Photos from Filming

These are some of the photos we took while filming, showing how we appraoched the task and also showing some of the issues we faced.

We knew lighting would be a problem in the 'bed' scenes. We filmed every shot we wanted with three different lighting states, as we know that playback on the camera and playback on the editing package does not look the same. Therefore we wanted to give ourself options. Here we are using a lamp and have draped it with a scarf to knock the light back a little.

Here we have opened the blids slightly to get the cold, bluey effect of early morning.

Here we are creating Gabi's makeup. We wanted her to look really tired to reflect the title of the film, but at the same time did not want to go over the top with this.

We tried all sorts of differnt camera angles to create different feelings and moods. This one above Gabi was a useful one as it creates a voyeuristic feel.

Here we are filming in the school toilets. We had to be aware of the mirror on the door.

Here we are filming the dream sequence. We cast a Year 7, Ellie, in this role as there is some resemblance between her and Gabi and we know she attends Drama Club and is therefore interested in acting.

This is Mr Woollatt and Kelly preparing for the drowning scene. This was tricky because we wanted to be quick and efficient so Kelly was not in the cold water too long; but these are also the most impactful shots in our trailer so they needed to be right. We also had the logistical problems of making sure Mr Woollatt was not easily identified and did not show much of his face, while we wanted the watch to be prominent and clear in the sequence as it is a key plot point. We rehearsed and walked through other scenes but were reluctant to do this too much for this scene for Kelly's sake. We therefore had to spend a long time setting up the cameras and explaining to the actors exactly where they needed to be before filming.

Here we are filming the caretaker, who had definitely learned his lines!:

These are conversation scenes on the island. We had to film these several times as we knew the dialogue wouldn't be picked up from that shot distance. If necessary, both actors have agreed to revoice their dialogue, which is common film practice.

Target Audience - Katherine

Research into Target Audiences and How to Attract Them

Active Audiences

Active audience theories suggest that the audience is participating in the action of consuming text. They are not messages ‘encoded’ in text for the audience to ‘decode’. Instead, through consuming the text, meaning is encoded in the interaction between the text and the audience. Therefore the meaning belongs to the audience. This is quite important for our kind of psychological thriller, where we depend a lot on the audience doing a lot of the work and making their own interpretations. Many people found Inception confusing, but this added to rather than detracted from its appeal. The beginning of this article suggests that being clear on what happens would actually spoil the fun:

http://collider.com/inception-christopher-nolan-explains/61972/

There is a feeling of pride in being able to understand the film, and even audiences who were confused seem to enjoy the confusion as these comments suggest:

http://uaddit.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=15123

So I would argue that there is a market for complex films where the difference between dream, reality and drugged halluciation is difficult to work out.

Context of Consumption
According to Morley’s Reception Theory, meanings vary with the individual. He interviewed a large audience on the meanings they had got out of watching the same episode of the Nationwide programme and found the influence a text has on a person is affected by the context of production and the audience’s context of consumption, where you are, who are you with and how you are feeling at the time of consumption. Therefore each individual feels differently towards a film because of their tastes, which is why we have target audiences, but also because of how they consume the film. If the individual were to watch a film in a cold, dirty room, on their own and whilst they feel unwell it’s unlikely they will enjoy the film.

For us, this means that when we are trying to identify our audience, we need to think about the context of consumption. Watching a trailer on the internet is a different experience to watching in a crowded cinema. Therefore our promotional campaign needs to take into account where we release our products. As the main trailer  we are making is intended for the cinema, we need it to be loud and dramatic to catch the audience who have come to see a different film and might not be settled or might walk in half way through. Therefore we need dramatic shots and loud, energetic music to catch attention. This is why trailers rely on a combination of dialogue and voiceover and strong visuals - often the same basic information is being given because this way you get your message over to the audience who is half-watching and the audience who is half-listening.

However, we also need to make sure our trailer rewards audiences watching online. This is likely to be a more peaceful experience and they might even watch several times. We therefore need to have a variety of shots so there is always something new to notice.

Target Audience
Fiske argues that target audiences don’t exist. He suggests that audience profiling has become pointless and that demographics are almost irrelevant to audience tastes these days as audiences are now fragmented and diverse. There is too much of a wide range in difference in taste that it can’t be put into big groups. There is too much choice to have big target audiences. If we were to look at taking the traditional demographic approach for our film, we would probably aim for a target audience age ranging from 15 to 35. I think our film does not have a specific gender preference as although the main character is a girl which would appeal to females, the plot of the film could be appealing to males also. We have a lot of action, drama and psychological tension which should appeal to all.

Ang, however, suggests Fiske is too extreme and all media producers try to ‘package’ their audiences to a certain extent. Otherwise selling the film would become extremely difficult as you wouldn’t know around who you are selling it too. However, he does agree that it’s become harder to use the demographic approach- it’s becoming old fashioned. It’s not easier to use the VALs (values, attitudes, lifestyle) approach, where the audience is targeted based on taste rather age and gender. If we were to base our target audience on the VALs approach, we would be targeting individuals that enjoy films with an enigma code (a puzzle they have to solve) as they would be trying to figure out who the murderer in the film is, and drama as the film involves this also. We are also thinking about a wide adult audience who do not want to see too much extreme violence but like to be involved in the film.

