This blog has been marked. SJA 08/05/11

final film product

Q5 How did you attract/address your audience

Q7 Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

During media throughout this year we have been set the task of making an opening sequence. During the begging of my A level course we was given the task to make a continuity task that would prepare us for the opening sequence that we have to make later. I am going to show try and comment on the things that I did well in my continuity task and also those things that showed we were beginners in the filming industry.

After I look back at this Shot it is quiet funny because you can see the reflection of the person that is filming the actual shot. This is such an amateur mistake that I would not have been able to use in my final opening sequence because even though it is a big mistake it just looks unprofessional which may take away from my grade. This is in comparison to the other shot that i have which is a well taken shot and there could have be a reflection although we avoided it by the lighting Ect.

The shot above is a shot that we were firstly quiet happy with although once we got feedback one shot it was apparent that this shot had breached the 180 degree rule. This was an arguable point because it was such a short amount that it seemed as if it did not breach the rule. How ever in the opening sequence there were not any breaches of the 180 degree rule, which gives an insight on how much we have come along since we had last filmed chopped up various shots.

However our first attempt at making a movie was not a full flop we were able to get some good shots in our and techniques in our continuity task. As you can see the shots that we did have that even though we were beginners turned out pretty well. The shot of the boy walking through the door was one shot that I was quiet happy with because it was the first time that I had ever done a Match on action shot and it came out good for beginners. How ever the shots that I have in opening sequence show the progress that I have made over the course. I think the shots that I have in my opening sequence are well framed, I have stuck to the 180 degree rule and used match on Action and P.O.V.

Q6 What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Throughout the making of my opening sequence "Possession", I have had to use various different pieces of technology to get my opening sequence to the highest standard possible. The technology that I used consisted of programs like 'live type', 'Final cut' and 'I movie'. to incorporate music into my title sequence I also had to use a website called 'freesound.org' and that is where I got most of my music and also used Itunes to get the music on the film itself.

I used mainly three main programs 'Live type', 'Final cut' and 'I movie'. Live type is the program that I used to make that I used not only to make my titles to put over the film but to make my company logo also. 'Live type' is one of the programs that was a new piece of technology to me although it did not take me long to work out how to use everything on the program since it is similar to another program that I have used before 'Logic'. however it does differ in many ways but overall it was easy to get the titles where I want, how I want and got to have which titles i wanted also.



'Final cut' is essential for the opening sequence for the main reason that it is the program that infuses the 'I movie' with 'live type' and lets the movie play as though it was made at once. Final cut for me is also quiet easy to use but there were certain difficulties getting to grip with how the actually program works, but once you have learnt it is easy.

The last program that I used to put my opening sequence together was the 'I movie' program this is probably the most important program for making the actual opening sequence. This is the program that i used to cut the shots that we took and put them together to get the actual finished product. I also had to incorporate freesound.com with this also so the opening sequence once I had made it. This was simple I just had to download the sounds that I wanted to put with the sequence then just cut it to fit that shot that it was being used with.

The last piece of technology that I used and this was the most important thing was the Apple Mac. This is because it has all the programs on it that I had to use to get the to cut, chop, put titles and music on the opening sequence. The task may have become more difficult without this piece of technology. How ever when first getting to grip with the Apple Mac was difficult although after a while it becomes easy because the some of the applications have similar qualities.

There is also another piece of equiptment that was essential to the opening sequence his was the camera. Since the camera that we used was such a high spec camera with HD abilities the shots that we took came out much better than they would have with the other cameras that were offered to use. Thisesspecially important that we used these cameras because in our opening sequence we used shot of the night time and we had to use natural lights so with out this camera we might not have been able to use some of theshots that we.

There is also other pieces of equipment that we use and that was the tripod and the Fig Rig. These pieces of equipment were not that important throughout the opening sequence, They were just used so that we could get some of our still shots steady and stop shaking although we do not use it for many shots because it was not need.

Q4 Who would be the audience for your media product?

I have an idea of the person that I think would watch my type of film. Firstly I don't think age is going to be a something that splits my audience apart but they are going to have to be over the age of 15 because the film may have some violence in it that is not suitable for minors.

The next thing that may split my audience apart is that I don't think that the main audience of people coming to watch the film is going to be the ones that come to watch the film because of the content of the film it is something that someone would call female, I see it to having a lot of explosion and action those are things that I don't think this would be appealing to females. I think that it is going to be a mainly English audience due to the setting of the film and also the content of film. other things such as occupation, education and ethnicity are irrelevant because it may reach out to all types of people.




The next thing that may different audience is the psycho graphics of the audience that may watch my film. Firstly I see the people coming to watch my film being in the in the ABC1 scale, this for various reasons. One reason being that people in the ABC1 scale would be in the upper half of the scale because they would be the people who have the most money to actually go out and spend on watching the film.


I Also think that the person that comes to watch my film will be your typical English male, this being he likes drink, clubbing and watching football like most other males in England. I also think that they would be content conformers. This is because I don't suspect any one out of the ordinary would be watching the film so i think that people would like this, although others like strives would come to watch this film if that is what their friends are doing.

This is basically what i think that audience may look like just normal people that are interested in film.

Q3 What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

These films are two of the many films that may have had the same distributer that we would have used for our opening sequence. The distributer for the film snatch is made by 'Columbia' they are an established film distributing company, although they may not be the best example because even though snatch is an English based film Columbia are known for working with films of a much higher calibur.

This film 'Lock, Stock and Two smoking barrels' is a film that is distributed by 'Summit Entertainment', they are more likely to distribute my film. This is because since they distributed a film similar to ours and were very successful from it then they would probably like to re-live that success. This is because our film has many of the qualities their film does also.

