1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of media products?
Our media production is an Action/Thriller, we generally follow the conventions of this genre, we have our opening scene as an establishing shot, we used this for the opening scene because we thought in the first few seconds of our film we could acknowledge the characters and the mise en scene.
Our production continues these conventions by adding upbeat intense music into our film in times of excitement and intensity, most Action/Thriller films also use music to set the mood like we have done. The use of these conventions gives the audience a clear indication on what the genre is, our use of music and camera shots showed the mood well and gave a good idea to the audience of what genre the film will be. Many films of the Action/Thriller genre use the music to create a mood, for example in Reservoir Dogs the opening scene has a song that sets the mood as good and exciting. we have tried to follow these successful conventions to show our sub-genre.
Our film was influenced by many other films of the same genre, e.g. Reservoir Dogs, The Transporter and Pulp Fiction, these films are all of a similar genre to ours and influenced our conventions, we thought the use of music in Reservoir Dogs was good, and we thought the camera angles in Pulp Fiction were equally as good, we have used similar methods as them and followed the same conventions to get our genre clear to the audience, like when we had the scene with the girl in the boot, this is similar to a scene in transporter because they are both set about hostages and using carshttp://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=8qcMQ7Db5ag
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The main representation in our film is that the men are dominant over the women, this dominant theme carries on the whole way through our production, we see both men talking about going out into town while they are in the car, this is a stereotyped male thing to be talking about, furthermore the main story line consists of a dominant male force locking up a women in the boot of the car, this is a stereotypical "damsel in distress" scenario. This social group is the one that is mainly represented in our film.
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Our film would be distribute and produced by a large Hollywood company, in a previous post we have stated our reasons for choosing a conglomerate company, many Guy Ritchie films like "rock 'n' Rolla" and "Snatch" are produced by Warner Brothers, this is why we chose Warner Brothers.
Our film could also be done by an independent company because it would be quite low budget and set in the UK, no exotic locations would be needed and there would be little special effects, only for car chase scenes etc.
If we were with a independent film industry we would not get the advertising that we would if we were with Warner Brothers, like TV, magazines, posters etc.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
Our film would be aimed at/appeal to people of our age group, the film would appeal more to men rather than women, it has more of a stereotyped male theme with criminal activity and violence, other films similar to ours like the transporter or lock stock and two smoking barrels are labeled 15 and would appeal to our target audience. Our film would also probably be given a 15 certificate by BBFC because it does contain violence and crime.http://www.bbfc.co.uk/
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
We addressed and attracted our audience by doing a questionnaire asking them on their favourite type of film genre and what it is about a film makes them want to watch it.
We feel that our film would attract the male age group of people around 15-25 because it is an action/thriller that contains violence and crime, we thought this was the kind of film that people of that age and sex would want to see at this time.
We also made the film a 15 because people of younger ages could be disturbed by images such as when the hostage dies in the boot or other violent scenes.
6. What have you learnt about technology from the process of constructing the product?
We first got used to the cameras after doing our preliminary task on the short journey, it was helpful for when we started our main task.The camera we used was a simple small camera, a weakness of using this is that you couldn't use it without a tripod because it would be unsteady, for example, we used the camera in the back of the car but it was difficult to hold it steady, we overcame this problem by wedging it between the headrest and the seat. A good thing about having a small camera was that we were able to use it in the front seat because we had the room. We also faced problems with white balancing the camera, we had to white balance about 3 or 4 times before we got it right when we were in the car, and in the kitchen scene part of the room was natural lighting which made it difficult to pan across to, we had to edit it out to correct it. iMovies was very helpful whilst editing our film and we found it easy to add transitions, titles and music using it.
We also used iTunes for our music, to preview it and sample different types of music.
7. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
We used this blog to plan out how we would film our project, we used the blog to create a list of camera shots, the script, character profiles etc.
Since the preliminary i feel far more confident doing tasks such as filming and editing, i feel like i would be comfortable doing this task again, i think it was helpful working in a group too, if you were ever unsure on something someone could help, and it was easier learning as a group through experience e.g. going out and using the camera or just having a go at editing and learning that way.
It was good that we had already created a shot list, it helped the process of filming run very smooth, we knew what we had to do and when whereas in the preliminary task it was improvised.
Here is a link to some audience feedback for our film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2RkLM3l8dw
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