This female writer / blogger tries to analyse here why psychological thrillers appeal to her. The poll she conducts suggest they are the most popular sub-genre of the thriller genre:

http://rebeccaberto.com/tag/thriller/

I think a lot of her comments would apply to many fans of the genre and explains its popular appeal and why it does not alienate a female audience.

Audience Activity
Fiske sees the consumer/producer relationship as a conflict. Producers try to determine our tastes by what they provide. Therefore the audience can only select what their taste is from what is provided by producers. Fiske argues that we determine what becomes popular, and we tend to choose products that we can ‘resist’ and create our own meanings from. Therefore he is suggesting we like products where there is not a definite meaning to the story so we can create our own version of what the story means to fit our individual personal needs. This is how we drift into ‘fan’ pursuits such as mash ups, fanfiction etc. Jenkins argues that today’s consumption is active and creative. The audience goes beyond the film itself when consuming and creates a world outside the film they can live through. Our intended promotional campaign has a social networking element which allows audiences to interact. We would also expect the creation of alternative trailers on YouTube etc.

Silverstone suggests that consumption is a mediated experience that can take three forms:
Consumption- this is the ordinary, everyday act of watching a film.
Play- this is an act of participation in a make-believe situation. The audience actively involves themselves- they like to make believe that the world of the text is true.
Performance- here the act of participation becomes real. For example, when the audience participates in creating fanfiction and YouTube remix clips. Silverstone argues that play and performance are becoming more popular that consumption. Therefore the film itself is becoming less important; it’s more about playing with the story and becoming part of it. So, when thinking about target audience for our film we also need to think about where they can take the story and how they can involve themselves. This means that the trailer has to leave big questions, and has to make the audience really engage with the main character so they are tempted to look up her Facebook profile, read more about her on the film website etc.

User Theories

‘User rather than consumer’ theories, however, suggest that we use media rather than consume it. We have a set of ‘pleasures’ that we have identified and we use media texts to gain these pleasures for ourselves.
Blumler and Katz said we watch texts for what we can get out of them. We use them for: information (what we can get out of them), learning (to improve and educate ourselves), personal identity (to work out who you are and what you stand for), integration and social interaction (to discuss texts with other people) and entertainment (for fun/escapism/pleasure).This is what gets us addicted to film, we almost need it to make ourselves feel and become better- to interact with others and escape from our problems.
Furthermore, we need to take these things into consideration when thinking about our target audience and what will attract them. We need to think about which of these pleasures or uses and gratifications will be involved in our film and then target those who enjoy them. For example, the audience should achieve integration and social interaction from our film as they will be able to discuss it with other people. It will also involve entertainment as it allows them to get escape from their personal problems and get engrossed in the film’s story instead. They will also be pleasured voyeuristically as the audience will see something secret like the girl’s drink being spiked, that the girl does not know herself and so is positioned as a spy.

There is a suggestion that these films are exploitative which is touched on in this article:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/millennial-media/201210/what-makes-film-psychological-thriller

This suggests that our film could portray serious mental disturbance in a less than thoughtful way, just for a thrill; and we also don't go deeply into our murderer's feelings / reasons. However, as the writer says, this is common for the genre and is what makes these films enjoyable to watch. As long as our audience do not take the film too seriously it should not do great harm.

Target Audience - Oliver

Research Into Target Audience

The target audience for my trailer is the traditional target audience of 15-35 years old. This covers the key demographic for our film and also hits the most prized media audience demographic as these are the people who are assumed to consume most media as they don’t have big financial responsibilities and have time.

This google search:

Google Search

shows that if you google "who watches psychological thrillers", a common entry is a list of best films - the fact that there are so many of these suggest that they are very popular films. Having looked at some of these lists, the majority of films included are from 2000s suggesting a youngish compiler, so this backs up the idea that these films are popular with a young audience.

My film is non-gender specific as it has an appeal for both genders. Male viewers may enjoy the action and suspense sequences and female viewers may enjoy the psychological drama. There is often a strong female character in these dramas to help this appeal.

This article by a film writer / producer explains his target audience for his own psychological thriller and his target audience. This highlights the importance of the female market and also of the older market, who are maybe more important than people realise.

http://www.johnfurse.co.uk/marketability.html#audience


However, these are big gender generalisations and Ang suggests that this kind of targeting is no longer accurate and a VALs approach is better. This is why he believes that target audiences are based on tastes. This means that according to Ang, the people watching my film should like movies which include drama and a puzzle and you have to keep watching to work out the puzzle. This is the enigma code as identified by the theorist Barthes and this has an interest that is not relevant to gender, age, social class etc, but more to personal tastes.

