Thursday, 26 April 2012

Evaluation

Evaluation Question 7
What kind of media institution would distribute the product and why?
What Kind of Media Institution Would Distribute The

Evaluation Question 6
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? 
Looking Back at Your Preliminary Task

Evaluation Question 5
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? 


Evaluation Question 4
How did you attract your audience? 


Evaluation Question 3
Who would be the audience for your media product?

This is a video created by team members Arvinder Bahia and Oscar Rughoo, any other third person or party who uses this is committing copyright and should not be credited!
Evaluation Question 2
How does your media product represent particular social groups?


Evaluation Question 1
In what ways does your Media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?





Monday, 23 April 2012

Creating credits and a title

In response to our teacher and peer feedback we took immediate action by planning a title. Since we hadn't found out what we were going to call our film we had to have a little discussion around the topic. The final title for the film is "Shotta." This video shows why we chose this title.  






The font used for our title sequence also looked out of place so we decided to look in to styles and colours. This video illustrates the decision making process behind the font.




















Finally the last title and credit problem we had to remedy was the difference between credits and the title, as we started improving our sequence we found that our audience couldn't depict the difference between the title and the credits so we had to present the title of the film in a slightly different font.

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The last form of action we took in improving our drafted product was to further develop realism, what I mean by this is the realistic image of a dangerous young male who is in a relationship with people who are in trouble with the police. Here is an audio/video of us explaining the decisions made for using sound affects to create this verisimilitude. 





Title sequence first draft Along with feedback

Our first draft of our title sequence had to be made in a very limited amount of time, so what we concentrated on mainly was the editing of the shots. This meant that we negelected the titles and credits, however I feel that we have created some good scenes within this piece for a first draft.

Good points 
  • Some good moments created through close up shots and shot reverse shots of the protagonist's face.
  • Good use of mis en scene it was very convincing at times. 
  • The location is used well as it is very realistic to involve a very well layed our room for a semi rich drug dealer.
Improvements

  • The overall title sequence is too long and becomes quite boring. 
  • Needs background music added since without it the sequence is even more boring.
  • Some shots are too long.
  • Although the location used seems relevant there are no establishing shots which is part of the convention of the title sequence form.
 On the whole I believe that the feedback attained from my peers and my teacher has been very useful and I should use this to enhance the final outcome of my title sequence. However the feedback on the use of location may not be fully developed since this was deliberate as we wanted to create that claustrophobic so that we are able to place our audience in the same position as our protagonist. But we will still improve most of the other forms of feedback.









Saturday, 21 April 2012

location plan

Initially we were thinking of shooting the location outside of the apartment but after a group discussion and audience research we decided to shoot inside the apartment in the protagonist's bedroom. This is because inside of the apartment will allow us to delve in to the characters emotions which our audience desired. We also wanted to create a claustrophobic affect and so by doing this we  will be shooting in a bedroom.


Here is the initial location where we were going to use an establishing shot to establish the scene, however because of our demand to make it more of an emotional and personal setting, we aren't going to use an establishing shot and we are going to just start the scene from the characters head down.









Shooting schedule


Shooting schedule Plan 24th march 2012 Saturday


9.00- Meet up as a group at Ilford station.
10.00 – Arrive at shooting location. (Not fully decided.)
11.00-  Have the location set up ready to shoot.
11.30- 5.00 – Shoot the whole scene with double the footage required.

One thing to consider is that one location is being utilized for this piece, this will be explained in the location decisions plan.

Audience research Conclusion

After having done audience research the group and I decided to look at and highlight the main reasons why females and middle aged people don't watch British Crime Dramas. 

Although middle aged people aren't within our main target audience it was clear in the research that they did not regard the genre, looking at the answers in the questionnaire they stated that:
  • It was too violent at unnecessary moments which made it hard to emotional engage with plot.
  • Language spoken by the youth is too hard to understand. 
  • Plot seems dull and  very similar in all other texts within the same genre. 
  • Plot is too predictable. 
  • Very depressing at times. 
Looking at the this feedback it is clear that we as creatives have already subtracted those negative aspects however I find that it will be impossible to please this audience since part of the crime drama genre is to explore some real life yet at the same time depressing moments.

However when looking at the female audience we found that some of the things they disliked about the genre could be fixed within our film.

