The Missing Days Opening Titles

Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation Question 2: How does your media product represent certain social groups?

Evaluation Question 3: What kind of media distribution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Q4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

For our Thriller opening sequence, when we were planning, we were aiming for a 15 rating according to the BFFC guidelines. It states the film is allowed strong violence and language, drug uses, sexual references and violence, and discriminatory language. I believe out film could achieve this rating as it meets these guidelines, because it doesn't really having any of these in our opening sequence, it may even possibly fit into the 12 rating. It's not that we are specifically aiming for a 15 year old audience, but there's no point adding in content just to force the film into the 18 category when it isn't necessary.

As well as following BBFC guidelines, we followed Demographic and Psychographic profiling. From our demographic profiling, we said we would attempt to appeal to teens of our age and young adults, so around 15-30. We said we'd try and appeal to both genders as there are not enough thriller films that try to appeal to females. Race and sexuality we didn't really have a preference for, this was more to do with the availability of actors, which we were limited to. For our opening, we cast a female as the main character, so hopefully our film would gain a greater female audience, as they could relate to her as a character. Also, all the actors fit the teen demographic, again, meaning the teen audience can relate to the characters more, and hopefully take more of an interest into the film. 

Following our Psychographic profiling, we said our target audience would be Reformers and Explorers. Reformers like to be enlightened, have independent judgement and are aware of good taste. Explorers seek discovery; they like to adventure and try new things. Our film is sure to appeal to Explorers as it isn't a Thriller that follows the norm, its quite a melting pot of sub-genres. It might also appeal to Reformers as it challenges the convention of the strong male role in thrillers. 

We believe these make up our primary audience. However, I believe we would have a secondary audience in the 30 - 50 age range, as they too enjoy thrillers, and many may still feel young, or not mind the young cast. We believe the story is compelling enough to attract those of any age.

Evaluation Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

Q5: How did you attract/address your audience? 

One of the main ways in which we attempted to attract out audience was to use a cast of our age group. Having a cast the same age group as your audience means that the audience can associate with the characters more, and it really highlights that this film is aimed at them. We also used a female for the lead, hopefully attracting the attention of females so that more watch our film, as thrillers often tend to be more male orientated. 

Graph of Favorite Film Genres

We thought Psychological Thriller would be the best sub-genre to follow for our film, as it borders on Horror, and horror is a popular genre with our age group. We feel our opening has elements of Adventure too. All these themes and genres are liked by our age group thanks to a quick survey we took. They seem to enjoy shocks and surprises and mystery, like any youths would. We made sure the story wasn't too complicated or boring, to keep the audience engaged with the film. Playing with two protagonists in different time periods helps to keep the film interesting, following one protagonist for 3 minutes may have gotten boring for our audience. 

The score in our film was chosen to really amplify the emotions and feelings we wanted out of our audience at certain moments. Our film has 2 scores, one slower, timid and creepy in the first half, we feel it had an air of mystery to it, and we hoped it would straight away make the audience tense. The second score was the build up to the climax, so it had to ramp up the tension and suspense, so the audience felt the characters were in grave danger. Its faster beat and pounding drums achieve this. The first score is around 0:06 - 1:31, the second around 2:15 - 3:05.


We uploaded our opening sequence to YouTube. This is because this is the main video sharing website on the internet and most people use it all the time. People can comment on your video on YouTube, also, it is easy to post a link to the video onto social media sites to share with your friends and followers, and they can also add comments on them. Majority of people in our audience use Social Networking, its the main way they consume information now. So to address our audience, the ideal place would be social media. So we linked our film to Facebook and Twitter, this was useful as we got some audience feedback. We did screenings with some people at school, some people we asked through Facebook chat what they thought of it, and some were comments and tweets. 

Various ways we received audience feedback

Someone via Facebook said that our film had 'brilliant ideas' and was 'properly tense' in many parts. They said that they thought we could have chosen a 'better font' for the credits, and they thought there were 1 or 2 editing 'faults' in it, but that these 'didn't distract from the overall film'. They thought it wasn't 'your typical thriller', which they enjoyed. 

After a public viewing, one person said that they were 'very interested' in the story, and thought the cinematography was 'excellent'. The thought it was 'genuinely' creepy at points. However, they thought it could have been shorter as it got a bit boring towards the middle. 

Evaluation Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the film process of constructing this product?

Q6 What have you learnt about technologies from the film process of constructing this product?

I have learnt a multitude of skills and techniques that I had never known about before, many different types of editing skills, as well as foley sound and voice recording skills.
Before the production process the blogs that we had helped develop and record our ideas so that we would have some key concepts to focus on, this stage influenced our production as we record details online where both me and my partner could access the information whenever we wanted to, what we learnt from  this process is how to better organise our thoughts and opinions, as well as helping with our research which would influence our work.


 In the production stage the use of camera's was one of the most enlightening procedures, I developed very important recording skills, and matured my use of film angles, shots and movements. I refined skills of operating the camera, such as changing unwanted footage, and uploading on to the lap top.
Furthermore we used lights from the photography department to give effect to our product, I learned how to use this piece of equipment quickly and it provided the perfect mood for our scenes.

To start of with the first important skill that everyone must have acquired is the cutting, this was very simple and allowed my product to use varying montage and prolonged shots efficiently through the ease of use as the cutting was dead straight forward and very quick and efficient to use, as shown below all you had to do was click on the image of your clip and then drag the highlighted picture until you decide you want to keep the rest. The image moves according to the frame at the time of your shot making it extremely simple to understand.

If we wanted to edit the middle of a clip what we had to do was split it, this allowed us every possible cutting option in a simple way. 

