of this gathered information we used it to make our film. Because our footage was under the limit of five minutes we asked people how they thought we could make it longer and interesting. They said they would like to see Andrew Francis at work to see how he would act in a different environment. After the first post-production of our film we thought we needed to ask people in our class, friends and family about the first draft. People fairly gave us critical feedback on parts they thought we could improve such as clearer titles, a voice-over to allow the audience to interact more with Andrew and more tense and powerful sound-effects.

These changes were urgently made afterwards. We then posted this to different medias like FaceBook 


(www.facebook.com) and YouTube (www.youtube.com) and gained much feedback from various people including our target audience. There were parts in our film which did confuse our audience such as cutting from the killing to Andrew’s house but this was intended as flash forwards for the audience to interpret what was happening, to fit the pieces together. They also said that the second killing was perhaps too dark but we wanted this mise-en-scene as it’s a critical part in the film.

By getting further feedback from others amongst audiences including family and friends, classmates and our teacher, this received much praise for our efforts believing it would be a success and we had no negative feedback on further changes.
The point of asking for feedback is to improve the film and it can be easy to ignore.  We could have been ignorant and not listened to the comments from our audience believing it would succeed. Because I have been involved with everything in the film (editing, planning and filming I had to take into account things woudn’t always go smoothly. Therefore you must be self critical and say ‘we need to change that!’ as the audience knows what they want.

So the feedback we have gained from our audience has been extremely important. Without this feedback the film would not have succeeded with little continuity making a confusing storyline and little connection to the characters personalities.