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Evaluation Question 7

Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Evaluation Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Evaluation Questions 4&5

Who would be the audience for your media product? How did you attract/address your audience?

Evaluation Question 3

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

Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Evaluation Question 1

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

Audience Feedback

At our media showcase evening, some people that viewed our film gave us some feedback about how they liked 'When the Bough Breaks'.

Finished Final Opening!

Here is our completed final two minute opening! As a group we are so proud of everything we have achieved over the last year and we are so happy its finally finished.

Film Synposis

If our film opening was to be made into a full feature length film, the main protagonist would be the male, serial killing, black cab driver who kidnaps and tortures multiple victims. The story will focus mainly on the mother and baby revealed to be trapped in the boot at the end of the opening two minutes and the torture they endure. However, later on the story will turn to the main protagonist and his psychological problems and history. At the end of the feature length film we have decided that there will be a hero like figure that 'comes to the rescue', which will most likely be a detective. As a group we realise that we want the audience to be fully involved and consumed throughout the film, which is not a typical convention of the psychological thrillers that have already been produced.

Costume and Props

For the costume, the male cab driver in our opening's costume is basic casual wear that cab drivers are typically seen in due to the fact that they do not have to dress smartly. Therefore, it is just a tracksuit and casual trainers.

The props we used for our opening were picked specifically to make the cab driver seem like a typical family man, in which passengers should feel safe in the cab. For example, the family photo in the front and the cab licence badge create the feel that he is a trustworthy driver, which misleads the audience completely as he is actually a serial killer.

Dialogue

Tara made a video for our group which shows the dialogue we used in our two minute opening. We used Stefani's dad as our creepy taxi driver and while we were filming we had a conversation in the back of the cab to make the dialogue seem more natural and therefore more strange when it is revealed that there is actually nobody in the taxi…

Storyboard / Shot List

This is the final plan of the shots we used during filming for our two minute opening, our alternative to a storyboard. On reflection, I realised we used quite a few close up and extreme close up shots of either the taxi driver's mouth or objects in the car, to add to the eery tone we were hoping to create in our psychological thriller.

Location

I realised I have previously forgotten to talk about the location in which with shot our opening. We decided to firstly use the road in which me and Emily live to film the basic shots of the cab drivers mouth and shots like the family photo. We did this because the scenery did not have to be specific here as it was only showing the road for a short time.

Then, we moved on to a more remote setting of Whitewebbs Golf Club not far down the road. We chose this setting as it is a remote woodland setting with many trees and lots of space to add to the creepy feel of our opening. We also loved the setting because of the shot entering the golf club car past where the cab is secluded when driving down a pathway lined with trees as this conformed to the nature of the psychological thriller we are aiming to create.

Reaction Video

This video, as I mentioned before, is the reaction from our media class to the baby crying at the end of our film. From this reaction we decided to keep it because we think it adds a certain edge to our opening, weather it is pushing the boundaries too far or not…

Title

We were really struggling to find a name for our two minute film opening as we wanted something that was a twist on words but was also reasonably subtle, and this did not turn out to be easy! Even though we know that having a baby crying in the boot at the end of the opening is pushing the boundaries quite a bit, we have decided to keep it, as a lot of the feedback we had was that it was definitely a bit twisted, but people generally liked it.

 So, we have researched into nursery rhymes to find a title, and we have decided on the name 'When The Bough Breaks' from the classic lullaby 'rock a bye baby'.

Almost Finished Opening

This is a draft of our very nearly finished opening. We were recently playing around on YouTube and found a clip of a baby crying and added it to the end of the film to see what it looked like and we were quite surprised as we like it, even though it may be slightly morally wrong. So, we need to get a few opinions on weather we should keep it or not.

 

The only  things we have left to do are to finish off the title sequence, to sort out the editing on the footage where the taxi is stationary by putting footage in-between, to re record the voice at the end of the opening, to decide weather we want to keep the baby crying at the end of the film and finally add in the engine noise over the dialogue in which it is missing.

Title Sequence Research

As we are coming to the end of our editing process we started looking into title sequences separately and bringing out ideas together. I researched mostly titles of films that were of the psychological thriller or horror/thriller genre as they seemed to suit our opening well whist also sticking to the conventions of the psychological thriller genre we have based it upon.

The first title sequence I came across was the opening to 'Se7en'. I really liked the font used and the way that the words appear and disappear on the screen as it screamed psychological thriller and hooked me in right from the beginning, which is exactly what we are looking to do.



The second title sequence i came across was the opening to 'Bullit'. This was my favourite out of all the sequences i have researched as the font was exactly what i can imagine our film having as it was bold and sharp. I also really liked the fact that the font was white, as I had only considered having black font before, but after watching the title sequence to Bullit I'm more interested in having white font in our opening.
  )

New Music Idea

While Tara was doing some extra research she found a song that was better suited to our film, so we decided to try it on our film and we love it! The song is 'It's not for me to say' by Johnny Mathis and it fits in with our footage perfectly. We showed our media class and they were divided in their opinions and some preferred the old one whilst others loved the new one. However, we have decided as a group that we want to keep the new song, linked below:

Shaileyee's Rection

As a group we think our opening is coming together just as we planned it to, but we wanted to get an extra opinion to check that it was also appealing to other people outside Mac 4. So, we asked our media friend Shaileyee to be the first to watch the (almost finished) opening and give us a bit of feedback!