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

Our film plot:

My film opening uses, develops and challenges forms and conventions of real media products through the genre, narrative, character roles and editing techniques. I have compared our film opening to a range of real film references including 'Seven', 'Pulp Fiction' and 'Inception'.

Our film is a neo-noir film about our main character, Stacey, seducing a rich business man into marrying her. She then kills him and takes his money but as she is a detective she is able to sabotage the case of his murder to protect herself. Our film ends on a cliff-hanger as a new detective joins the force and begins to suspect her.

Our form:

I think our opening followed the typical format and I think its function was carried out well as it portrayed our character well and left the viewer wanting to see more.

Our credits were very similar to those used in 'Se7en' as they fit between our shots and flickered to create a mysterious tone. I think we could have tried to make our titles more effective by adding graphics to the background as they were on the screen.                                                                                         

We also included dialogue but this did not come in till the second half of our opening sequence as opposed to 'Pulp Fiction' where the first scene begins with dialogue in a cafe. By only including one character in our opening it meant that we could not use any shot-reverse-shot I think this still worked efficiently as it hinted at their being an element of danger.
           

Genre conventions for neo-noir/film noir:

'Blade Runner', 'The Last Seduction', and 'Fatal attraction' inspired our style of lighting as it was very low key and cast dark shadows across the character's faces which created an element of mystery and danger.

'The Last Seduction'

'Fatal Attraction'

Our setting was inspired by 'L.A Confidential' as a bedroom that is clearly feminine creates iconography of a femme fatale. 

Exenia Onotopp and the femme fatale in 'Blue Velvet' inspired the representations we used to portray Stacey. As seen in the gif below, our character follows the conventions of a mysterious, yet seductive, character who are able to use their beauty and feminine charm to attract male attention for their own personal gain- below the male character turns to observe the femme fatale and seems engrossed with her. 

The Killers, 1946

'Inception' helped us to establish our iconography and, as seen in the image in the table, the character is holding a gun to convey the genre conventions of crime, therefore we also followed this convention.

Narrative Structure: 

Style:

The style helps to connote the genre and the way we want our film to look and feel.

1) Grading

Our grading was very similar to 'Dexter' as he exits the room. The saturation is high and it creates a very normal, happy feel to juxtapose the criminal aspects.

2) We edited the music to fit with the dialogue and chose it specially as we thought it matched our style and we particularly enjoyed when the drum beat came in. We cut our shots to match the beat to create a fast, snappy pace which creates tension. Below is our initial music piece which I am glad we changed as I do not think it works very well.

In 'Skyfall' we felt that the music was a very important aspect and this made us very aware of the style of music we wanted. Although 'Skyfall' consisted of lyrics which we did not want to include in our opening, the instruments used were very effective as they helped set the mood which inspired us to find a track that created an exciting and tense atmosphere.

           

3) Titles

Titles in 'Seven'

Titles in 'Unlawful'

To conclude, I think our opening sequence follows many genre conventions and conventions of an opening sequence. This means that our opening is easily identifiable to our target audience as they will recognize that it is a crime-thriller, neo-noir film. This also meant that our opening will be very similar to real media film products.

Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our chosen social group is females in their early 20s so our film focuses on the representations of gender and age in particular. We have represented them via our mise-en-scene,  our character's behavior and dialogue, and our camera and editing techniques.

 After researching how women were portrayed in film, I realized that women were very underrepresented, as shown below.

In action &adventure films, only 23% of speaking characters were women - according to UN Women.

Strong female characters who challenge stereotypes and influenced
 our characterization of Stacey.

Below I have annotated a video to demonstrate how our video follows or challenges representations of our social group. (You may want to skip from 1:03 to 1:25)

We have tried to create a confident character who breaks most female stereotypes but she follows most conventions of a femme fatale character.

Gaze theory:

Our male character contrasts with the strong, sexy role of our female character. Stacey is objectifying Ryan via the photos of him on her iPad. In films, following the Gaze Theory, this notion is normally where men objectify females but we decided to challenge this idea.



To conclude, we represented young females as we were familiar with the stereotypes and related well with this representation. We also had a clear idea of what stereotypes we wanted to challenge and conform to. 

Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Our production company is Starlight Pictures, known for making films with darker themed genres and based in London.

Other similar production companies to ours - distribute small,
independent films.

We chose Lionsgate to distribute our film because... 

Lionsgate is a horizontally and vertically integrated company so they will buy the rights to our independent film and like to distribute it. Below is a list of their highest grossing films, the majority of which are independent British films.

Our marketing plan is very similar to most independent movies as it uses both traditional methods and social media to reach and appeal to our audience.

We looked at other similar independent films such as 'Hunger Games' and 'Testament of Youth' to create our release plan.

To conclude, we used Lionsgate as our distributor as they seemed liek the most likely institution to invest in, and distribute, our small, independent film. We created our release plan by looking at other release plans of independent films and seeing how Lionsgate could do the same. 

Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Once we had chosen our crime/neo-noir genre we realized our audience would be fans of this genre.
Our film would appeal to both males and females the crime aspect appeals to boys and the confident female protagonist is relatable for females.

'Gone Girl' was very similar to our film and I found out that 60% of audiences were female which is probably due to the strong female role.

BFI Yearbook of 2013

These statistics are useful for us because:

- The most popular age group for film-goers are 45 + which is beneficial for us as our film noir style will appeal to this age group as they may relate to it well.
- The second most popular group is 15-24 year olds which is one of our mass audiences as our young female character falls within their range, making her easy to relate to.



We had a clear idea of our target audience which helped us anchor our opening to neo-noir fans of both genders and ages ranging from 15-30 years old.

Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

We used our uses and gratification theory to help us find ways to attract and address our audience.

Audience Feedback:

We created a survey to get some audience feedback on our narrative, effectiveness and find out how they reacted to our opening. Majority of the people who took our survey were from our chosen target audience of 15-24 years of age.

More females watched our opening than males which is what we expected as our opening was slightly skewed to females.

We also asked whether they would want to watch the rest of the film, to which most of the people said yes. Only one person said no and when asked why their given reason was because it was 'too slow' which we think is referring to the pace.

We decided to ask for some more detailed feedback and asked whether they understood the plot to which almost every answer said yes. To improve our opening we asked if they had any criticism, the answers are below. A reoccurring answer seemed to be that the dialogue seemed to staged and unrealistic, we also could of had a clearer plot line.

Below is a video of some people I interviewed and their reactions to our opening. I interviewed both genders with ages ranging from 13-17.

 

A trend that I found with the responses was that most of the people I asked enjoyed the opening but the males could not relate to our character very well. The other media students suggested we played around with editing and lighting more. They all said that they liked the plot and thought the opening was interesting. I agree with this as I think we should have played around more with the lighting and style of editing however I am pleased that out target audience enjoyed the opening.

Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I have learnt a lot about a variety of different technologies through this project and below I have created a presentation to explain how and what I have learnt.



I have learnt a lot about technology because of this project, particularly about lighting and editing on the computer. This will benefit me with any future tasks.

Question 7: Looking back at your peliminairy task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

I feel I have learnt a lot and improved on many of my skills since creating our preliminary task. My production and post-production abilities have developed greatly.

Our Preliminary task:

We had to work in a group - I was with Gift- to create a sequence containing continuity and dialogue between two characters.



We edited the shots afterwards whilst following basic continuity principles such as the 180 degree rule and shot-reverse shots, as shown below.

Below I have created a flow diagram showing the process and stages we took to create our preliminary task.

I have compared and contrasted our preliminary task with our opening to evaluate what e did differently and how we improved.

The editing process was very enjoyable as we could all come in our free periods and do our own little bit. I learnt many new skills on Adobe Premiere Pro but I would have liked to work on LiveType slightly more and of experimented with graphics. Overall, I am very happy with how the editing process went and how all our elements fit together. 

Our edit suite

Our group did not argue very much and often agreed with each other which made the whole process easier. I think that working on the prelim helped us develop our teamwork skills and made it easier to collaborate for this project.

My group at the edit suite.

Finally, we also had to have market research for our opening whereas with our preliminary exercise it was not necessary. This meant that we were more informed and always had something to improve on in order to reach and appeal to our target audience. To be more professional I think we could have asked a larger range of ages, particularly as our film had a secondary audience of an older audience.

Construction Post 10: Looking back - reflections on our final outcome

Looking back over the whole production and post-production process, I am very pleased with how our project turned out and how well my group worked together.

The highlights of the project for me have been:
- The continuous support and encouragement that we have given each other.
- The fact that we were all friends before the project began.
- I gained a lot of confidence working with Monica and Amy. For example, after shooting for hours I would lose my enthusiasm but Monica would always be offering to get me a drink or telling me she was proud of me.
- Experimenting with the order of our shots and the length of them although grading was still my favorite aspect.

The low points of the project would be how time-consuming the filming and editing was. It was always dissuading when we would watch our shots back and find out they didn't look as good as we had hoped they would. When filming me putting on lipstick we ended up taking about 20 takes as I was not applying the lipstick correctly and ruined the elegant effect I was trying to create which was really frustrating.

I hope that our opening looks professional and stylish as we put a lot of effort into it but more importantly I am hoping that the audience can identify the strong female character and realize that she is not as good as she may seem. Hopefully this will be connoted by the representations, such as the passports in the drawer and the photos on the iPad. I also hope that my audience will be drawn in and want to watch more of our film.

In hindsight if we had more time..
- I would of liked to find the music earlier on so we could spend more time editing it.
- We could have added more effects to our shots.
- We could have taken more of a variety of shots from different angles and framing.

Construction Post 9: My technical learning curve (production and post-production)

We all helped when creating our opening, in the production my main role was to be the actress, during the post-production I found the music and was responsible for adding the titles in the correct place. I also did a lot of the grading to our shots.