Q2 How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our film challenges the ethnics stereotypes that are normally brought up in today society. That is the thought mainly people of a black ethnicity are the main ones doing crime, although in our opening sequence this is not the case. In our opening sequence two main main characters that are committing crime are both black and white, which gives an insight into our view on the stereotype on that subject.





Our opening sequence also makes a female the person that helps towards the plot of the film and make the story line by getting kidnapped. This was a decision that we decided to side with because we thought that a boy getting kidnapped would have seemed slightly unrealistic so we used a girl. So like most other films we decided to use the girl as the vulnerable one. Although this is not the same for a film called 'Set It off' where they use all female characters as their main strong people and give them the charcters of males, in the sense that they are robbing a bank which people don't hear about women doing as much as they would men.

Another thing that we used was a shot of the girls house we made it quiet bright inside and dark outside to contrast against each other. This is again something that we used to make the girl look as helpless as possible, while she is inside in the light she is safe. As soon as she comes out the door into the dark everything changes and she is helpless, against the men again feeding some stereotypes.

We also gave an insight in to the class and status stereotypes. As you can see the the in the picture are wearing work boots, this is to give the audience the impression that they are working class. When the opening sequence folds out they may think why would it be working class men that are doing those types if things? Maybe because they are working for someone of a higher class than they are so the Builders uniforms are just for show. I f that is the case then we can consider the opening sequence a success because we aim to get the audience asking question so they are more eager to watch the rest of the film.

Q1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My product has various connotations of normal thriller opening sequences, and also we have different genres of film intertwined with the normal thriller that is a slight hint of comedy and also action which complement each other well. We would hope that our opening sequence reaches out to all social groups, although it is mainly made for those who enjoy thriller ECT and that could be from teenage years to elderly people; it isnt based around one age group. There have been various different thing that I have in my opening sequence that are in other professional opening sequences such as:



Two of our main characters are also male this adds to the cliché women getting kidnapped, we were going to use two women but thought that may look unrealistic. Also we decided in out scene not to use any speech as an opening sequence job is to get the audience to ask question we thought that this may leave them inquisitive as to why we made his choice.




continuing this point we also have the main character doing suspicious thing again raising suspicion as to what they are going to with the thing that they are picking up, this is again another techniques that we have used to try and keep the audience drained into the film and keep them guessing as to what is about to happen.

Our opening sequence is a through and through British film and would have been a very low budget film to make, to the distributors wouldn't have been your big names such as 'Warner Bros' it is something smaller such as 'Maple Pictures'.

This is because British film are norm ally on the smaller scale of the film industry when it come to with the budget made to them because it is mainly liked by the British viewers and our film mimics that property which limits it to smaller distributors. however this does not take away any of the film value as it is still a video of high quality that most people could reach out to if they like this type of film, because it grabs the audience out of their seat and leaves them wanting more.

Audience Research 2

In this section I got a survey from some random people and asked them for two minutes of their time to help me complete my survey so that this would help me with my own opening sequence.

The first two questions that I asked were just two questions about demographics just the sex and the age of the person answering the questionnaire. The third question that I asked was about the clients favourite type of film but most of the people I asked were around the same age.

The fourth questions that I asked was then I asked if they would like to see two genres of films joined together and one of the pieces of feedback I got back is yes but they have to suit each other or else it may ruin the film, which I thought was a good and gave me a good insight for the actual opening sequence that I made.

Lastly the last two questions that I asked was just just about preferences and that majority of people said that they like either thriller, action and comedy.Also i asked about the prefered setting I used usual thriller settings but thought I would think outside of the box and use a totally different setting to have the auidence asking questions.

Titles

- Very Damaged

- Assassins Dub

- Fluoxetine

- Rough Linen

- Project Y

All of the above are titles that my group as possible going to be using, we choose these titles under the influence of other film genre titles font choices. They have all been unique from very plain to extravagant, that is why we chosse the above few because they may be the best for what we are trying to create.

Conventions of a thriller

There are various elements that a thriller possesses. The connotations are mainly suspense, tension and excitement. A thriller tends to get the audience on the edge of their seat because of all the things that are happening withing the film. Most thriller ask for the audience watching to have some intellect because there may be some things that they may not understand, but there are little clues that the film makers give away to help with audience but this also makes them ask question about why certain things within the film are happening.

Brief

The task that I have been set is to make and create an opening sequence for a genre of my choice. The genre I choose to make my opening sequence with is 'thriller', the reason for that is because thriller is one of my favourite types of movies and also it would be a easy topic to make an opening sequence with. mThe poeple I am working with are Jenny Hill and Elenya Grant, they both have quailties that I think are going to be very useful when making our title sequence, such as Jeny acting skill and Elenya artistic over view to the shots in the opening sequence.

Story Board

This is the drawn up version of what the finished opening title sequence will look like.

Script and Casting

Script:

As a whole we chose to have only one line of dialogue at the end of the opening sequence this is because it adds to situation as a whole in addition to this no dialogue also asks the audience more questions and the fact that they are inquisitive would add to the rest of film as the story line progresses, and the line we are using is "don't worry this won't hurt a bit". we choose this because it was simple but affective.

Casting:

Casting we an easy decision because we are using the whole of the people actually making the video and also we are going to get one other person to play the other kidnapper. This is also a good idea to have the other person because he drives which is a big part of the opening sequence.

We choose to use me and the other boy as the two kidnappers, we choose them because this would make the opening sequence seem more realistic; we were pondering using two girl kidnapping a boy but then thought of the realism within that and decided that it wouldn't be believable.



so now we are using one of the girls in our group Jenny Hill, the reason that is because she does drama so the acting will be to at least to a good standard, although Elenya has done acting in school productions before so either one that we uses it would have been a high standard.

Here is some of the costumes that the characters will be using:

Sarah Smith

Kidnappers: