In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product is a crime thriller. We took the classic thriller conventions and modernised them so that a moderately, young adult, British audience could relate more to the characters and enjoy the opening sequence further; by doing so we came across different risks, challenges and crossed different conventions. We used some conventions of a typical thriller such as dramatic irony; the audience are aware of how ‘Dante’ covers his tracks after deficiently murdering a comrade of his faithful
girlfriend ‘Julie’ deplorably no one has found out yet.
Our product genre which was a urban-crime thriller, allowed us to work with a genre hybrid which would correspondently target our niche market/a
udience using an urbanised,
dramatic, exciting and anticipating score countering against conventions with its innovative style. We then subtly overlapped this with a continuous and tense score which implicated the closing of the opening sequence’s irony.
Many of the distinctive thriller conventions such as a continuous trail of anticipation, anxiety and excitement are not fully fletched in our opening sequence because we unveil different enigmas such as; who, what, when and how in between an ordinary morning demonstrating dissimilarity with a typical thriller. Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller films were highly inspirational for the process of creating our media product as his common trait of playfulness mirrored the way in
which we linked our flash backs to the actions in at hand, i.e. the dragging
of the shovel and ‘Igor’ being hauled across the set. Hitchcock’s style in plot inspired us to use a dandy, pretty and somewhat naïve girl as the helpl
ess one and next victim in line. (Hitchcock tends to use women as the helpless victims as seen in ‘Psycho’). Our film is
identifiably a British set film as it is filmed in west London with a British cast, using the urban surroundings to portray close case scenarios for the young and cohabiting adults in urban cities.
How does you media product represent particular social groups?
With the aid of different stereotypes we specifically targeted the cynical portrayal of young black males. We had the option of using ‘Bill’ (our Caucasian group member) but instead we chose to use ‘Dante’; as his skin colour and tall, muscular build, helped enrich credibility and fulfil the stereotypes of violence orientated black males. It was also imperative we casted one black male as the victim to simply counter the preconceptions against youths in this ethnic group. This will alter the view that not all stereotypes are true and many are simply exaggerations of social circumstances. The dominantly white population/audience already have a fixed idea on
how young black males should act and behave as they are portrayed through different multi-platforms such as newspapers, Hollywood Films or the news. West London is not usually known to be a crime populated area but alike ‘Kidulthood/Adulthood’ we have brought another counter stereotype to the table by bringing this sinister crime to west London’s society.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Our media product, in terms of institution, is an independent film as it is of low budget, does not have the backing of film studios as well as its urban location and casting of unknown actors. To distribute our film we could approach U.K broadcasting industries such as Chanel 4 or BBC 3 which are very supportive of low budgeted films. Through the use of the internet we could also distribute our film on MySpace,
YouTube or Facebook for the public viewing and feedback benefits. These internet based sites may not come with profit but uploading them is free and there is still a possibility that advertising agencies could approach us and hopefully give a small cut of their profit to us as the creators of the media product. Additionally there is a possibility to share in advertising revenues from YouTube. The kind of
media institution that might distribute our media product is a terrestrial television such as Chanel 4 who has a remic to promote independent British films.
It is a public service broadcaster and provides programming for minority
audiences and therefore may show our film. Also, commercial broadcasters have advertising funding which means that our media product could as well generate profit from being shown on Chanel 4. Furthermore, our media product could be shown on a community channel as the content is user created; these sorts of channels are on digital, cable and satellite television and could exhibit our media product. Another way to get distribution and exploitation is to release our film at a film festival. There are many short film, student, and community film festivals that would distribute our film. However, more widely renowned film festivals such as the Cannes, Sundance or Venus film festivals may not
distribute a product of low budget and
independent nature alike our kind. No cinema that is of a major chain such as Odeon, Cineworld or Vue, would distribute our film as it is not a mainstream film
with a large budget and does not have an A-list celebrity cast. Mainstream films tend to have less challenging themes whereas an independent film, such as our media product, tackles more realistic themes that are experimental. However, independent art house cinema such as, Waterman’s in Brentford, The Electric Cinema in Notting Hill and Everman an independent chain, may exhibit our film as they show independent films.
Who would be the audience for your media product?
Initially our target niche was deliberately aimed at young adults without a specific gender target aged 15-20. We aimed for our film to be suitable and classed as a BBFC certificate 15. I feel that we met the guidelines set by the BBFC as we thoroughly researched what they were before developing our media product. There is very little dialogue in our sequence which features no extensive use of strong language and we
also used a low degree of violent scenes, even though we would not have been able to provide ourselves with the facilities or skills to generate highly skilled realism in intensely violent scenes. I therefore think that we successfully created the opening sequence of a thriller that can be moderately and confidently classifies as a ‘15’ certificate as it obeys and follows all the guidelines set by British Board of Film Classification. On our preliminary audience research, we chose this age group as we felt that young adults of this age would be able to empathies with the young adult cohabitants ‘Dante’ and ‘Julie’ also relating to them in terms of the way they are presented.
How did you attract/address your audience?
Our media product related to our relevant target audience as we had the two main characters in a relationship cohabiting together. Love and romance is a theme heavily related with the younger generations as marriage is promoted to sociably construct the positive functionalist view of marriage. Many teenagers leave home at a
premature adult age today and cohabit with short term partners or friends; this is also linked with how ‘Dante’ and ‘Julie’ live alone together. At the age of 18 all characters on set can easily relate to the 15-20 boundaries and the audience may feel for more empathy and understanding towards them as they have more credibility as characters. The mise en scene and key props used were again also used to assert credibility as the actors were dressed in casual trendy and ‘cool’ garments to relate to the ; in vogue ‘youngsters’ of today.
Our audience feedback also helped attract/display our audience awareness. It is a useful and important part of creating and editing our media product so it is of the highest standard possible. People who watched our product gave us useful constructive criticism to help us improve on our faults and errors. Some suggested that we change the contrapuntal score and make the score more subtle but effective to deliver tension and anxiety, this was then developed and also gave us the idea of using a consistent overlapping score approaching the end of the sequence. They also pointed out unsteady camera work and the unnecessary use of zoom, the 180 degree rule was also not thoroughly put to use. My group and I followed through with the different suggestions and altered many clips as the audience we presented our daft to, are of the same audience we relatively aimed to target. The subgenre of our media product was a crime thriller; specific conventions we included to make it appeal more to our target audience was having a different raced couple which is commonly growing and having kids of a mixed race.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
With a good understanding and general knowledge in computing skills, working with the Apple Mac editor enabled me to modify any work and enhance my skills. Technology has sternly changed in the past 50 years, from newspaper prints to automatic editing, with notable changes(concerning videos) such as; the ability to change the contrast of the clip – taking away the integrity of camera lights- being able to cut clips and put them into different time slots ensuring a coherent flow in clips. Although editing and computing technologies has furthered in development, using these programmes are relatively self-explanatory as a group we found that if we shared our roles in editing we will proficiently work more rapidly.
The old cam-cord was simple but effective. It did the job which it was encrypted to do but limited us with time. We had to ensure we had enough time record whilst benefiting off daylight otherwise the old camera could not pick up light. The camera and the editing software was quite juxtaposition as one the editing software was highly skilled and developed whilst the camera was old and relatively drivel.
I have learnt that, although whilst editing you can alter many mistakes and make many changes, you need to give yourself enough footage and correct camera work (old or new) in order to get the best result of the clip.
My approach to the preliminary task was very negative as I had underestimated the amount of vocation and effort put behind a project as such. I had not anticipated the commitment, devotion, organisation and consistency put behind filming, editing, blogging and planning in order to produce a relatively excellent final piece.
With the first task we encountered a few halts in our progression and technical difficulties with the DV cam corder. Whilst attempting to rewind and take out the tape, the cam cords old technical use did not enable us to look back at what we had done meaning we were at times recording over vital work. This problem was later fixed as we changed cams and simply re-recorded mixed work. Furthermore, whilst editing we realised our footage was not continuous and we did not leave enough time at the beginning and end of each take, meaning we did not have much footage to edit with. During planning we saw problems with lighting; during the suns peak the light was too bright meaning it over shadowed the footage and we could not see much; at night the cam couldn’t pick up light at all making it impossible to see anything, especially characters and props of a dark complexion. These problems were all distorted to make the final product more efficient and it benefited my knowledge and the knowledge of the group because in future reference, we will evaluate problems facing us during filming rather than encountering these problems during editing. Although the Apple Mac computers have a good editing programme, its tools cannot always alter specific filming errors.
Amongst all my errors I made sure that all my organisation skills were at its best as there was a lot of work involved in the whole process of making our media product. We had to re-draft the story board more than once, finding appropriate locations that we could use also ensuring it was of a closed set to ensure no unwanted sounds during dialogue were heard; however we found that the ambient sound enabled us to add realism and add tension to the foreboding score.
Quite evidently I have learnt many skills ranging from how to edit or simply how to uphold a camera at the right angle to ensure the ‘close-up’ shot for instance to ensure it was at its best. These skills I have learnt will remain with me and forever help me with any sort of media projects, whether it is professional or unprofessional. My unfathomable passion to work in the media industry enabled me to cooperate with my peers relatively well and take on any tasks given by the team leader. We fairly distributed the work load and at times I was forced to take on more than others but that was all part of working as a team.
