Production Research

Our media project is to create a film opening of our desired genre, the film opening must last at least two minutes and should include editing, sound effects and different camera shots. 

The original and initial research that I did into our production was into the main genres of films to get a broader view and an idea of what genre we would like to use for our production;

In a group of 3, we have chosen to use Thriller as the genre for our production. A thriller film aims to keep the audience alert and on the edge of their seats. Throughout this page I will be looking at typical media conventions of the thriller genre and analysing particular thriller films to get a better understanding of the genre and to take ideas that could be useful in our own piece. In our production we would like to incorporate thriller conventions  such as settings, characters, lighting, narrative and sound to make it more effective.

This is a presentation of a film analysis that I have done on The Silence of The Lambs, an existing thriller movie;
       
                     

Film Analysis of an existing thriller film 'The Dark Knight':

Film Analysis of an existing thriller film 'SE7EN':

The first part of our research was based on our audience - in this we created a questionnaire using questions relevant to our desired genre and collected the results from a range of different ages and genders to give us a clearer perspective on who our target audience is. Here is the original questionnaire that we created -

       Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Here is an example questionnaire that we have used as a sample to analyse from our results; the majority of the results were generally very similar to that of this one.

This pie chart is representative of the ratings that individuals in the survey gave on how much they enjoy watching thriller movies - the ratings were on a scale of 1 - 5 with 1 being not at all and 5 being enjoy them very much, as we can see from the results there were no 1's rated and the majority of the participants rated from 4-5 giving a very positive outlook on how people view thriller movies. 

Here we can see the results from the 'Favourite Film Genre' question in the questionnaire - Thriller is the favourite genre with 26% of the people in the survey voting it as their favourite, followed closely by Comedy at 21.7% of people voting this at their favourite genre, this is useful information in that we can now consider what the favourite genres are when thinking of initial ideas.

The first pie chart of these two shows the results from the question asking of the participants gender, there were 20% more women than men, however the numbers were largely similar and so we know that our target audience can be both for male and female. The second pie chart however, shows the results from the question asking the participants what gender they would prefer the antagonist character to be - male or female. Surprisingly from these results we found that the majority (72.3%) would prefer a female antagonist rather than a male antagonist. These results are useful in helping us to decide what characters we should use for our production.

From the results we collected, we analysed them and found that the most popular age groups for liking thrillers is around the ages of 16 to 25 years old, with a mix of both males and females. The results helped us to create a more suitable narrative for our production as we know what they enjoy and what they do not. One of the questions was about the antagonist's gender, in our responses we found that most people tend to prefer having a female antagonist and so we will use a female antagonist for our production. Not only this but we also found that the most popular sub-genre for thrillers was crime and so we are incorporating crime elements into our narrative to suit the target audience.



The next part of our audience research is into existing UK tribe groups - such as mainstream groups, edgy groups, alternative groups, urban and aspirant groups. Understanding that there are different cultural groups within the UK culture is important in the decision of who to target our audience at, as each group has individual differences as well as group preferences in various activities. If I can understand the things that appeal to my audience then I can use these elements within my production.

Flash Card Deck created by ndann98 with ExamTime

To research more into our target audience I have created an audience profile for three individuals belonging to different social groups that are of our target audience;

                     

For the next part of my research I have looked into the codes and conventions of a typical thriller film - here is a group of flashcards of the codes and conventions (click on the arrow to see the next convention or on the card to see an image) - 

Flash Card Deck created by ndann98 with ExamTime

After looking into what elements and factors contribute to making films thrillers, I have looked at some facts, figures and box office charts to see what the most successful thriller films are, here is a chart showing the top 15 thrillers from the year 1989-present;

This chart shows thrillers with all different sub-genres, however out of all 15, 7 of the films have the sub-genre of crime - this also influenced us to choose crime as a sub-genre of our thriller media product as they seem to be the most successful thriller films.

This figure shows the variety of ways that people access and watch films throughout a variety of age groups, as we can see the 16-24 age group (our target audience) has a wide spread of data throughout each different form of watching films e.g Cinema, Television and also beginning to merge into the online streaming sector so watching films on subscription websites such as Netflix or LoveFilm - this is useful in the way that our target audience age group has an extremely widespread way of watching films, giving them an ease of access to most media products.

Here we can see the figures in a chart for the age distribution of cinema goes from the ages of 15 and above in the years between 1997 to 2012 - these figures are helpful in understanding what age group goes to the cinema the most in more recent years and comparing these figures to the films released in cinemas around these years tells us what age group are more likely to go to the cinema to watch thriller genre films. This figure shows us that the age group more commonly going to this cinema is age 15-24 which is who we are using as our target audience age group - therefore ensuring that our production would be successful if released in cinemas.

After looking into the codes and conventions of a typical thriller genre I then wanted to get a better insight into the types of genres that fall into the genre of thriller and so I have created a presentation on the sub-genres of thrillers;

I have also created a mood board with some of the typical conventions of thrillers included - 

This animation goes through a mindmap of some of the most popular thriller movies to date;

Mind Map created by ndann98 with ExamTime

Alfred Hitchcock is known all over the world for his ingenious director techniques and the making of his thriller movies - he was known as the 'Master of suspense' - here is a slideshow of information about  Hitchcock, some of his movies and a few of the techniques he was most known for, to read the information on each slide click the arrows -

                          

                       

Before we are able to create our own logos and production company titles, I am researching into existing production company's to see what the typical conventions of logos and production titles are for thriller films. 

                         

In order to know how to locate our production and film titles for our production, we needed to know the specific order of title sequences and so I have researched into the conventional and traditional order of titles for films.