Our film genre is action-thriller and we have been relatively safe with sticking to the generic conventions of this genre. For example we have a scene where there is a female victim as a hostage and two males in control holding her hostage. This is a convention used in many action-thrillers as the male is often portrayed as being more dominant than the female as this genre is often aimed at a male audience. The whole kidnapping in general is often seen in films of the same genre such as "The Transporter".
We don't challenge any conventions of a typical action-thriller but we do develop them as our male lead characters are portrayed as being very casual and comfortable with the whole situation of crime and kidnapping which is similarly done in the cult classic "Pulp Fiction" with the characters Vincent and Jules. I feel that our film was directly influenced by "The Transporter" and "Pulp Fiction" as our entire group liked the idea of the two male leads being unusually comfortable with the criminal activity taking place. Our title sequence is pretty similar to the title sequence of "The Transporter" as it starts with the lead characters preparing for a job in a calm and peaceful environment with the titles appearing. Although with "The Transporter" the action immediately starts after the calm opening whereas we chose to provide the problem that the rest of the film is based on instead of an immediate action sequence.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
We have stereotyped our characters by having our two male leads as being dominant and in control and our female character is a hostage which portrays that the men have the power and are in control while the woman is in danger and in need of help which can be seen in many action-thrillers as the audience is mainly male orientated and we feel it would appeal more to our male audience if this was the case. Our two hired criminals are rather young, early 20's, which connotes a lack of experience and skill as criminals which would have added a humour aspect to the film which later could have been experimented.
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Our film could be produced by a major Hollywood Studio as many similar films have had success worldwide such as "Transporter" "Snatch" and "Lock Stock...". We have outlined Warner Brothers as our distributor in another post. Although with our film being set in Britain with little budget needed as few special effects are used and no exotic locations, our film could be an independent film. There are many of opportunity for product placement within our film as cars play a major role in the film with high speed pursuits etc. Clothing would also bring product placement as the richest of the characters would be wearing designer clothes and some of the more hands on criminals such as our two male leads will be wearing more casual high street clothes that all could be advertised within our film. If a major Hollywood Studio were to distribute our film there is also merchandising opportunities for Tee-shirts and clothing based around the characters and quotes.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
The target audience for our film would be males of 15-25 years. This is due to the fact that our film is a British, gritty action-thriller which is largely orientated on criminal activity. Our data from our genre research suggests that this genre is more popular with males. This is a similar case with films such as "Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels" and "Snatch" as our film is very similar to these with a Guy Ritchie style. The BBFC classification for our film would be a "15" as our films does contain drug use, strong language, sexual activity etc, as outlined in a previous post on the BBFC.
www.bbfc.co.uk
5. How do you attract/address your audience?
Our film is aged at 15-25 year old males as our research suggested this was appropriate. Our film is orientated around criminal activity and research has shown that this appeals more to males than females as criminal activity is seen as masculine. It has a 15 certificate because the viewer would be witnessing criminal activity, strong language, sexual references, drug misuse etc. All of which is deemed inappropriate by the BBFC for people under the age of 15. As our film is aimed at males, a male dominant cast is used with male protagonists and the females have more stereotypically passive roles throughout the film. Also there is many scenes containing patriarchal gangs that are largely male populated which gives the male audience an inside view of this life and helps involve them more as an audience.
Here is a two shot from inside the car in our opening sequence. This shot helps the viewer to become more personal with the protagonists as it's shot from the backseat almost as if the viewer was sat there themselves.
6. What have you learnt about technology from the process of constructing the product?
We had to learn how to use all the equipment we were to use when filming our title sequence. We learnt all the basics from our preliminary exercise of filming the short journey. When it came to filming our title sequence we knew we had to film from inside a car so we had to use the smaller cameras which brought detriments to our picture quality but we were able to get all the shots we needed. With the small camera we used a tripod for most shots but found it impossible to keep still when filming inside the moving vehicle. We overcome this issue by clamping the camera and tripod in place when filming inside the vehicle. We also found the white balance hard to achieve when inside the car and a white balance had to be taken several times before we got it right. Another problem with white balance was inside the kitchen of the house as one half of the room was natural lighting whilst the other half was not and as we panned across the room to the natural lighting the colours weren't correct. This shot had to be editing out due to this issue. The main problem we faced was trying to get the right camera shots from inside the car as we had very little room. This was also the case when trying to achieve a two shot from inside the boot whilst the door opened, the back seats had to be lowered to achieve this shot.
