shot lists:

Research and Planning:

Research: 

One of the first things i did in the research process was make a survey ,monkey- in which i asked people to answer questions on what they would expect to see in a thriller film.

Not only this but i targeted specific people and asked them in the audience profile in order to get different people from different class, culture and backgrounds.

It was one of my favourites because it was developing my understanding on the thriller genre and interacting with people , seeing how they got passionate about different genres and their expectations from the films.

As a group we conducted two interviews, one group interview with two students at our school watching Gone Girl. This enabled us to get different opinions as to what they were expecting from a thriller and their thoughts on the opening. After, we conducted a one on one interview to get a more personal response. During this we played Killers allowing us to discussed in depth the opening and conventions of a thriller. This research allowed us to get feedback and different opinions as well as enabling us to think about how we could add it into our own thriller openings.

We also done 9 frame analysis so that we understood and were able to make our opening the best that we could. 

Planning: 

Our most important part of our panning is when we had decide what we had wanted to base our thriller on , then we set out a story board of each scene and what would happen then we made an animatic story board in which we put the music we were going to use in the background. 

Pre planning the Mise-en-scene. 

And the pre planning what would be saying. 

Post-production:

During our post-production process we put our footage together in order to produce our thriller opening, we did this through editing. Our main editing programme was final cut pro.

Here is a a video of our editing process : 

I personally edited a lot more in our final piece than our preliminary investigation and made significant improvements because of this.

Visually-
what we done: 

• stabilised footage 
• added colours in order to appear darker and sister
• adjusted lighting 
• music 
• blurred footage
• sharpened footage ect.

Titles and credits-

what we done: 

• placement of our credits , correlated to that of other famous thrillers e.g. Gone Girl 
• faded them in and out - so were not the complete focus 
• Type writer font - to create mystery 
• Our film title sat in the middle in order to be different and stand out from the titles 

Soundtrack/Audio-

what we done: 

• we had an idea of what the 'perfect' thriller opening would sound like
• we could not find a track that suited what we envisioned 
• therefore we created it ourselves on garage band.
• As well as adding in a second track from Soundcloud to make the contrast  and show the apparent time difference. 

Preliminary comparison to our final product: 

In our preliminary we were very pushed for time and did not have a lot of time to plan, not only this but we had never used the cameras before and neither one of us had experience in filming such things. As a result our piece was quite unsuccessful.

 Where as for our thriller opening we had much longer to plan and more experience with the camera , we were able to learn from what we had got wrong previously and as a result were able to make a more successful piece overall. 

As a result of the time we were given we had more time to edit giving the reasons our thriller opening was so successful as we achieved match on match action and were able to hold up the aspects of continuity editing which created verisimilitude throughout our piece. 

Preliminary:

Thriller opening :

Preliminary:

Thriller opening:

Conventions from real media texts - reflection:

The Pitch - what songs we could use:

I think as a group we should go for a song that fits in the grime/rap genre. I think we could produce a video that portrays and man and woman falling in love , with the aspects of the 21st century which makes it difficult for relationships to work e.g. social media and the influence of other people.

I thought these songs could fit the sort of avenue we would want to go down , when producing our music video.





Both artists are unsigned but some what known artists, this may be the most difficult part of trying to use the songs when producing the music videos. However , if collectively as a group we decide that one of them is a song we would want to use i would go about contacting their management or get their serious contact details e.g. email address and ask them permission to use the songs.

If we don't get permissions from the artist then ill set about asking other artists and have back up options to fall back on. If we do get permission i think it would be good to request a high quality version of the track.

Locations:

• party
• date night
• london at night 
• Driving around in a 'nice car'

(conveying a certain type of lifestyle)

Characters:

• two central boys
• two central girls
• 'temptation' characters
• extras

The main message of the video is to convey how in this day and age, it is difficult to be involved in a relationships when there is other people that put it on a plate and often ruin relationships because they can. Although it is the party involved in the relationship that is to fault, it shows how easy it is to get caught up and make these stupid decisions which we later realise wont get us what we want and love. 

Zoella from Lauren Gilbert

Pointless blogg from Lauren Gilbert

Genre: (Pop)

Pop music: 

What is pop music?:

often referred to as commercial popular music, accessible, tuneful music of a kind popular since the 1950s and sometimes contrasted with rock, soul, or other forms of popular music.


Pop music is the genre of popular music that produces the most hits. A hit is a song that sells many copies, and the latest hits are listed every week on the charts. 

They have a good rhythm, a catchy melody, and are easy to remember and sing along to. They usually have a chorus that's repeated several tim

Forms and conventions:

• Artists wear fashionable , stylish and what may be considered 'mainstream'  outfits.
• song is set between 3-5 minutes , with a persistent beat and set structure.
• Artists are always portrayed as being completely content, happy with life 
• Lyrics are most often based around love and relationships. 
•  Bands express a form of unity, the unity associated with teens, teenagers being the main TA for the genre.
• The music genre is usually conveyed through the music video , by mise-en-scene
• Associated with bright and bold colours.
• Usually follows a verse-chorus-verse structure  
• Uses hook lines, which are very catchy and stay in the audience's mind.
• Generic and played on extremely popular radio stations all over the country.

Imagery:

• Usually include beats that are very dance related.
• typically associated with teens 
• Due to the fact that teens and young adults are often associated with enjoying partying , clubbing and dancing - the main purpose for pop music. 
• A lot of the imagery and visuals is based on sex and partying ,which could be said to be the youth culture of today.

