EVALUTAION - 1 In what way does your media production use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media productions

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

Our two minutes sequence is called MANIPULATION and we followed many conventions of the Thriller/Horror genre to make our project. The point of our thriller is to mess with the Protagonist who may be being haunted or who may have a multi personality disorder. This is a plot that has been seen in thrillers like “Memento” and “The Machinist” with Christian Bale.




The point is with these movies, that you don’t know whether or not the characters are in their right minds or not, and in this way they act as representations of everyday people that may or may not be going through stressful psychological times and make us all feel better and a little bit more normal compared to them!!!

One thing from MEMENTO that I admired that the time lost its not in chronological order he needs to find out what he is doing. This makes every move feels very uncomfortable as he is going through short term memory loss he keeps tattooing himself to keep memory but that is even messed up all about the mind.


Our protagonist thinks he is working on secret government project cataloging undesirable social groups in the U.K. and ways to get rid of them. He is not very happy or comfortable with his job though, and because of this he is a bit nervous and stressed out. We used the prop of a KALMS bottle which is a type of “over-the-counter” medicine that is supposed to calm people down in times of stress, but then we changed the pill packet label so it suggests to our audience that even there naturally everyday medication can be tampered with as it is only stress relief pills not even prescription stuff. This could be a warning against taking so much medication and becoming too much like a paranoid USA businessman, or it could just generally be a warning to say “Stop polluting your bodies and minds cause you start to do unreasonable things when you want money and status in this context”

The sub genre (of the meta genre of thriller) that we are working in is Psychological Thriller. In these types of films (until the often violent resolution) the conflict between the main characters is mental and emotional, rather than physical. where much of the action is going on in the mind of the protagonists.

We have an antagonist that likes planning mind game with UK government officials who are responsible for making the lists of undesirable racial groups to be removed its set in the future for a warning. Or do we? The point of the film is to imply that a group is being taunted by a ghost or a real live persona who is a threat, but that you don’t know who it is. I think that it would be good to air issues of racism in this country, as our group and teachers discussed a lot of times recently where foreigners hadn’t been treated fairly, which fits in well with the recent push to introduce cards for all foreign nationals in the UK to carry around with them. It feels sometimes that history is going in circles – printing more money etc and I think that identity cards as well as passports are pretty unnecessary and that there should be a UK film that addresses that.

We are just lucky that we were in a position to beg,borrow and steal (almost) a convincing location and props from people we know who live around our school. This really helped to create the feeling that it was a higher budget production than just a student film.

Examples and some influences of another psychological thriller that we liked was FIGHT CLUB and SWORDFISH, which are American, Both of these had similar themes of making society take a good look at itself, before sometimes taking radical action to change the balance of power – especially at the top.

The most interesting thing about FIGHT CLUB is that he is obsessed with commercialism and that he is an avid consumer of society before the protagonist (played by two characters who are part of the same mental entity) loses it.

We tried to convey confusion with editing pace and a variety of shots, as well as a soundscape that was eerie and suggestive of more confusion and mind games to come.

EVAULATION - what have you learnt about Media Technologies from the process of constructing your Product?

We used on the shoot day the camera type was a Sony pd170 and as normal for a Sony camera it has a Carl Zeiss lens As my role was the role of the cameraman on the shoot day I learnt how to use the camera and the different settings like how to set the exposure up which is important for the frame because with the wrong exposure the frame looks to blurry We used the Final Cut Pro for the editing of the movie and I learned how to construct bins for the different logs of sequences of the rushes. I learnt also how to create a bridge and how to fade a credit in and out which we utilized for all of the credits

EVAULTION - looking back at your preliminary task what do you feel you have learnt about the progression from it to the finished product

I was required to film a sequence involving two characters in a conversation within an interior set. One character crosses a room to establish themselves opposite another character and a few lines are exchanged. The organization for this task was totally different to the organization of my media production. We had one lesson to shoot and to plane the task contrary to my media product for which we had one month for the planning and one day for the shooting. We had to develop the storyline on our on and for the development of the production we had to produce a production pack with our ideas for the movie before even beginning with the planning for the media production. For this production pack we had to do research in the internet to get information about special effects, sound effects in horror movies and about director of hour movies. Before our group decided which idea we would choose each of us had to write a treatment and to present to the class which wasn’t necessary for the preliminary task because the plot was preset and it was already figured out how the sequence should be shot. Because of this process I learned how to write treatments and my presentation skills improved.