The theorist Fiske says that target audiences do not exist as everyone is an individual and no one has the exact same view on something. With so much choice now available and so much content for niche audiences, producers are now chasing audiences rather than one mass audience as before. He feels that everyone thinks something different and there is no longer such a thing as target audience as there is such a wide range to choose from. However, I think that there is still some audience profiling that is possible. For example, we think that our film has more appeal to a younger age group because of the age of the characters and therefore the actors involved.

The theorists Blumler and Katz think that the audience is ‘caught’ through gratifications; entertainment, escapism, self-worth and social bonding are key gratifications for our film. Our movie will have entertainment because people will enjoy it and they will find it fun to watch. It will have escapism because it will get you so drawn into the puzzle; you will forget about the outside world and only be focusing on the movie. It will give you a chance for social bonding as you can go to watch the movie with friends. There is also an appeal in films which are challenging and have complex plots, as ours does. On this poll, the majority of responders said they actively enjoyed being confused by a film:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20121202070355AAhvQU0

Silverstone is another theorist who talks about the target audience. He says that we watch these days in 3 ways; consumption (watching), play (making believe in the reality) and performance (interacting). My film will have consumption due to its huge promotional campaign. There will be websites set up for it and it will also be on social networking sites which will hit the play element. It will involve play as we are going to make the world of the texts seem real by creating games, and having interviews with the actors pretending to be the characters. It will have performance as I will allow for fan fiction to be posted and people will be making Youtube mash ups of my end product. In this way, our overall campaign allows audiences to consume the film in more than one way.

Potential Poster Design - Oliver

I have gone back to researching film posters to get some design ideas that are specific to our genre. The thing that stands out most is that these posters tend to feature a close up of the main character looking scared /  vulnerable. We will also want to feature some other key narrative moments like the murder scene, the tattoo / watch that gives the murderer away etc, and I have tried to include these in my sketch:

Use of shadow / silhouette in the background - something we can use?

Focus on carefully-lit, vulnerable female face

Unusual composition and a lot of text. This is more the facial expression we should aim for.

Again, a shadowy figure. The red makes a good accent colour. We are thinking of using that for our title.

If we decide to put photos of the suspects on the poster, this could be quite a striking format.

Both of these posters split their space into thirds. The title uses a glowing font, something we haven't considered. This kind of style enables us to convey more narrative.

Very simple but effective. Again, good lighting is key.

We have started talking about the title being a key part of the research as seen in Katherine's posts, and this sketch is trying to use ideas from above while making the title key.

Initial Layouts for Magazine Cover

Here are some initial ideas for how we might lay out our cover:

The shot of the main character looking over her shoulder will add an action feel and make it clear that she is under threat / nervous.

The shot of Gabi sleeping would be quite a striking image if we lit it carefully to have a sinister shadow falling on her face and would tie in directly with the film title.

This would be Gabi in full face staring directly at the reader and looking tired / haunted.

All of these designs leave plenty of room for text and all the other functional features of a magazine cover.

Poster Designs and Sketches

These are the posters that I used as my main inspiration:

This has the idea of another reality existing in the person's head, which is useful for our piece.

The second poster has mood lighting and suggests characters in conflict, so we could oppose our main character and the villain in this way.

This focuses on the terror of the main character and makes you wonder what is lurking in the darkness. We want to replicate this kind of lighting.

Here we have an extreme close up of the main character, which might work well for our film. It shows that a really simple image can work if it is bold and striking enough.

This poster has more narrative detail and is divided into clear sections. This works well for story-telling but does not create as much atmosphere.

Here we have another poster suggesting ideas inside someone's mind, this time literally coming out of their head.

This looks like one image but is three - the silhouette, the main character's face and the second smaller silhouette. If we lit the main character carefully in the photo shoot, we could create something similar with the teacher providing the sinister figure.

After looking at these posters, these are my initial designs:

This keeps focus on the main character's face and emotions but can have a misty sene from her dream on the other side of the poster.

Here we have the dreams literally coming out of her head.

Here I am playing with a more Bullet Boy idea of having the dreams trapped inside her head.

Location Shots

We have been looking at some of the locations we intend to use and have taken photos to get ideas / throw up potential problems:

This is the classroom where the class who have agreed to be filmed for classroom scenes will be working. It is quite a light room but has a lot of display material which we will want to limit in the shots we take.

This bridge could be useful for the dream sequence but the lighting is very reduced under the trees.

This is the deepest section of water, but again, it is under trees and so very dark.

These are shallower sections of water but could be useful because the lighting is better.

These fences could feature in our dream sequence as they can be filmed through to create a distorted effect.

This aerial view could work well as an establishing shot for the chase scene.

School corridors tend to be quite dark. These are good locations and could look quite sinister, but again, we will have to be careful as we don't have any lighting equipment to help improve the natural light.

This office could work well for the counsellor / teacher.

These seats are all good possibilities for where the main character has conversations with her best friend as these are key to telling the story.

 

This could be the caretaker's den - he could watch the main character from the window and appear in the door way.