Media evaluation questions

Media Evaluation Questions

By Louisa Collins-Marsh

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of existing film opening title sequence?

• This first frame has an eerie feel to it which helps give a dramatic feel to it. It also helps set the scene for the opening sequence of the film. The non-diegetic music is soothing and doesn’t give away the genre of the film, this in some way could be challenging the stereotype of the thrillers soundtrack.

• It continues with an introduction to school life. The title is displayed at the bottom which doesn’t obscure the action taking place. This setting is one of a few which the film is situated, this prepares the audience for the type of film this might be.

• This shot is entirely different to the previous shot because we have an individual person who the camera is mostly on throughout the opening scene and we have a voice over by the time this shot is in frame. This helps to introduce the main character and get in insight to who and what the character wants. The props help to illustrate the type of person the main character is, so by adding slippers and a carpet we wanted to demonstrate that he was waking up to go to school.

• This forth shot emphasise the setting in which the film is mostly set. This not only helps us understand what the film could involve but we also get to know what type of film this could be. We wanted to show areas of the college by not showing faces and we decided to shot with a tinted window to get a feel of college but doing it discreetly.

• This shot is a typical shot of a boy trying to study, as we see this type in different kinds of films that have students life in it. This is a crane shot which we thought might be ideal for this type of action. We wanted to support the stereotype of teenagers going on their phones while revising , so we made sure this was clear to the audience.

• In this fifth shot, we wanted the audience to know that he was a student still in college so we shot this in the library. We made sure that his face wasn’t seen because we didn’t want unveil the main character yet and so made sure we had a close up of the hands and his shoulders. The lighting wasn’t natural light because we wanted to highlight the fact that he is determined to find this book.

• This shot is a low shot, still making sure that the characters face is not shown and it shows he is going somewhere. The music is still very slow , so we know that there is no real action going on, only a narrative that tells us he is a student going through the student motions. His clothes are the type of the style we want our character wearing and it somehow shows the type of personality that he has.

• We are back in his bedroom and this could be seen as cross cutting. We can easily see a weapon which is a convention used in the genre thriller films. By including this object we wanted to establish the genre and the intention of the main character, so we had him holding a card with a girl on it, illustrating that this must be the girl he is supposed to kill.

• This is the ending shot that has at the side the picture of the lady. ‘The Plan’ is the title of our film and we wanted to change the way in which the titles are usually y displayed. The fact that its called the plan explains that the main character is going to come up with a plan that involves murder.

How does your film opening represent particular social groups?

I couldn’t get any photo that had a profile of our character because we wanted to keep the profile and the guise of our character hidden. We had done this for the film and we wanted to market it with him being anonymous. This made sure that audience would be guess and wondering of what the actual killer could look like and so this stirs up interest which we would want from our film. However, this is what I could find that made sure there was a comparison between a character from another film which had the aspects as our film.

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

Who would be the audience for your media product?

A profile of our typical audience member

This is James Donald, he is 18 years old and lives in west London. He dresses with the known trend among boys these days and hangs out with his friends after work. He shops in JD and works in retail. He enjoys watching films such as 4.3.2.1, Pusher three, and the Sweeney. He is mostly interested in the rap and hip hop side of music and wants to produce his own music.

I think our film would mostly appeal to boys who have the same interest as James because they can more or less relate to the main character of our film. This would be seen by the actions and words that our character says, especially when the voiceover is playing in the opening sequence.

He is classified as the stereotypical gangsta of todays youth and this would obviously help us with knowing who we can direct our film to especially when this film would appeal to that type of social group.

James dress style is a trend that is seen everyday and this is also the style that our main character is wearing in the opening scene. This is another factor that can help relate this type of social group to the film and by doing so we might also be able to promote our film.

How did you attract/address your audience?

How did we attempt to engage our audience?

In this shot we have one of our production companies displayed in white text which is very simple and recognisable. The music starts to play in the background which consists of a guitar being strummed and it helps set the atmosphere of the film we are about to see. There are trees in the background and as the camera pans down we see the sign saying ‘Harrow College.’ We immediately start to understand that this film could be in a college. We wanted to establish this because we know this might relate to some of our audiences experience by being in a college.

