Target Audience
The audience I am targeting with my media piece are mainly fans of the film-noir genre aged between 15 and 70 who are moviegoers that are serious about what movies they see and understand what goes into them in order to make them good. I was not aiming for any gender in particular. The film is a thriller as well as a film-noir and would be appealing to a mixed gender audience.
Research
In order to find out about movie audiences in general, I carried out audience research with the Explorer Scout group of which I am a member (see other post on Audience research for more information). From what I learned, most of the people who participated in the survey are more into 'mainstream' blockbuster films that are sometimes not very subtle in their narrative structure and are primarily very commercially-oriented. However these sort of people are not my core audience, the sort of people I am appealing to are what would be described as a niche audience. A way I would attempt to get these people to see my media piece would be to use the internet, such as social networking sites, so as to gain attention and a following for my media piece.
Mood
What I put into my opening that would attract the audience into continuing to watch my media piece was the use of suspense inducing music in order to build up an atmosphere of dread and foreboding within the people watching this to suggest the narrative possibility that something bad is going to happen to the main character.
Mise-en-scene
The mise-en-scene of the opening I had in mind was a dark empty room which would give the audience the feeling as if someone is going to jump out at many moment and attack the person in the room which was later proved true by the door slamming shut off camera and the character being asphyxiated by poisonous gas (use of unseen terror). This was probably the most successful element of the media piece because of the use of the characters' costumes to give the audience an idea of who these characters may be, the props as they drove the plot (like the book read by the private investigator character) and the rooms layout since I intended it to look messy thus that is what I did.
Here's a mise-en-scene example: I deliberatly created a look of disturbance as if there's been a struggle
Plot
The enigmas I put into my opening to attract audiences to keep them watching was to keep the identity of the character secret so that the audience will want to continue watching the media piece to find out the identity of the character and how he ended up in the room with a dead body. The lack of dialogue was deliberate in order to create an enigmatic feel for the media piece and to let the audience decide for themselves what is going on like having the ending being open ended to allow opinions of what may have happened. I also challenged a typical film noir cliche as I had the private investigator character being killed off at the end of the piece which normally does not happen in most film noir pieces.
However there are things I wish to improve about this media piece. Firstly there was a continuity error within the piece since the actor playing the private investigaor character's shoes kept changing colour between shots as we filmed on different days (improvements here could be to advise him to wear the same shoes on each day of filming). There was also one issue pointed out by the test viewer I showed it to was that they did not get the sound of the door shutting thus the improvement for next time could be to insert of shot of the object that just made that sound.
Sound
The sound used in the extract included the use of music throughout the piece by Bela Bartok and John Cage. One of the uses, at the beginning, was praised by my test viewer since he said it reminded him a lot of the opening credits to 'Vertigo' (1958) due to the music fitting in with the various shapes (similar to the images of Vertigo's title creator Saul Bass). Hopefully the audience will be able to notice references to other films like this. However, one improvement I would like to make with the use of sound in the extract is to find a leaking gas sound effect to give a reason into why the private investigator character was choking to death.
In this shot is an example of a reaction shot to a loud noise which I enhanced in post-production
Lighting
An achievement I made with this technique was to bleed out the colour in order for the audience to see what the private investigator character was doing with his hands when one shot was too much in the shadows. Despite not being true monochrome in some cases, it did have that monochrome-like feel, again associated with typical film noir movies, avhieved through the use of a tool in iMovie which allows you to change it from colour to monochrome without affecting the lighting. Unfortunately, and this is something I need to keep in mind for the future, I was unable to create the use of shadows effectively so to achieve this next time, I will use a drape on the window to block out the light in order for the lamp to work effectively.
Example of backlighting (use of natural light) to create a dramatic effect
Camera
One of the praise I got from the test viewer in this category was the actual picture due to its similarities with Vertigo such as the opening sequence since it looked disorientating something which was associated with Vertigo. Another praise I got was the shots, such as the use of close-ups on the other parts of his body, around the private investigator before his reveal in the later scenes. I felt I managed to achieve an effective use of handheld shots since this time round the camera did not shake when I filmed the shots like it sometimes does when you perform handheld shots. However I do need to perform perfect zoom-ins and zoom-outs, even though I did not do any in the piece due to the following reason, since sometimes when I try them they are always too fast, too slow or seem too jittery when I press the zoom switch too tentativly.
Here is an example of a high angle shot used in a montage to create a dramatic effect as the character dies slowly.
Editing
The thing I felt I achieved well on the editing of this extract is, mostly, the continuity editing which allowed the events of the media piece to run smoothly even though I did compress the time between the private investigator character putting away his notebook and pen and him exploring the room.
The audience I am targeting with my media piece are mainly fans of the film-noir genre aged between 15 and 70 who are moviegoers that are serious about what movies they see and understand what goes into them in order to make them good. I was not aiming for any gender in particular. The film is a thriller as well as a film-noir and would be appealing to a mixed gender audience.
