Evaluation Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?


We aim to target a younger audience of older teenagers to young adults who enjoy realistic and intelligent movies.

Our audience is quite niche hence the reason that we think our movie would be shown at smaller cinemas that deal with more independent movies, such as the Phoenix, East Finchley. 

We included young actors and confronted the young audience with a situation that could happen to anybody - this gets our audience thinking about the movie and wanting to watch the rest of it.


It's something that could happen to anybody in our target audience regardless of lifestyle, nationality etc. The audience can LEARN from our film.


We also realised that our film could have a secondary audience of those over the age of 25 who simply enjoy the theme of crime. Since our film would be focused around an investigation into the rapist and his past crimes, those who enjoy crime thrillers in general may also want to watch our movie. This broadens our target audience, helping us to reach more people.

Evaluation Question 3

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?


Our production company is called GPH Productions. We focus on making gritty, realistic and hard hitting movies that deal with current issues for those who enjoy more intense thrillers. We're trying to reach an audience of intellectual older teenagers and younger adults. Because of our niche audience we'd expect our movie to be independent and released at smaller cinemas such as the Phoenix, East Finchley.

One of the movies we looked at previously was 'The Last House on the Left' (2009, Iliadis). It was also focused around rape and this film was produced and distributed by the company Rogue Pictures. Rogue Pictures distribute other films of a similar genre (ie. thriller/horror) such as 'The Hitcher' and 'The Strangers.' 

Our distribution company was called 'Heartbeat films' implying that they distribute movies that make your heart beat ie. Dramatic, intense fims.

We would start off by exhibiting our film at film festivals such as the 'Sundance Film Festival.' An example of a successful film that was screened there is 'Paranormal Activity, Peli, 2009,' and independent movie which became a huge success.  

Since our film is focused around a British female teenager from London, we would also try screening our film at the London Independent Film Festival as the audience that would be able to relate to the movie the most would be reached through this platform of exhibition. 

Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?


The main social group depicted in our opening sequence are typical female teenagers in their late teens. An example of a character like this is Effie from Skins, a character that inspired us when choosing an actress to play our main character.

We tried to repsent this social group through the way Georgia was dressed ie. heels, leather jacket, black skirt:

We also showed how she was rebellious through her drunken trip (adding a slow motion hazy effect when Georgia trips) and her smoking before she enters her flat - we did not try to show them in a bad light, we simply showed what many female teens are like. 

Evaluation Question 1

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



Genre: What genre did we feel our movie would fall under? Thriller. A thriller is made to keep the audience on edge. It contains many twists and turns making the audience constantly ask questions - this can be unbearable for them.  

As shown above, the thriller genre has many sub-genres. 'The Safehouse' fits into the Crime-Thriller sub-genre.

We want our audience to have to examine the backstories and motivations of our main characters and to feel somewhat involved in the movie and to become immersed in it.


Examples of crime thrillers include:

• A Perfect Murder, Davis, 1998

• Seven, Fincher, 1995

Both these films include typical characteristics of the crime-thriller genre - We have one clear 'goodie', 'baddie', dark scenes in shadow, tense music and the sequence increases in pace - these are common of thriller. 

Do we challenge conventional crime thrillers? Yes.

We have a female heroin and the whole movie is from her point of view, as opposed to from a male's point of view eg. Seven. 

We also cross-cut between the present and past events.

Narrative Structure: Conventionally, films have a closed narrative in which time is compressed. (Two hours constructs events happening over months or years) The opening tells us the WHO, WHAT and WHERE of the story and we usually see a series of events crucial the rest of the film's development. 

Typically, a film:

this is based on Todorov's theory.

A buildup to the event is shown through jumpier and shorter clips and the sequence is not shown in real time - we include flashbacks and crosscutting between the past and present.

The action code is clearly set up - the who (victim), the where (her flat), and then when. ("It was the 28th February 2010...")

The enigma code is also set up clearly as the audience wonder why our victim was chosen by the rapist. These follow Barthes' theory. 

Form: 

Our film does conform to these typical features of opening sequences, as demonstrated in the grid of screenshots below:

Comparing our opening sequence to that of 'Seven':

Despite the fact that Seven is of the same genre as The Safehouse, the opening sequence for it is very different. Yes, the main character is introduced but we never actually see his face and it's all alot more mysterious with far more ECU's. There's alot more detail too - however, like our opening sequence there's tense music in the background and titles are also included. 

Style: 

Music; Initially, the music is sad but it slowly changes to tense and dramatic with a loud ending when the attack happens. The dialogue is all straight to the point (eg. "I'm here to talk about my rape experience.") showing that our movie will be gritty and realistic. The pace increases building up to the attack.

Titles; 'typed' up as though an investigation piece is being written.

Use of Binary Opposites; 

Between the shots of Georgia talking to the camera and the flashbacks, we included lots of binary opposites through her clothing (tight to baggy), the lighting (dark to light) and the camerawork (jumpy to static):

Editing Week 2 - 15th March

Last week we managed to do alot on our opening sequence - we put all the clips in order, got our music sorted, did the titles and added sound effects to them.


We're aiming to get signed off by Wednesday morning, leaving the triple media lesson on Friday for any snagging etc.


We experimented with changing the order of the clips - instead of having just Georgia talking at the beginning, we tried alternating between clips of  her talking and clips of her walking and getting attacked. We compared the sequences and found we preferred the first and original order as the music fitted perfectly and we felt that the sequence 'flowed' alot better.


Finishing Touches: We need to do our production logo and include it at the beginning of our opening sequence. We also need to improve the title for 'The Safehouse.'

Editing Week 1 - 8th March...

So we've definitely finished shooting our footage - I'm really relieved, it was definitely the most stressful part of the whole coursework experience. Now editing is our priority and I'm feeling more confident that our final sequence will be a success. I'll update my blog from now on, writing down what the group managed to do:

Monday 8th: This was yesterday - we only had a single period to work on our sequences today. We captured some of the footage and had a session on the mac computer with Ryan - he showed us extra effects we could add to our sequences that Windows cannot do.

Tuesday 9th: Today was had two periods of media and half of lunch to edit. We finished capturing our footage and put alot of it together roughly, slowly forming our opening sequence. We had to make sure it had good continuity and we began to think about extra effects we wanted to add in the near future. This week will be an intensive editing week as next week, Despina will not be here due to the Geography field trip.

Thoughts so far...

I havn't blogged on my personal blog in a while - so far on the project, we've done our test shoot which was weeks ago. We used it mainly to experiment with shots and test out some ideas. It wasn't very successful in terms of creating a rough opening sequence but it did make us realise that we needed new actors and that we needed to uncomplicate the storyline a bit.


For the more final shoot, we did change our actors - we used Georgia as our victim and George as our rapist since his leg was better and he was able to do it. This was a really good decision. As well as this, we made our storyline less complicated - it's now just about a girl who was out partying and who gets attacked whilst going back into her flat. The simple storyline means we can focus more on the filming rather than explaining a long story in two minutes.


Our real shoot was the weekend that just passed (28th Feb) and it was definitely more successful than the test shoot in terms of acting and scripting. However we're still unhappy with some of the shots and we're going to do a final final shoot Wednesday evening between 6-9 to get the extra shots we want.