Along with the technologies that i have used (referred to in question 6)i feel that i have made a massive progression with the way you put a film together, for example to get the perfect shot you have to re-shoot until its satisfactory. I feel i have learnt how to create a soundtrack that can help to add tone and feeling to a film. I have improved massively with using the software and equipment (DV cameras).
I also feel that i have developed within myself as a person as we have had to contribute and play certain roles within our groups to help each other and to perform the tasks that were asked of us. For example while jodie and i did the editing and soundtrack, pheobe did the titles.
I have learnt a lot about the different technologies that we have used to make our film. I have come across different digital software such as storyboard quick (so you don't have to draw it by hand or be good at art and it saves you a lot of time), final draft (you don't have to worry about formatting a word document with normal script conventions for example character names,dialogue and parenthesis). In final Cut I have developed more skills including colour correction, key framing, super imposing, adding special effects, time manipulation and cropping. I have also developed an ability to use the extended features of Livetype, including the use of live fonts.
I have also learnt about the advantages and disadvantages of the mini DV tapes that we use in our camera's over the HDD (Hard disk drive). The HDD camera's copy the footage across from the camera to the computer in one straight file so you don't have to capture the footage on the computer like you do with the DV tapes, this is a huge advantage as it saves you lots of time but a huge disadvantage is that if the disk drive corrupts you don't have a backup so the footage is lost and cannot be retrieved. So the massive advantage of DV is that even though it takes you alot of time to transfer the files you will always have a backup of your footage on the mini DV tapes. I have also experienced using the Apple Mac's and the differnces between them and using windows.. By doing this course we also learnt how to use Blogger and Youtube. By using Blogger we are able to upload our videos and pictures to the internet and to present all our research in one certain place so it is easy to read a follow. We use Youtube to upload our videos to the internet as youtube hosts the video and this then lets Blogger access the video.
This is mine and Phoebe's preliminary task. Since doing our main task i have realised that my camera skills and my editing skills have improved the most. By watching the preliminary task you can see obvious mistakes and flaws that are less noticeable in my main task and this is because i have had more practice using the software and equipment.
We attracted our potential audience by creating an original soundtrack which would appeal to our target audience. We also attracted people to watch our film by including twins. Twins are a subject that a lot of people are obsessed about for example Can they feel each others pain? If you are not a twin you want to know how they live, if its the way we live. Twins intrigue us and we incorporated that into our film as normally twins are loving to each other and they get on but in our film we portray them as jelous and out to get revenge against each other.
By revolving our film around two girls and the relationships between them it suggests that the film will be a 'chick flick' and this will appeal to women, as our film is a hybrid of 'chick flick' and thriller we could start to attract a new audience. The audience that enjoys chick flicks may be encouraged to watch our film as it incorporates their favourite genre. Also another new audience that we could attract would be men who would be interested in watching the two main female characters enact a murderous sinister plot.
The audience for our film would ideally be couples who enjoy pathological and psychological thrillers. They would enjoy to relax with each other after a hard weeks work. It would apply to the female as the film has common aspects of the 'chick flick' genre and the male would enjoy the film as its got thriller aspects. They would both be interested in rock/pop music and would probably be lower/working class. They will enjoy watching tv and listening to music. Males are statistically more likely to watch horrors/thrillers than women so males would be a more ideal target audience but with the chick flick aspects women will also enjoy the film. Even though in our film we do not portray the twins in any sexual way, men will enjoy to watch a physically appealing cast of girls.
The distribution company i have chosen is twentieth century fox. I decided this after looking at the distribution company of dead ringer which is a similar film to ours. Dead ringers was hugely successful when it was released and this company has released other thrillers which have also ben very successful which highlights to me they are effective at distributing thrillers. The english version/branch is called rank film organisation. This will mean that because the companies are linked my film will can be distributed across England and America generating a bigger audience and profit.
Twentieth century fox successfully distributed 28 Days AND the brilliant sequel 28 Weeks later.
Our film represents an older generation, our characters are represented as business women from their demure style of dress. Its smart/casual as they are of a higher social class but are casual as they are at home.
Also the twins are represented as working/middle class through the mise-en-scene in the house when they are having dinner, the cutlery and china, the fact they are drinking wine with their dinner and the formality of the twins sitting across the table to each other. A lower class person would stereotypically eat their dinner off their laps while staring blindly at the TV, it wouldn't be an important family ritual. Stereotypically killers and the protagonists are normally lower class people who have a shady background, which is normally the reason for their turn to crime.
Our main convention that we challenged was that we used a woman as our main protagonist. An example of another film that also challenges this convention would be Monster.
This challenges conventions from most major films as well as thrillers because women are not seen as strong or clever enough, to be capable of murder and things associated in thriller films. A professional/working class woman would normally be seen as a victim.
A normal convention that we use is our flashback scene. It is not an obvious shot as we didn't want the audience to realise that the rest of the film was in the past. We wanted to confuse the audience by quickly showing the shot of Lily dead, then bringing in both twins. Twins aren't that common in most films so they are very rare in thrillers. I have found two thrillers that do use twins and are similar to ours using anger and revenge as their main themes. Another convention that we used was Lily being a 'damsel in distress'. In nearly all thrillers there is a victim, Lily is our victim and her twin sister Ivie plays the role of dominance over her. Ivie tries to poison her sister and the audience are made to feel slightly worried for Lily as she has no idea that her sister is trying to kill her.
The film 'Monster' compares to our film as it also challenges the main convention by having a female protagonist being the killer. The main character is also strong willed and dominant which is like our main character. Another film similar to ours is Dead Ringers, our titles are similar in the fact that they are the same name and that they conveniently portray the film. A dead ringer is another word for a twin, there is no difference between them. Our titles contrast as they have a darker tone than David Cronenberg's psychotic thriller although David sets the tone further into the film.
This our final film. We re-edited, changed our sound track and totally changed our film due to the feedback that we were given by the other AS media students.
This is our rough cut of our film DeadRinger. We thought that we had nearly finished our film at this point but after having feedback from other AS media students we realised that we had a lot of things that needed to be changed to improve the film. By having feedback this enabled us to have an outside view on our film and to review things such as our storyline, to see if others could follow it.
