Evaluation Addition

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

The conventions of a thriller are the violence, crime and murder by showing society in dark dangerous ways. The ending of a thriller film usually ends with the antagonists being killed or arrested and justice is usually brought. Plot twists and cliff hangers are usually common features, which are very effective in creating it to be tense and gripping. To challenge this convention, our thriller showed a more psychological aspect, but still had the feature of blood which then leads to fear and murder (injustice). We still followed the convention of suspense with the music and the shots transitions which did increase with certain parts of the opening sequence (Bus scene). We followed the psychological thriller conventions but also developed in some mystery in our opening sequence. We did this by hiding the antagonist and only revealing him right near the end at the bus scene and with the bloody hand after time had past. In each scene the audiences opinion on the antagonist changes, at the telephone box and the bus scene the antagonist is hidden and is calm and quiet. He is portrayed as a tranquil being and isn’t thought as an antagonist until the bloody hand scene, because the blood makes the audience think, “Oh, that’s not good. He’s obviously the bad guy”.   

2. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? (In particular, discuss how you used social media to gain audience feedback).

Most students including our College use YouTube to share projects online to others. YouTube is free and everyone can view it. This is appealing to those with little to no money and has more of a chance to get views from others, even if they do not leave a response, but even the views from each video does determine the popularity and the success of the video. There is also a gain if your videos are so popular and some people make a living out of it and class it as a job, for example Tom Ridgewell (TomSka) and Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg (PewDiePie). Production companies also promote material on YouTube and so do musicians. Some independent companies can use YouTube as leverage and publicity for their companies. Runaway Planet, for example, is a new production company which is using YouTube to connect with audiences and therefore reaching out to a wider audience. Despite seeing YouTube as just a place to view your favourite clips or music videos, it does become people’s lives.  YouTube has 800 million users and gets 4 billion views per day.

Social networking sites such as Facebook has 1 billion users with 9 million apps. Especially with the young active population Facebook is very popular to communicate to friends and family. This also plays nicely to companies within the media field. Pages of bands, films and celebrities are constantly active and they can use this to inform their fans on new developments, such as band updates, what new film an actor will be starring in and social trends which are spread globally will most definitively reach you in some form, be it a comment from a friend, a news feed or a advert.  When you share a project on Facebook friends are able to comment on it and share it to their friends, and cause a chain reaction if it is successful. Then it would get well known and possibly become an internet sensation. One example: Gangnam Style    

Film studios such as Hammer Film Productions might be interested in our Thriller because they produce mainly horror, science fiction, thrillers, film noir and comedies. Our Thriller would cover both thriller and horror due to the blood and psychological violence we were aiming for. And of course the bigger production companies who cover all film genres would have some sort of interest such as Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Working Title and Warner Bros. Film studios such as Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks would not be interested due to their children/family target audience.

3. Who would be the audience for your media product? 

Our audience is aimed at teenagers and adults and of course those who like thriller film especially the psychological.  From our audience research the films we gave from the list, the top rated film was ‘Pyscho’ which is a psychological thriller.  In general Thrillers aren’t the most popular genre and are very ranged into sub-genres that nearly any action film can fit into. Most films want to create suspense it just varies on what the type of suspense is and concentration of it.