Evaluation

We began by researching movie genres so that we could choose a genre and base our movie on it. We chose to do a thriller movie. Then we researched thriller movie openings and found out more about the conventions of thillers. We also looked at the titles and music in thriller openings and found that many had quite tense music. We looked at popular recent film '28 days laters' and chose to create a similar storyline to this film. Then we had to research target audiences and chose who we would aim our film at. Our group then decided to have our target audience as 18 to 25 year olds. As well as this our group had to choose an age restriction for our film. We decided to have the age certificate as a 15 because although our film may have some violent and creepy scenes we did not want it to be too scary or gorey. For our film we chose to have a storyline that a girl has a dream that the human race is wiped out and then her dream slowly happens in the film. Our two minute opening would be of the girl having the dream. Then we had to decided who would be the main character in the movie. We decided to have nancy being in our two minute clip and that she would be the main character. I think that our research went well and we found out a lot about the genre of our movie. The researched helped us to think about what sort of font to use in our final product. It also helped us think about the storyline and how to make our two minute opening successful.

We then had the task of choosing a name for our film. From looking at other movie titles we firstly felt that we should make the title short so that people would remember it. Also by making the title short it makes the movie sound more professional. Thinking about the genre and storyline of our movie we came up with the name 'Extinct'. We thought this worked well as our title as it looked short and gave the audience an idea as to what the film was about. However, later whilst editing our film and adding the title we decided to change it to 'Extinction' because we felt that this was not so sharp and looked better on our final product.

The next task was choosing costumes and settings. We decided to make Nancys character a young teenage girl who may be quite vunerable. We decided to make her young because our target audience is young people and watching people similar to their age would appeal to them. Therefore the clothes we chose her to wear were high street fashion clothes. I think that the clothing we chose are quite effective although they are plain. I also feel that the costume we chose would show the audience the type of person that she is. Originally we wrote out many places that we could film which included parks, shops and roads. I think that the places we chose to film were good although we should of filmed more in different locations to make our film more realistic.

We began filming using a flip camera which we found was very simply to use. However when uploaded the shots we had taken we realised that the quality was not very good and also the shots were shakey. Therefore we chose to use a digital camcorder for filming. I think that this was a good choice as are shots are now much better quality and as we used a tripod most of our shots have no shake in them. Also we made sure the lighting in our shots was good. We wanted to show a difference in lighting between the clips outside in the daylight and the shots of Nancy in bed. However we had problems trying to film in the dark room so we had to use a lamp so that you could still see clearly in the dark shots. As well as the lighting we had to make sure the weather was the same in all of our outside shots. We wanted to make all of our shots in the daytime and wanted the weather to be dull. We had some problems when it snowed and rained because we could not film outside. I think that we ended up with shots that all had similar weather and therefore I feel that it looks more professional and like it is all on the same day.