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Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media projects?

Our film 'Follow' follows the story of the protagonist Grace who is stalking a girl, Ella. Once Grace discovers Ella is now dating her ex-boyfriend she decides to progress her obsession and attempt to murder her. Grace tries to do this several times throughout the movie but fails, and after a fight between her and Ella she is forced to run to another town where she begins stalking a new victim.

In our opening we followed many of the conventions of our psychological thriller genre in the form, genre, narrative style and genre and uses theories to underpin the decisions that we made about our sequence and story line as a whole.

Please view the Prezi below to discover more:

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

The main representation that we focused on in our project was representation of gender. We wanted to have two contrasting characters of the same ender: one that conformed to the stereotypes and one that broke them in order to make the narrative plot of our film interesting and unique to the audience.

We executed this by having two female characters in our media product:

• Grace: non-stereotypical teenage girl
• Ella: stereotypical teenage girl

In order to discover the conventions of (teenage) girls in the media, we looked at real examples for inspiration. Skins was our main reference point as due to its wide cast we found characters in the TV show that both conformed to and broke the conventions of teenage girls. We specifically looked at the characters of Naomi and Michelle.

In our film we constructed our representation of the characters through the use of dress, gesture, dialogue, setting, behaviour, relationships, camera and editing. Examples of this can be seen in the table below.

Evaluation Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media project and why?

Our media project would most likely be distributed by an independent, British media institution. This is because our film is low budget and it's theme and plot, characters, and setting are designed to appeal to a British audience.

Production
The production company that we created for the purpose of this project is called Bugle Films. It is a small, independent, British production company based in London and it specifically chooses to produce films of the horror and thriller genre, which is why they would make a film like ours. In the real world a production budget of around £500k-£1million would be needed to produce our film. This is because the film is very technically simple and requires no no special post-production effects and the settings and costumes are very simple and achievable.

A similar example of a production company is White Lantern Films. It is an independent British production company based in Bournemouth that has produced several small thriller and horror feature films.



Distribution

Evaluation Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Then we were producing our film, the mass/niche audience we had in mind was fans of psychological thrillers. We also thought about our primary audience of people from the ages of 15-24 and our secondary audience of fans of British indie films.

Further information about the audience of our media product can be found in the Prezi below. Please enlarge it to see it the full information:

Evaluation Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

We attracted our audience of fans of psychological thrillers and 15-24 year olds by applying the Uses and Gratifications theory. The theory told us that audiences 'are not passive but take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives' and that they use media to fulfil their own gratifications, typically one of the following four:

• Identity - ability to recognise product/setting/person or role models with similar values, someone you would aspire to be
• Educate - ability to acquire information, knowledge and understanding]
• Entertain - getting enjoyment and form of escapism from consumption
• Social Interaction - ability of product to produce topic of conversation between people and spark debates

Please see the mind map below to see how we applied the theory to our media product and opening sequence:

We also used continuity editing techniques in our opening sequence such as match on actions, as seen in the GIF below. Using these techniques increases the realism of our film and therefore makes it more likely to attract the audience.

Audience Reactions

Throughout the production and creation of our film opening, we keenly gathered feedback from our audience to inform ourselves whether we were appropriately addressing the audience and to find out what we could improve.

In our surveys, we aimed to take a random selection of gender and ages from within our target audience of 15-24 year olds, and in total we gathered a sample group of 8 people. We asked our sample group for feedback at two points: after our the rough cut of our test shoot and after the we finished our final edit.

Below is a chart of the feedback results we received from the reaction to our rough edit:

Although the reaction was not on the whole positive, we received extremely useful critiques for what to change and improve in our opening sequence. The main critiques were:

• Better characterization - despite the fact we intentionally did not use the actor we planned for in our test shoot, we did not use hair and make-up as well as we could have
• Different setting - the audience noticed that the small shooting location severely hindered us and how the narrative was communicated
• More obvious storyline - the initial storyline of Grace trying to emulate Ella was hard to get across to the audience and they didn't understand the relationship between the two characters

After we completed our final edit we asked the same questions to our sample group, and got the following results:

Looking at the charts, it's clear that the audience's reaction to our opening sequence massively improved as a result of the changes we made between the production of our rough cut and final edit. This tells us that we can safely say our attempts to attract the audience were in the end successful.

Evaluation Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During this process I have learned and developed my skills on the uses of both hardware and software. Looking back on the technologies that I used in the prelim and in previous years of Media Studies, I have realised how much I have progressed.

Hardware
The table below details what I have learnt from my use of hardware such as the camera, tripod etc.

Software
The software that we used included Adobe Premiere Pro, Audible and LiveType.

My greatest technical challenge was using the camera effectively to get professional-looking, clear and consistent video throughout our opening sequence. Overall my technical ability has greatly improved throughout the project and I have learnt a great deal of information about technologies and how they can be used to develop the initial idea of your media product.