What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

After much research on Distribution Company that may distribute our media product, i have decided a universal studio is our ideal company. Universal Pictures (sometimes called Universal City Studios or Universal Studios for short), a subsidiary of NBC universal, is one of the six major movie studios. Founded in 1912 by Carl Lamelle, it is one of the oldest American movie studios still in continuous production running for over 95 years. On May 11, 2004, the controlling stake in the company was sold by Vivendi Universal to General Electric, parent of NBC. The resulting media super-conglomerate was renamed NBC Universal, while Universal Studios Inc. remained the name of the production subsidiary. In addition to owning a sizable film library spanning the earliest decades of cinema to more contemporary works, it also owns a sizable collection of TV shows through its subsidiary NBC  Universal Television distribution. It also acquired rights to several prominent filmmakers' works originally released by other studios through its subsidiaries over the years. Its production studios are at 100 Universal City Plaza Drive in Universal City California. Distribution and other corporate offices are in New York City. Universal Pictures is the second-longest-lived Hollywood studio; a Viacom-owned Paramount picture is the oldest by a month. With this much experience behind universal pictures, it was only right that i chose it to distribute our media product. Also there success in thriller films that they have distributed in recent years such as:

Devil

Devil (also known as The Night Chronicles: Devil) is a 2010 US supernatural thriller film based on a story by M. Night Shyamalan, written by Brain Nelson and directed by John Eric Dowdle. The film was released on September 17, 2010, and is the first of The Night Chronicles trilogy, which involves the supernatural within modern urban society. The film's plot follows a group of people trapped inside an elevator that realize one of them is the Devil Universal studios budgeted this movie around ten million and grossed over fifty one million showing there smart business stature and experience coming into play..
















The Fourth Kind

The Fourth Kind is a 2009 American science-fiction thriller film, starring Mila Jovovich, Charlotte Milchard , Elias Koteas, Will Patton, and Mia McKenna Bruce. The title is derived from the expansion of J. Allen Hynek's classification of close encounters with aliens, in which the fourth kind denotes alien abductions It claims to be fact and uses real archive footage of actual events. The film purports to be based on actual events occurring in Nome, Alaska in 2000, in which psychologist Dr. Abigail "Abbey" Tyler uses hypnosis to uncover memories from her patients of alien abduction, and finds evidence suggesting that she may have been abducted as well. The film has two components— dramatization, in which professional actors portray the individuals involved, and video footage purporting to show the actual victims undergoing hypnosis. (At some points in the film, the actual and dramatized footage is presented alongside each other in split-screen.) Throughout the film, Abbey is shown being interviewed on television at some point years after the events of 2000.The film was a box office success, earning US$47.46 million worldwide, from an estimated $10 million budget. Again Showing Universal studios smart and effective budgeting along with their  experience. 
















All of these factors above played a part in why i have chose them to distribute our media product. They may also want to distribute our product as they have found much success in the thriller genres so they might see this as an opportunity. They have the experience and marketing scheme as they are well known worldwide in distributing excellent films worldwide.

Preliminary Task & Grimaldi Title Opening Sequence

Who would be the audience for your media product?

As you can have seen on previous post, i have researched our main target audience for our title opening sequence. This is more specific in general and it is about one of our audience member called Marcus.

Click on picture to enlarge it!

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

As seen on previous posts, we identified the 15-25's as our target audience for title opening sequence. So it is only right that we represent this social group in our title opening sequence. Our character as shown on earlier posts is a teenage girly girl living at home with her parents.  She likes to party and socialise with her friends with little interest in school. She has a boyfriend who's not an angle and her parents dislike him.

This is our character Samantha Evans posing for a picture at a party. This represents the teenage social group in our title opening sequence. We purposely did this to represent the teenage social group. We did this as our target audience is predominantly teens so we wanted to represent this in and out of our film.

As you can see from the above picture, this is the type of social group we wanted to particularly represent as they were likely to be our audience. This as a result alows them to relate to many things that Samantha Evans is going through, throughout the film such as party's, get togethers, fighting with her parents ect.




One of the main elements of a teenagers life is partying and clubbing, if we had the chance to make the whole film we would of represented this in our film as it represents this social group. Heres what a typical club teenage scene would of looked like:

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

The forms and conventions of a thriller typically include:

Music: Usually tense, starting off slow and then quickening the pace to become dramatic at the climax of the shot. Or the music will take on an opposite tone, of a lively, or even happy mood, whilst the shot is of people being murdered or something– however this usually happens in a more original, edgy or independent film.

• Mystery: There will most probably be an enigma present which will run throughout the thriller film, and it will be answered right at the end, and usually by the antagonist (Serial Killer?) or by the detective (protagonist) which has been clever enough to work out the plot.

• Pace: The pace is quick when action is taking pace, but slower when protagonists are trying to work out what to do, the end scene is open to much interpretation though.

• Mise-en-scene: Cities, where lots of action happens, there is culture and diversity, and a high population. Making the place where the crime happens a ‘normal’ place where the audience themselves are likely to live, so they can relate. Costumes yet again usually represent the ‘casual’ clothes of people, travelling to work, walking in the park, the antagonists is likely to fit in with the rest of the people around him, to he is indistinguishable. The protagonist also, will be either an everyday person who has been thrown into the story unwillingly, or an agent, so the costumes are standard. Props are nearly always used in Thriller films, they could come in the form of clues, murder weapons or guns used by the agents.

• Themes: Isolation, vulnerability, loneliness, betrayal, revenge, love/passion, jealousy, troubled childhood, outcast, obsession...

• Gender: Stereotypically a male character plays the main antagonist maybe with an entourage or on his own. The protagonists are usually a mixture of male and female characters.

• Characters: The antagonist is usually intelligent and scheming and there is usually a relationship between the protagonists too, like a partnership between two agents. 

After researching music of the forms and conventions of a thriller we decided to use some of the elements that it contains. For example the tense music used in most thriller title opening sequence. We decided to use this element but however we developed it by playing two tense music at once over lapping each other. We were cautious as we thought it wouldn’t work but thankfully it worked perfectly, this was a challenge that we had and we overcome by finding ways of editing it for it to fit.

A thriller is usually faced paced and tends to have a mystery, we looked at many title opening sequence which have these elements such as se7en:

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We looked at these elements and decided to use it in our title opening sequence "Grimaldi". However it was not a matter of copying it, we develop it by changing the character from your typical male to a female, and bringing a toy to the picture.

Mystery is one of the main forms and conventions of a thriller and it sometimes in films contains a serial killer or a psycho path. in this case of the dark night, it’s the joker. We as a group wanted to implements a similar but not identical mystery sort of character, so as a result we thought of "Grimaldi" who is a clown toy with a mystery. It is clear it’s a similar idea but we developed this and added a toy into the equation to create more mystery and drama.

Our DVD & Cover

After finishing our editing we burned the title opening sequence to a dvd. We also decided to put the finishing touches to the cover to make it look professional and slick.

After we done this, we printed out two sides of our poster that was created by Taylor Beahan and we measured it so that it would fit the DVD cover and we placed it on there also having the age certification on it.

Delay to uploading our Title opening sequence :(

Unfortunately due to the college computers not performing well when we tried to upload our final finished and edited video, we could not upload it. This is because it took hours to process the video without even uploading. As this was on the last day of college before we split up for Christmas we did not have time to try upload it again. Therefore I've decided to go ahead with my evaluation and as soon as we get back to college, I will immediately upload the video.