This shot gives an insight to the college life and the atmosphere that is felt. By introducing this shot, it seemed to help engage our audience further by beginning to understand what this film could be about. We wanted to make sure it related to the student of today so the natural approach of filming unexpectedly when a group of teenagers went through the door helped emphasise the motion of student life.

This shot continues with the main character waking up and we get a low angle of the characters body, directing the attention to his feet. We wanted it to natural so we decided to have him with night clothes to emphasise him rising from bed.

In this shot we decided to introduce the college where there were more people and more of an atmosphere to add to the intended college life where are main character goes.

This shot shows light humour which might appeal to the audience in a humorous way. We wanted to use some comedy essence that might uplift the actual film opening and it might challenge the conventions of a horror thriller with comedy placed into it.

In this shot, our main character is studying and pulls out his book. The mise en scene helps signify that he is a boy who is still studying and is seen as dangerous because we see a pen knife beside his book. It is something that stands out in a students life so we wanted an object that might deter the audience from realising that he is a killer.

We also decided to spread our film by word of mouth, which benefited us a lot especially when there is a large amount of people who like the genre. We also gave out questionnaires to make sure we got feedback about our film and the result of who liked it the most.

I think we got the preferred reading of our media product because the feedback we had gotten back was acknowledgement how the film could relate into student life and this not only made the piece more interesting but it also had a lot of awareness on the subject of psychology which this film was based on.

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

Everyone in the team had experimented on the equipment that we needed and the software that would edit our piece of work and it had benefitted us very much. I soon understood how to manage the camera and use the tripod and develop my skills in the editing suite which I know might benefit me in other activities that I do that might include the equipment in media. By using these strategies, it has helped me be a useful person on set while we done the title sequence.

TripodIn the preliminarily task I had started to develop my skills in using the tripod and how it worked. This had helped me further when I had used it to film some of the shots in our opening sequence.

CameraThis is the sort of camera we used in both tasks and I had the chance to use in a lot when we were filming. I now know that I can use this if there are any other tasks that need to be set which involves a camera.

Final Cut proThis is the software we used to edit our opening film which I had trouble understanding but I practised using it and made sure I could my skill when editing our final product.

BloggerWe had analysed our work in blogger which helped organize the work which we contributed altogether. I didn’t understand how to plan out my work when I first tried it out but I began to make progress when I contributed work for our coursework.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

I have learnt to be patient and productive with my work because the task had a lot of potential in it which meant we could improve our opening sequence. However we had to put a lot of effort into it to make it as good as it should have been. We were given more creative freedom for the final product of our film which included more understanding of our shots and of the mise en scene we shot in. In the preliminary task, it seemed like we had more rules to oblige to as there were certain things that needed to be included, however we always understood the 180 degree rule which we made sure was valued in every shot.

There are certain shots we included in our opening sequence which we were taught in class, and they are placed opposite and on the next slide to show how much we understood the techniques.

This is a continuity shot which we thought would be ideal for this particular action of a boy running down a corridor and turning the corner. By placing this in our piece it made it simpler to tell the story in order and still grab the audience’s attention. This can be compared to the shot we had thought up below, it shows we had copied the same technique that we had done in the task to the opening of our film.

We used the 180 degree rule here, making sure that the action that the camera didn’t go over the line and matching the action of both character positions. This helped us understand what to do when we were filming the opening, keeping in mind that the rule is always used to keep the direction of the characters the same.

This is a extreme close up that was used in both tasks and it helps to highlight the a certain issue which arises. In the case of our task, the boy is late so we decided to use the clock showing the time to emphasise his lateness and the phone to highlight who the women in the photo is.

A cutaway was used to add more detail to the task and opening sequence. We wanted to include more of an atmosphere in both tasks so we include cutaways that not only added to mood of the piece but expressed more information through various cutaways of the time and the college.