3. Who would be the audience for your media product by Niall

3. We feel the target audience for our media project are men between the age of 15 and 25, we have found that men seem to enjoy the thrill and tension of horror movies more than women and men who are in there late teenage years and early twenties seem to find it more exciting than the older age group. We have done some internet research to find out this information and we have also asked men and women of different age groups for there opinion on horror films.

We feel that the age group between 15 and 25 tend to like horror movies more than any other age group because they enjoy the thrill of it and they would like to know if the movies is scary enough to frighten them, the thrill of horror films increases both heart rate and adrenaline which men enjoy the feeling of adrenaline pumping through there body more than women.

We are going to use this information we have gathered and use it in our horror film, we have decided to use lots of tense music to build the tension up so the audiences heart rate and adrenaline will both increase as men who are in there late teenage years and early twenties like this feeling of excitement rushing through there body. We shall also use lots of close ups and lots of sharp sounds in our film, as this will also increase the excitement of the audience who are watching our film.

Someone from our target audience age group on IMDB who is 18 years old who watched Paranormal Activity 2 said, "There's two or three scenes out the movie that will make you jump briefly, because they catch you off guard." This is what we are trying to achieve with our film as we feel that the age group between 15 and 25 enjoy being scared.

Here is a shot where the audience may be caught off guard as the door slams behind the victim without anyone closing it, hopefully our target audience age group will find it scary and hopefully catch them off guard.

Conor: 5. How did you attract/address your audience?

Our intended target audience was people aged between 15-25. I think we targeted them well as our film fits into the specification for a rated 15 film, but yet it still appeals to people over this age too, with it being scary but not too scary.
From our evaluation research we can see that our film does not fit in with our intended age specification as the person who watched our movie rated it as between 19-22. They also put that  they thought it was aimed more at females, this is not intentional as we wanted to appeal to a wider audience, so both males and females. We think the reason it may seem only targeted at females is because there is only one female in our film and no other characters, and it is not overly scary, so may not appeal to males as much.
To target our intended audience we used an actress who is 17, so in the middle of our age range so as to appeal to our targeted audience as much as possible. We also kept the mise-en scene very neutral in terms of colours etc so as to apply to a wider audience as possible. Finally, we kept the music tense and quite fast, to appeal more to the males, as it adds suspense and makes it scarier, to appeal to the males.

AS Media Studies: Foundation Portfolio Evaluation Question 7 by Niall

7. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

For the making of our film we have used the Blogger, Imovie, Garageband and the internet. All of these have specific uses and all helped us to make our film really effective and good.

To begin with, Imovie was what we loaded our film onto and what allowed us to edit it. We found Imovie quite easy to use and we soon got to grips with how to use it to successfully edit our film, for example it allowed us to cut clips, delete bits we didn't want, change the darkness levels, render it, change the order of clips and other things too. All in all without Imovie our film would not be as effective as we feel it is.

Secondly Garageband has helped us to create our music needed to accompany certain parts in our film and create the feeling we want. Also we recorded our own sounds and put these with sound clips already available on Garageband to achieve the desired effect. In Garageband we could put sounds over one another etc and a wide range of sounds were available on it so we were never short of choice and didn't struggle to create pieces of music we were happy with and that we felt fitted our film.

Here is where we recorded our own sounds which were whispering and heartbeat, we recorded the whispering sound by using a microphone and then uploading it onto garageband by using real instrument instead of software instrument.


Furthermore Blogger has allowed us to keep track of our progress, record everything we have done and document it. It shows us the progression from the beginning, from having the idea to actually creating and all the planning, practices and work in-between. We have found Blogger really useful when creating our film. 

Finally, we have used the internet throughout the whole process of creating our film. We have used it to research horror films, then more specifically psychological horror films, which is they type of horror film we have tried to create. We used it to work out the rating our horror film should be, to find out information on previous horror films that have been made and to draw inspiration from these. 

All of these technologies enabled us to be more creative and to use skills and improve our film greatly. They also helped us to maintain control over the film, as we could change/improve any aspect we felt needed it. In conclusion without all these technologies we do not feel our film would have been a success.

Evaluation Question 1 by Rachel Nolan.

1. Introduction: what did you make, who did you work with and where did the original idea come from?
The brief we were set was to create the first two minutes of a horror film. It could be any type of horror film, from psychological to zombie, but we chose to do psychological. The reason we chose to do the psychological genre is because we found these the most realistic type of horror films, but also some of the scariest - as they play with the audiences minds and draw them into the film.We watched a lot of psychological horrors before coming to the decision to definitely follow the genre and we found that they were all very successful in achieving a scary film with a tense feel,  which is what we wanted to achieve for our own film. 
Before beginning to plan or create our horror film we did a lot of research into what a psychological horror consists of and we did this by watching psychological horrors. 
The film Paranormal Activity inspired our original idea, as we liked that there was a very scary threat, yet never physically seen by the audience. We used this concept for our film, with throughout the whole film there was a threat present, yet never visible. This is typical for horror films of the psychological genre and we intended to mainly follow the conventions.
I worked with two other people, Conor and Niall -  we had done other practice exercises previously and we found that we worked really well as a group and decided to do our final project together. As our group get along really well it definitely has helped in us creating a successful piece of work, that we are all proud of, as we all bring something different to the group which I think is very useful. We have not had any problems in our group and I think that this is because we all listen to one another's ideas and nobody took control and tried to manage the group, however we all had the ability to take control when necessary and to tell one another what to do when we felt it was needed. 
Here is a picture from the film Paranormal Activity:

Here is the trailer for the psychological horror film 1408, we watched the beginning of this film and drew inspiration from the build up of suspense, with the use of music, mise en scene and camera angles/shots, for our own film:

This is a shot seen in the trailer for 1408. We like this shot because of the use of lighting and mise en scene to create a scary, foreboding feeling for the audience. The dim lighting creates effect, but the lightening which is illuminating the main characters face allows him to be the thing to which the audiences eye is drawn to in the shot and the sense that something bad may be about to occur...

This is another shot from the trailer of 1408 that stood out to us. We wanted to include a lot of close ups in our film as they show exactly how the character is feeling, allowing the audience to understand and feel how they are feeling. Also close ups are one of the main conventions of psychological horrors.