Addressing the Evaluation Questions

The following are the 4 evaluations questions we need to address: 

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

2. How effective is the combination of your main and ancillary texts?

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stage?


1- My media product I am currently developing and working on production is my thriller short film, where I aim to bring in conventions of dark, psychological thrillers. One way my product uses forms and conventions of real psychological thriller films is through my use of dark, low-key lighting and darker colour pallets, and through the use of slowly built up and escalating camera shots and editing. Such as, modern darker thriller films can often build up tension and suspense that intrigue the audience, through the use of slow camera shots and pacing, that have an end goal of revealing something made to shock the audience. This slow build up is what gets the audience involved with the thriller film and is what creates the thrill value of the product. They also, often use very low-key lit scenes with dark colour pallets, that are suggestive of bleaker and more sinister moods that the audience can decipher, just based on the colours used in the shots. Additionally, one way my media product currently develops real forms and conventions of thriller films is by the way I have got a slow building, ambient piece of soundtrack over my video. In certain types of thriller films, fast, attention-grabbing pieces of non-diegetic audio will be used. This is different to the type of non-diegetic audio I have used in my short film. The reason for this is the different purposes the types of audio create, where my slow building, atmospheric non-diegetic music slowly draws in the audience to my films diegesis and premise, fast, action-based non-diegetic audio aims to get the audience attracted to the action on screen as quickly as possible. This is why I used a slow and more subtle piece of non-diegetic soundtrack as opposed to fast, uptempo thriller bases soundtracks; I was aiming to lure in the audience slowly rather than try and attract them in as quickly as possible, doing so creating a more tense short film.

2. I personally believe that my combination of main text, and both ancillary tasks is fairly effective. I am particularly happy with my poster and how it visually turned out; it replicates the dangerous, dark themes of my main text considerably well. This can be seen through the use of my black and white colour scheme, along with a contrasting, striking red font throughout my poster. This created themes of danger, since the colour red is a convention used in typography and posters that indicate danger or some kind of trouble. The black and white colour scheme also helped to explicitly add to my theme of crime and bleakness. So on the whole, I believe to a fair extent that my poster is a thorough, and effective visual representation of my short film text, and it hints at what the film will be like considerably well, through the uses of conventions and features I've explained. For my film review draft 1, I am happy with the way it turned out and think it represents my short film text to a fair extent, once again. Despite it's a film review, I tried to stick to the same colour scheme as my poster of blacks and reds, which is why my background colour in my film review is black and text colour is often red. I did this to try and replicate themes of Intrusion in my poster as well as film review, so the 3 products share synergy and an overall theme.

3. I think that my audience feedback survey served as an informative, anchoring piece of evidence that helped me establish features and conventions to use in my main text. Despite the fact that my audience survey was based off another short film idea I once had, both of them still incorporate thoroughly similar themes and visions so I still currently find my audience feedback survey useful. One useful thing I have currently learned from my audience survey is that the most common types of thriller sub genres people like to see are action and psychological. This is something beneficial for me as it is good to know that audiences like to see psychological-thriller films, and that I'm not making a product that people technically would be less willing to see. Additionally, I have learned from my results that thriller films can be made better through more effective uses of sound, lighting, direction and cinematography. These are the answers numerous people said when I asked them what they thought made thriller films better. As a result of this, some of these are elements I prioritized and paid additional attention too when it came to filming, story-boarding and post-production. Additionally, another key thing I learned from my audience feedback survey was that 90% of my interviewees thought that the gender of the lead character in a thriller film doesn't matter. This is definitely something that helped me out because once I received all of the data, I then was confident to cast a male in my short film due to the fact that the audience said they don't mind what gender is in the leading role.

4. One form of new technologies that has helped me with my construction and research stage of my project is through the likes of YouTube, Survey Monkey and Adobe After Effects. YouTube was a fundamental aspect of my research stage, I watched many previous short films from students and professionally made, that really gave me an insight on what was to come and how I can draw any ideas and inspirations from these past examples. Survey Monkey is a new technology in the form of a website, that allows anybody to create questionnaires and have them filled in by users on the internet. It was a great service and very much helped me create my survey, which in turn gave me the results that very much so helped my research. In terms of Adobe After Effects, it is a fantastic piece of video editing software developed by Adobe. It is fairly modern as well. This was the main piece of software I used to cut, select and edit footage together used to make my rough cuts. Without it I would of had to choose another editing software which I was more reluctant to do as I like the interface for After Effects and have used it in the past.