Research
In order to find out about movie audiences in general, I carried out audience research with the Explorer Scout group of which I am a member (see other post on Audience research for more information). From what I learned, most of the people who participated in the survey are more into 'mainstream' blockbuster films that are sometimes not very subtle in their narrative structure and are primarily very commercially-oriented. However these sort of people are not my core audience, the sort of people I am appealing to are what would be described as a niche audience. A way I would attempt to get these people to see my media piece would be to use the internet, such as social networking sites, so as to gain attention and a following for my media piece.
Mood
What I put into my opening that would attract the audience into continuing to watch my media piece was the use of suspense inducing music in order to build up an atmosphere of dread and foreboding within the people watching this to suggest the narrative possibility that something bad is going to happen to the main character.
Mise-en-scene
The mise-en-scene of the opening I had in mind was a dark empty room which would give the audience the feeling as if someone is going to jump out at many moment and attack the person in the room which was later proved true by the door slamming shut off camera and the character being asphyxiated by poisonous gas (use of unseen terror). This was probably the most successful element of the media piece because of the use of the characters' costumes to give the audience an idea of who these characters may be, the props as they drove the plot (like the book read by the private investigator character) and the rooms layout since I intended it to look messy thus that is what I did.
Here's a mise-en-scene example: I deliberatly created a look of disturbance as if there's been a struggle
Plot
The enigmas I put into my opening to attract audiences to keep them watching was to keep the identity of the character secret so that the audience will want to continue watching the media piece to find out the identity of the character and how he ended up in the room with a dead body. The lack of dialogue was deliberate in order to create an enigmatic feel for the media piece and to let the audience decide for themselves what is going on like having the ending being open ended to allow opinions of what may have happened. I also challenged a typical film noir cliche as I had the private investigator character being killed off at the end of the piece which normally does not happen in most film noir pieces.
However there are things I wish to improve about this media piece. Firstly there was a continuity error within the piece since the actor playing the private investigaor character's shoes kept changing colour between shots as we filmed on different days (improvements here could be to advise him to wear the same shoes on each day of filming). There was also one issue pointed out by the test viewer I showed it to was that they did not get the sound of the door shutting thus the improvement for next time could be to insert of shot of the object that just made that sound.
Sound
The sound used in the extract included the use of music throughout the piece by Bela Bartok and John Cage. One of the uses, at the beginning, was praised by my test viewer since he said it reminded him a lot of the opening credits to 'Vertigo' (1958) due to the music fitting in with the various shapes (similar to the images of Vertigo's title creator Saul Bass). Hopefully the audience will be able to notice references to other films like this. However, one improvement I would like to make with the use of sound in the extract is to find a leaking gas sound effect to give a reason into why the private investigator character was choking to death.
In this shot is an example of a reaction shot to a loud noise which I enhanced in post-production
Lighting
An achievement I made with this technique was to bleed out the colour in order for the audience to see what the private investigator character was doing with his hands when one shot was too much in the shadows. Despite not being true monochrome in some cases, it did have that monochrome-like feel, again associated with typical film noir movies, avhieved through the use of a tool in iMovie which allows you to change it from colour to monochrome without affecting the lighting. Unfortunately, and this is something I need to keep in mind for the future, I was unable to create the use of shadows effectively so to achieve this next time, I will use a drape on the window to block out the light in order for the lamp to work effectively.
Example of backlighting (use of natural light) to create a dramatic effect
Camera
One of the praise I got from the test viewer in this category was the actual picture due to its similarities with Vertigo such as the opening sequence since it looked disorientating something which was associated with Vertigo. Another praise I got was the shots, such as the use of close-ups on the other parts of his body, around the private investigator before his reveal in the later scenes. I felt I managed to achieve an effective use of handheld shots since this time round the camera did not shake when I filmed the shots like it sometimes does when you perform handheld shots. However I do need to perform perfect zoom-ins and zoom-outs, even though I did not do any in the piece due to the following reason, since sometimes when I try them they are always too fast, too slow or seem too jittery when I press the zoom switch too tentativly.
Here is an example of a high angle shot used in a montage to create a dramatic effect as the character dies slowly.
Editing
The thing I felt I achieved well on the editing of this extract is, mostly, the continuity editing which allowed the events of the media piece to run smoothly even though I did compress the time between the private investigator character putting away his notebook and pen and him exploring the room.
The praise I got in this category from both my tutors and my test viewer was the effects I put on the titles such as my opening logo and the colouring effect on the logo of the secondary production company.
However one problem I did have was that the scene of someone running outside cutting to the shot of the door did seem odd and abrupt as did the transition from colour to monochrome since it resulted in an odd change in the continuity of picture quality. This could have been achieved better had I added a transition effect in between the two shots such as a fade to let the audiecne know that the scene was changing locations.
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