Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

In the process of making our thriller, "From the Dark", I have learnt new things concerning technology and its link to our thriller. The main thing I have learnt is how to edit a film effectively into a clear but absorbing narrative. By using effects such as "dip to black" and "cross dissolve", we could change between shots of the boy, Jonathon, in the house, and the members of the enigmatic group outside the house or somewhere else in the house. This prevented any long, boring sections where only one character is being followed. Again, without our new experience and knowledge of thriller films, we would not have been able to efficiently create this effect. We managed to achieve this effect without affecting the narrative, creating a clear but gripping thriller. Our thriller is below - this contains evidence of these effects being used.

Furthermore, I have also learnt a great deal about sound. Before the construction of this thriller, I did not realise the huge importance of the sound choice in a thriller - I now know that the soundtrack can completely change the atmosphere - as the wife of Bernard Herrmann (American composer for motion pictures, who worked with Alfred Hitchcock in famous films such as the thriller Psycho) said, "The music tells the audience how to feel and what to think,". Because of this, we chose a soundtrack that had a heartbeat that changed as the situation of our thriller changed, which also had an eery background sound to help the tension and suspense increase.

http://www.freesound.org/people/hello_flowers/sounds/32424/ - Main soundtrack
http://www.freesound.org/people/steveygos93/sounds/91572/  - Non-diegetic gunshot sound

Also, I learnt a great deal when operating my media blog. While setting up and using the blog was quite straightforward, the main thing I learnt was linked to the different ways of presenting my work. Using a blog for my media studies coursework cause me to use things such as Prezi and how to embed Microsoft Word documents into a blog. Before this I had not even heard of some of these ways of presenting my work e.g. Prezi. By using a media blog, it has increased my knowledge of how to present my work and improved my ability to use things such as Prezi. My Prezi I made to display the target audience for our thriller, "From the Dark", is shown below.

Target Audience for our Thriller "From the Dark" on Prezi

In addition, using the website IMDb assisted me greatly when trying to research other thriller films. For example, we used the "user ratings" section for "Animal Kingdom" to find out it's target audience. From this we learnt that it's target audience was similar to the target audience of our thriller, "From the Dark" - the males under 18 gave it the highest rating. This told us that successful features from Animal kingdom could work in our thriller. For example, we created the character Jonathon, who is similar to "J" from "Animal Kingdom". (as discussed in previous questions).

As well as this, YouTube helped us construct our thriller. As we wanted a similar costume to that of "Harry Lime" in "The Third Man" for our mysterious, enigmatic figures, we could use YouTube to view sections of "The Third Man" to help us analyse the costume. Below is a sequence from "The Third Man" that I analysed in our thriller research.

Also, we used many new techniques for changing the lighting in our thriller. We used several different lamps and lights to adjust the lighting, and in our edit we tried both black and white, noir lighting as well as full colour. In the end we decided to use full colour. At the start of filming our thriller, the lighting we used was too dark and we realised that and decided to re-shoot. The discarded footage is shown below:

                   

Finally, the school e-mail helped the production of our thriller film, as we could e-mail our teacher with any problems or enquiries and receive feedback. This meant that we could get quick feedback and advice.