Construction Post 8: My personal contribution to the Edit Sessions

I really enjoy editing so I spent quite a lot of time experimenting with grading and trying to change the pace of our opening.

Cold effect.

Warm effect. 

Learning how to create graphics on titles and edit our individual shots by grading them has really helped me gain confidence when editing and encouraged me to experiment more to see what works and what doesn't.

If there was anything that I would like to be able to improve on it would be to play with music and edit it more effectively. I would also have liked to work more on the titles but I am glad that I am now completely confident in grading although it was very time-consuming.

Me working at the edit suite.

Construction Post 7: My personal contributions to the Shoot Sessions

During our shoot, my contribution was predominantly acting in our opening but I also was very wary of mise-en-scene and made sure we were connoting the right representations we were aiming for.

Monica and I on set.

After every shot was filmed we would look back over our footage and discuss what we thought and this is where I was able to have an input in our framing and lighting. For example some of our shots had a lot of head space and I picked up on this and we were able to frame more tightly so the focus was on Stacey more or where I put on my shoes we decided the movement could be more swift and shorter after reviewing them.






I think we worked very well as a team and we all allowed each other to speak as we all brought our own individual aspects/talents to the group. I found it really delightful how we all supported each other and did not waste time arguing but rather got on with what we had to do straight away.

Construction Post 6: Reflections on Edit Week 2

I think this week was a lot more successful than last week as we were all more confident and had a clearer idea of what we wanted to achieve. For the titles and grading we had a demonstration from our technician to show us how it was done and then we were free to experiment with our footage ourselves.

We used Procamp and Three Way Colour Corrector to edit and grade our shots as shown to the right. These were very easy to use and allowed us to get our desired effect.

I experimented with the colour on our shots. To the left is a photo with red and blue effects which created a purple tone. Grading was also very time consuming but I enjoyed seeing the different atmospheres and effects we could create.



This week we decided to move our titles and make them into a montage with our beginning shots. Before, as shown below, our titles were on top of our shots so did not break up the action but after looking at the trailer for 'Seven' and 'The Black Widow' we decided they would look better if they were cut up and placed between the shots where Stacey is getting ready.

Before.

After.

We used the Mac Book in order to create these titles and make them look more professional. We could use a software called Live Type to put special effects on our titles so they flickered rather than just came on screen and then off. I think this flickering effect created a more mysterious atmosphere which is the aim we had.

Monica and I working on the grading and titles of our shot in
our allocated editing slot. 

Construction Post 5: The Back-Up Shoot

We decided we needed a back-up shoot as we weren't completely happy with some of our shots from our main shoot. We made a new shoot board which was a lot shorter than our previous one as there weren't as many shots we wanted to retake but we had to be careful we didn't miss out any shots that would've caused continuity errors.

I am very happy with how our main shoot went as I think we successfully corrected many of our shots and I think the representations of our femme fatale were a lot more obvious. Below is a video I took from our back-up shoot when checking lighting.

Amy & Monica checking
the camera framing.

Me getting ready beforehand.

Construction Post 4: Reflections on Edit Week 1

So far I think our edit week has gone rather well. We stayed organised by sticking to a edit schedule which also helped us co-ordinate with one another.

What we have done this week:
- We chose our best shots and cut them together so that there are no continuity errors.

- We changed our distributor title to video format to make it look more professional.
- We have moved around our titles so that they are now between our shots at the beginning when Stacey is getting ready. This builds tension and increases the pace before we suddenly jump into reality - the phone call. Our main inspiration for this was the opening to 'Seven' as shown below.



Issues we must resolve:
- Add a music track to our sequence, one which we all agree on.

- Speed up and cut our shots to create a faster pace in the beginning.
- In our lipstick shot we must make sure the technique is correct.

- Either delete background noise on Adobe Premiere Pro or retake some of our shots and ensure there is no background sound.
- Retake the shots with the blazer on the door so instead I just put it on downstairs.
- In our final shot we must also redo it as the zoom was not smooth at all so we are going to remove it and take a close-up instead.

Construction Post 3: reflections on our Main Shoot Session

I think our main shoot was quite effective as we had made a list of things to improve based on watching our test shoot and teacher's feedback. We changed our shoot board accordingly and managed our time a lot better.

I think we will need a back-up shoot as in some of our shots their is too much background noise and we would also like to change some of my acting techniques, for example when I am applying lipstick.

Above is a short bloopers video I made.

Construction Post 2: Our Post-production Kit

We will use Adobe Premiere Pro to edit our footage from the shoot - we are experienced with this software as it is the same as what we used to edit our animatic and test shoot. It is very helpful and easy to use and allows us to combine all our music, shots and titles together. We will also used Adobe After Effects to help us add graphics and style our titles.

I really enjoyed using this software as it was so simple to work with and I could easily experiment in my free time and save it on a different title so that I could show the rest of my group at a later time. The only downfall I can think of is that we could not all edit at the same time and we had to edit our titles on different software called Live Type but this was beneficial to us as we got the desired effect we wanted by using Live Type.

Me working at the edit suite.