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Our film could be produced by a major Hollywood Studio as many similar films have had success worldwide such as "Transporter" "Snatch" and "Lock Stock...". We have outlined Warner Brothers as our distributor in another post. Although with our film being set in Britain with little budget needed as few special effects are used and no exotic locations, our film could be an independent film. There are many of opportunity for product placement within our film as cars play a major role in the film with high speed pursuits etc. Clothing would also bring product placement as the richest of the characters would be wearing designer clothes and some of the more hands on criminals such as our two male leads will be wearing more casual high street clothes that all could be advertised within our film. If a major Hollywood Studio were to distribute our film there is also merchandising opportunities for Tee-shirts and clothing based around the characters and quotes.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
The target audience for our film would be males of 15-25 years. This is due to the fact that our film is a British, gritty action-thriller which is largely orientated on criminal activity. Our data from our genre research suggests that this genre is more popular with males. This is a similar case with films such as "Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels" and "Snatch" as our film is very similar to these with a Guy Ritchie style. The BBFC classification for our film would be a "15" as our films does contain drug use, strong language, sexual activity etc, as outlined in a previous post on the BBFC.
www.bbfc.co.uk
5. How do you attract/address your audience?
Our film is aged at 15-25 year old males as our research suggested this was appropriate. Our film is orientated around criminal activity and research has shown that this appeals more to males than females as criminal activity is seen as masculine. It has a 15 certificate because the viewer would be witnessing criminal activity, strong language, sexual references, drug misuse etc. All of which is deemed inappropriate by the BBFC for people under the age of 15. As our film is aimed at males, a male dominant cast is used with male protagonists and the females have more stereotypically passive roles throughout the film. Also there is many scenes containing patriarchal gangs that are largely male populated which gives the male audience an inside view of this life and helps involve them more as an audience.
Here is a two shot from inside the car in our opening sequence. This shot helps the viewer to become more personal with the protagonists as it's shot from the backseat almost as if the viewer was sat there themselves.
6. What have you learnt about technology from the process of constructing the product?
We had to learn how to use all the equipment we were to use when filming our title sequence. We learnt all the basics from our preliminary exercise of filming the short journey. When it came to filming our title sequence we knew we had to film from inside a car so we had to use the smaller cameras which brought detriments to our picture quality but we were able to get all the shots we needed. With the small camera we used a tripod for most shots but found it impossible to keep still when filming inside the moving vehicle. We overcome this issue by clamping the camera and tripod in place when filming inside the vehicle. We also found the white balance hard to achieve when inside the car and a white balance had to be taken several times before we got it right. Another problem with white balance was inside the kitchen of the house as one half of the room was natural lighting whilst the other half was not and as we panned across the room to the natural lighting the colours weren't correct. This shot had to be editing out due to this issue. The main problem we faced was trying to get the right camera shots from inside the car as we had very little room. This was also the case when trying to achieve a two shot from inside the boot whilst the door opened, the back seats had to be lowered to achieve this shot.
We used a lot of unfamiliar software such as imovie to edit and finish our final product. None of our group had previously used imovie before so we had to first learn the basic controls of the program. We then used imovie to edit our film into a final finished piece. We cut many shots as well as cropping shots to get the desired amount of length to our film. imovie also helped greatly in effects for our film such as titles and transitions as we have used fades on the picture and sound to produce desired effects on certain parts of our film as we found often the music was too loud to hear the speech so it had to be toned down.
We used itunes to preview all our songs which were originally collected from a CD provided by the media department of un-copyrighted music tracks and sounds.
7. Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
We used this blog to thoroughly research our chosen genre and plan our entire film. We made shooting scripts and speech scripts, a story board, a list of props and costumes and character profiles prior to filming to make sure the filming process went as smoothly as possible. We pretty much followed the shooting script precisely although we change the final shots of the opening sequence as new ideas came up whilst filming which we tried and later chose to use instead of the original idea. The speech script and the character profiles helped us to create the characters before filming began and we stuck to the characters throughout filming because of the profiles and script helped us recap exactly who and what the characters were like. We have learnt much more about camera shots from the filming process and we have used to newly acquire knowledge such as match-on-action shots in our film with the boot opening. We were able to use the shots and experiment with shots as our confidence grew with the equipment after the preliminary tasks which got us fully prepared for the opening title sequence of our film.
I feel our title sequence is very effective and serves it purpose well. It contains all the appropriate titles needed, it's also a good introduction to the characters and it lays out a problem which the rest of the film can be built upon.
Here is a link to some audience feedback on our title sequence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2RkLM3l8dw
We used itunes to preview all our songs which were originally collected from a CD provided by the media department of un-copyrighted music tracks and sounds.
We used this blog to thoroughly research our chosen genre and plan our entire film. We made shooting scripts and speech scripts, a story board, a list of props and costumes and character profiles prior to filming to make sure the filming process went as smoothly as possible. We pretty much followed the shooting script precisely although we change the final shots of the opening sequence as new ideas came up whilst filming which we tried and later chose to use instead of the original idea. The speech script and the character profiles helped us to create the characters before filming began and we stuck to the characters throughout filming because of the profiles and script helped us recap exactly who and what the characters were like. We have learnt much more about camera shots from the filming process and we have used to newly acquire knowledge such as match-on-action shots in our film with the boot opening. We were able to use the shots and experiment with shots as our confidence grew with the equipment after the preliminary tasks which got us fully prepared for the opening title sequence of our film.
I feel our title sequence is very effective and serves it purpose well. It contains all the appropriate titles needed, it's also a good introduction to the characters and it lays out a problem which the rest of the film can be built upon.
Here is a link to some audience feedback on our title sequence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2RkLM3l8dw
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