Next the tools that came in handy where the colour correction and filter ones, which enabled my product to have a different feel to it, they are also simple to grasp and very effective at directing the mood and lighting of your film. Next the slow motion and fast forward options allowed to create the desired pace if it wasn't already. This was useful in speeding up certain scenarios however some limitations where that it looked unrealistic if analysed carefully.



Next sound had to be added to the product which required us to use the internet to find some sound effects and score, we also used the voice recorder technology to create some foley sounds that we could use in our project, for example we slammed doors, hit things together to make various sounds which we then uploaded on to our project. Once we had acquired the sound we put it through i movies sound effects which had some useful special effects that it could add to the sound effects/ score as seen in this screenshot. What I learnt from these things was how to use equalisers, how to fade songs/fx in and out and how to connect songs/fx together, this allowed me to develop my film making skills.

There was also a text option which would allow us to have moving titles, this was also informative and cool, we ended up downloading many different fonts of the internet to find one that suited, through this i leant how to pick appropriate text fonts etc.

How did the I movie software affect my work?
I believe that with out the software the film would be incomparable to what it is now, with out any effects, any added sounds, any text, the sequence would look not only less impressive but also more confusing as there would be no cut footage, making it drag along much more slowly. However thanks to the technology used it does look good, it is edited appropriately for the genre and it contains easily visible enigma's, the contrasting, colour correction and brightness adjustment all create a sense of dimension and mood as they are dark and creepy suiting our storyline- all thanks to iMovie.

How has new media influenced in the creation of this product, and distributing finished product on video sharing sites?

New media has helped to make our film even better, for example using a site called freeplaymusic.com -we could download sound effects that would be difficult or impractical to do ourselves, for example getting blizzard wind noises to play in the back ground.
The other major benefit was that we could see other films which gave us an over all understanding of the conventions, watching other peoples AS projects helped me understand and get a better idea of what to do for my own project.

Finally when we shared our project on youtube and Facebook we could see people's responses to our product and they were pleasantly surprising, everyone thought that it was really well done, which made us happy that our hard work payed off.

We learnt literally infinite skills both major and minor from this project, it would be impossible to list them all but to recap the main things i learnt where, researching, planning, story boarding, directing, acting, filming, lighting, producing, editing, colour correcting, composing, publishing, distributing and many more!

Evaluation Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

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

When we filmed our preliminary task it was hard at first, operating the camera, directing people and the whole post production process, however I was fortunate enough to have someone in my group who could edit well already, he taught us the basics, so from an early stage our group was ahead of the other ones. However we did of course encounter problems, for example it was hard to direct the actors as everyone kept laughing because they felt awkward in front of the camera, another issue was creativity we didn't know what we where capable of, imagining different shots was not part of the process when we first filmed, however this changed later when we made our own product, as we were not limited to time we were able to think of different shots and incorporate them into our product.
The same was seen with our editing, as we had a chance to mess around with the software we were able to learn more about how to use it.

I have learnt a multitude of skills techniques that I had never known about before, many different types of editing skills, as well as foley sound and voice recording skills.
Before the production process the blogs that we had helped develop and record our ideas so that we would have some key concepts to focus on, this stage influenced our production as we record details online where both me and my partner could access the information whenever we wanted to, what we learnt from  this process is how to better organise our thoughts and opinions, as well as helping with our research which would influence our work.
 In the production stage the use of camera's was one of the most enlightening procedures, I developed very important recording skills, and matured my use of film angles, shots and movements. I refined skills of operating the camera, such as changing unwanted footage, and uploading on to the lap top.
Furthermore we used lights from the photography department to give effect to our product, I learned how to use this piece of equipment quickly and it provided the perfect mood for our scenes.

To start of with the first important skill that everyone must have acquired on iMovie is the cutting, this was very simple and allowed my product to use varying montage and prolonged shots efficiently through the ease of use as the cutting was dead straight forward. Next the tools that came in handy where the colour correction and filter ones, which enabled my product to have a different feel to it, they are also simple to grasp and very effective at directing the mood and lighting of your film. Next the slow motion and fast forward options allowed to create the desired pace if it wasn't already.

Next sound had to be added to the product which required us to use the internet to find some sound effects and score, we also used the voice recorder technology to create some foley sounds that we could use in our project. Once we acquired the sound we put it through i movies sound effects which had some useful special effects that it could add to the sound effects/ score. What I learnt from these things was how to use equalisers, how to fade songs/fx in and out and how to connect songs/fx together, this allowed me to develop my film making skills.

There was also a text option which would allow us to have moving titles, this was also informative and cool, we ended up downloading many different fonts of the internet to find one that suited, through this i leant how to pick appropriate text fonts etc.

Finally when we shared our project on youtube and Facebook we could see people's responses to our product and they were pleasantly surprising, everyone thought that it was really well done, which made us happy that our hard work payed off. We learnt literally infinite skills both major and minor from this project, it would be impossible to list them all but to recap the main things i learnt where, researching, planning, story boarding, directing, acting, filming, lighting, producing, editing, colour correcting, composing, publishing, distributing and many more!


All of these experiences have progressed my individual abilities from the beginning of the continuum up to this point where I have started making holiday videos for my parents that they really enjoy, as well as teaching my dad to use iMovie.

Production Pictures

Prop process, me and Clarice (Clara's character) after setting up a makeshift bed, painted ancient druidic, and hieroglyphic symbols on the wall with red "blood paint" which we bought.

Setting the lights up for a shot of Clara walking down the stairs with blinding light behind her back.

-David Ziolkowski