  • Female characters are almost invisible and when they are presented in films they are pretty much the same and all lack personality for a female audience to aspire to be like or respect.
  • Male characters always seem violent, even to female characters this seems off putting .
  • They feel disengaged and neglected by the plot since there are no moments for female audiences to relate to.
This clearly shows the problems women faced with our genre, since our film features a strong lead role this should remedy part of their problems, however they aren't going to be seen in our title sequence were just going to use a portrait of her to establish the enigma. Although we aren't featuring a female character we are going to try and delve in to the emotional aspects of our protagonist rather than presenting him as a violent youth.  


On the whole I hope to create a text which still fulfills the genre conventions but simultaneously attains a broader audience than challenger texts of the similar genre.

This research has helped develop my understanding of what other audiences want from our text this will influence our creative decisions definitely as we may alter some scenes in the sequence so that they satisfy our female audience as  well as our male audience.

Thursday, 19 April 2012

Final blocked Plan for main task

Final Blocked Plan

Audience research task- Surveys!

In order to develop our understanding of our target audience we created surveys, from our initial understanding it is thought that young males are the primary target audience for British crime youth dramas. 


Here is a template of our survey, we sent this out to 20 people, within this 20 people we asked 15 late teenagers to adults and 5 middle aged people. 13 males and 7 females, this proportion because of the fact that males are the primary audience we are targeting, but the females we surveyed were all teenagers to adults this is because we wanted to question why they don't watch British crime youth dramas. 

Questionnaire for the Research of Film Genres and Audiences

Here is an example of how one of the surveys was answered. 




















From this surveys we made graphs using microsoft excel, graphs displaying the group of people that chose crime dramas as their favourite genre and we also made a list of the answers given by sources that didn't like Crime dramas.


Here is the graph displaying both males and females and showed the frequency of those that liked crime dramas, as you can see it is clear that our predictions were right since no females liked crime dramas.


In response to this information we surveyed one of the females personally and asked her why she doesn't like the British crime drama genre.









In the video we can see that the source states that she doesn't like the violence in the genre and that there are no women presented in the genre. In fact what she says clarifies our expectations of what females think about the crime drama genre. This means that our film could possible engage a larger audience. 

Initial blocked plan teacher and peer feedback

Reflecting on narrative theories

Now that I have a clear insight of what my plot is and how the title sequence will look, I have quite a different opinion on Todorov and Voglers theories.


Todorov and Vogler

Tuesday, 10 April 2012

Distributor and funding acknowledgement


Opening Sequence genre convention research

Although I have researched the conventions of the opening sequence form, I haven't looked at openers of films which are synonymous with the genre of our film which is British crime drama.















Here we can see that I have delved in to the way in which Bulletboy and Kidulthood have presented their openers. Although there are some similarities to the way in which they present their openers I can see there are still some differences. The differences being embedded in order to further explore the setting, tone and plot. 


Things I should consider from looking at these two:

  • Application of titles
  • style of editing
These two are very important, especially if I want to make my unique selling point established within the first few minutes of my movie. 

Wednesday, 4 April 2012

Institution Research

Institution Research

From the second box  we state that we chose Bulletboy because of the fact that it is in the same genre as our idea and deals with youth crime and violence, we chose Terminator for a more specific reason, this being due to the fact that the Terminator has a female lead which would incorporate a broader audience.


In the fifth box we can see that Bulletboy was financed by the UK film council and the Terminator being financed by HBO and Orion pictures.


The sixth box deals with other ways of financing movies, one of them being self financing or national financing.


The last box looks at whether these companies would finance our potential film, UK film council would most likely because of the low budget required for our film and the fact that he deals with a solely British theme however HBO and Orion pictures wouldn't for the fact that our genre is too different and doesn't fill the mass market sector.


I have explained all the unclear boxes but from this research one of the most interesting outcomes found was the money made, although The Terminator used a larger budget it made a larger profit however Bulletboy made a smaller profit. This shows how the target market for Bulletboy is small and maybe involving the female character within the film may enhance the films success. Another thing to look out for now after this is the film finance and distribution companies. 



  • Now I need to look at what finance and distribution companies we should use.
  • How will we fund?
  • How will we make the female character seem important in our opening sequence. 

How does our plot link with Vogler's hero journey?

Voglers Hero Journey