Presentation of Artists in Pop:

• Expressed sexually
• seductive
• Try to draw audience in through their sexuality
• Dressing provocatively
• All to create a sexual atmosphere
• 'sex sells'  

 famous pop singers:

Use of digital technology:

creativity:

https://soundcloud.com/user-351076208/new-recording

creativity:

https://soundcloud.com/user-351076208/new-recording-1

Technical Post : Green Screen

What we did:

We set up the green screen and placed a sheet of green card underneath our feet so that it gave a virtual effect as if we were on a movie set, we had already set up the camera on the tripod and as a 
group we tried different things we thought would look funny once edited.

Positives:

• gave us experience with using  green screen.
• gave us experience with editing green screen footage
• means we can incorporate it into our course work- music videos 

Negatives:

• some of the footage is a bit off as it was the first time filming applying greenscreen.
• during editing we needed to change the colour of the blankets ect, as they still appeared beige when on final cut pro. 

we may be able to use greenscreen effectively when filming clips for our music videos but we would have to sharpen up on taking the footage and editing to make it more realistic. 

Technical Post: Dolly Work

Magazine Advert:

1. Look at the magazine adverts produced by pervious A2 students on their blogs. Which do you find most like real magazine adverts? 

I believed this one to look really legitimate as the people who created it have included all the appropriate conventions in which allows it to look relatively professional. The fade out of dark at the bottom of the advert to the light could connote coming out of danger or rising from a dark place, the bold red writing further connotes to some form of danger.

With the use of the parental advisory sticker and the use of the fade and faded writing makes it appear edgier , the legitimacy is exentuated by the streaming options.

2. Research and collect adverts for newly released albums in a number of music magazines.




I could not find any up to date magazine adverts, due to the fact that most celebrities don't use famous music magazines as a means to promote their new and upcoming albums as it is not a piece of media that many people would choose to buy or even read anymore unless particularly interested in doing so. As a result I found the following adverts from artists from  the last few years which has helped to promote their newly released albums.

High street retailers

I went into a few high street retailers and what was evident was that Music Magazines were not as popular and there was little to none stocked in most shops that I entered. The ones I did see were mainstream ones such as rolling stones.

Target audiences:

 Different genres of music will target their audiences differently as each target audience will be different and will vary in interests ect.

E.G. One Direction will have a predominantly fan base of young/teenage females , therefore their marketing campaigns and album covers may include things that that specific group would be interested in.

But in Regards to genre they may portray themselves in a certain way, E.G. a rock band may have dark colours and heavy images in order to convey what genre of music they produce.

Digipak:

What is a digipak?

A digipak offers the audience a lot more content than a disk with a regular cd cover. It is used as a marketing tool to provide an incentive for purchasing a hard copy from a high street or online rather than the seemingly more popular avenue of downloading/ streaming the music. It is now essential as sales of albums have dwindled as buyers now prefer to download their favorite track or tracks rather than having to pay out for a full album.

 They usually have a gate fold , similarly to a book and are often made of paper or card and inside plastic. especially used for special editions and albums, and became popular in the early 2000's with artists and record labels.

The incentive to buy is the added extras to the cd/dvd , as well as the actual disk and its case with front and back covers.

Including:

•  front
• back spine
• at least four additional panels.

The Additional panels include:

• Membership postcard/flier
• lyric section
• disk impression
• Band information section and booklet
• free image , poster and set of postcards

Elements of Digipaks:

Front Cover:

• name of the album
• name of the artist
• an image (often related to the name of the album)

Spine:

• album name
• artist name

Back cover:

• list of songs
• name of the record label
• barcode
• distribution

Internal panel

• booklet
• name of band
• name of band members
• instruments played
• list of the featured songs

Booklets:

• information on the artist
• lyrics
• pictures
• insider information on the song

Retailers:

Retailers such as HMV are renound for selling Dvd's, CD'S and Digipak's and their primary basis being offering such products. However in such a digital age it is quite surprising that such a store is  still up and running. its not without struggle, due to big contending music apps such as iTunes, Spotify and apple music.



In 2012, HMV had to close down 40 stores in a bid to save millions in cost, with 15 shut in the first half of the year.

These include Woolworths, once the nation’s biggest seller of DVDs, Zavvi (formerly Virgin Music),

All of these were trapped by the squeeze on household incomes (the biggest since the 1920s) and by the advance of technology and competition from supermarkets and internet giants.

As for the march of technology, too many managements of retail businesses were slow to recognise the threat of online sales and of MP3 players and iPads.

But a more sinister factor has also been in play. Digital giants Google and Amazon were initially welcomed by the Government .Yet by allowing consumers access to pirate download sites at no cost, Google has essentially deprived musicians and recording studios of their intellectual property rights

Digital music revenues have surpassed the takings from traditional music formats , Worldwide, digital revenues ; from  subscriptions, downloads, and advertising revenue on sites such as YouTube – accounted for 45% of the total in 2015, compared with 39% for physical formats such as CDs and vinyl records.

The popularity of streaming, which has altered the way many people listen to music. The subscription value of streaming services like Spotify reached $68m (£47.7m) last year, a growth of 66% from 2014.

The problem is exacerbated by free websites like YouTube , which paid an estimated 70p per user to music rights holders in 2015.

Digipak nets:

contextual analysis-