Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The image above shows all of our characters that you see. To some, this would be a typical seen that you would see on the streets of London nowadays, as teenagers are the stereotypical group that you would see on the road at this time. We used these three youths represent the trouble makers at you would often see in the media. Teenagers are one of the most commonly mentioned in a bad light. Normally ‘up to no good’ and are well known for loitering and for that reason would make it seem very believable to the audience that they would all meet up together to go out this late.

However my partner and I wanted to have a little twist on our story as, instead of there being the usual vulnerable women/girl that are used in most horror films, we wanted to make it well known that no one would be safe from this ‘Jenkins’ character that is mentioned. Being in a group is supposed to be a lot safer than being alone obviously and being a boy which are fondly thought to be a lot stronger than girls would make this story a lot more interesting, especially from ‘intimidating’ black males. This not only shows an age stereotype but an ethnic one as well, as some people from the older generation may associate them with crime.

Evaluation Question 1

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

I have chosen these nine images above as they represent the conventions of a horror movie quite well. Not all of them are particularly scary in but there are some aspects that make it relevant. However there are some problems that we did encounter and we did work pretty hard to fix them to the best of our ability.

I believe that our film opening is like a traditional horror movie that you would see as we have tried to make it as ‘close to home’ as possible to make it relate to our target audience so it will seem like a normal thing that could happen them. For example the boy at the bus stop listening to music not paying attention to anything that is happening around him. This is a typical thing that most teenagers do in this day and age and we wanted to incorporate this for that reason.

 My partner and I had films like ‘The Ring’ in mind when we thought of this. As in this film they had a false start in this film near the beginning. This is represented in the picture above, first column second down, showing that he can’t see what’s coming but everyone else can.

The location that we chose was a bus stop as seen in the magority of the shot above. This is not a typical horror film setting but we used it as horror films mainly take place in what seems to be a safe environment and a place where most of our target audience would have to visit on a day to day bases whether they like it or not.

• the title of the film
• setting location
• costumes/props
• camerawork/editing
• title font/style
• story/how the opening sets it up
• genre/how the opening suggests it
• how characters are introduced
• special effects

Feedback for our actual movie

In the lesson my partner and I had presented our unfinished film opening.
The main problems that our peers have pointed out to us is that we had a couple people cut out of the shot so it wasn't filmed well and i am highly aware that we may be marked down due to this.
The lighting wasn't very good, as it got quite dark very quickly. So in some shots what you could see on the screen wasn't very clear. The location that we had chosen wasn't the best as the camera had picked up all the traffic and wind noises instead of the actors. Me and my partner both have has ideas to fix this problem so this was the least of our worries.

We both didn't just receive negative comments, we did get some positive feedback. They did mention that everything flowed effectively and we had good ideas, all or credits were good and that we had a really good production company. We had some constructive criticism by the class as well, they advised use to shorten some scenes to change the boldness of the font

Overall I believe the two of us have a clear understanding to what we have to do to make our film as good as possible.

My opening credits with jelly babies

Also in this lesson we made our opening credits using jelly babies.

Opening film Credits

In today's lesson we spent most of our time analysing open film credits. What we all noticed is that the name of the film never came first as we call assumed the producers name would always come first, how every we watched to different opening sequences from two differerent periods of time. "Se7en" which which was filmed more recent than the other film "Vertigo" which was filmed in the 50's, however the same structure still applied so it was almost tradition to have the title later on in the sequence. One thing we were able to identify is that with the older films the opening credits took a lot longer than the moden film but the begining reflected what to expect in the film.

Vertigo

Se7en

Two More Ways I Would Use To Market My Film

If I had more money to market my film, I believe that I would invest in creating merchandise that would b appealing to our target audience that I have posted previously...

My first experience of editing my horror movie

In today's lesson my partner and I had been editing the footage that we had filmed over the weekend.

The editing obviously wasn't the main challenge as we had done quite a lot of practice over the last couple months, it was the filming itself. However me and my partner did foresee a problem with lighting and we did try and find a way around it but this did not work exactly how we planned. We wanted to use the early winter darkness to our advantage to make the audience get the feeling that everyone was unsafe for they wouldn't be able to see what was coming but it got dark quicker than we thought, therefore there was a lot of editing that would we needed.

And for that reason there was a lot of editing involved not only with what was visual but with audio also as we did all our filming outdoors that day. We both did end up cutting out a lot of footage as some sounds and footage was irrelevant and/or unusable. We were able to use different techniques with the sound and hopefully we will be able to improve our skills to make the film opening look as good as possible.