Media Evaluation

Media Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, developor challenge forms and conventions of real media conceptions?

To create our media production our aim firstly was too use various forms of research for us to understand codes and conventions apparent in the film noir/thriller genre. First in class was to do primary research which was conducted in the form of viewing films such as Double indemnity (1944), and Brick. All the moves we had viewed in class meant that we were able to get a rough idea of what particular specific film noir characteristics we must add, and the observations we made a note of, and hopefully would find a way to incorporate it into our piece. The narrative and generic conventions created more depth to form the basis of our ideas.

Our group’s ideas from class were contemporary and fresh, but yet simple and linear narrative helped to draw in the audience, including them. The use of enigma was present at the end, using common convention drawing and capturing the audience. During our ongoing research for our project we managed to create representations of the main characters, including the introduction of a femme fetale in the first scene of our project, playing on codes and conventions using the femme fetale meant that we had added an element of mystery and gloom to the piece, which is intriguing and would provoke a reaction.

2.How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our media represented social groups in a through way throughout apart from that the older social groups, such as 20-25 had a poor reputation as there; our femme fetale is an alcoholic.

Our media product didn’t have many varied social groups or classes in it; it obtained the average, everyday working class, yet also higher class. The couple who were getting married were the couple of a higher social status, and the woman who decided to steal the bride’s identity was the middle class woman, wanting to ruin the marriage for not just love for her, but the wealth in the family. The location of which we filmed looks quite grand, for a family who have a lot of wealth.

We were trying to represent the woman who stole the bride’s identity more of sad lonesome woman, of lower social class although this probably isn’t portrayed well in the project, it was the initial idea. The costumes that we have used throughout the media project have all been those of a higher class status, as the imposter wipes off her make up in one of the scenes she is wearing a well fitted black dress, it shows how she’s used the wealth of the family on herself. The bride and groom are wearing traditional wedding outfits.

3.What kind of media institutions might distribute your media product and why?

I think our projects would be distributed on such TV channels which are the ones that are less popular, one for a specialist subject. I think Film 4 would suit our target audience. If our film were to be shown it would be in a small art house theatre as it’s a very small budget film. Somewhere such as the Ipswich corn exchange it may be shown, it wouldn’t attract a huge audience, but some of the public. Our film opening obviously wouldn’t have subsidy as we wouldn’t have the funds, so for people to watch our film it would have to from word and mouth from people who has already seen it. To hit our target audience, the main way of getting them in would be too be a school showing rather than out of choice, unless they already knew what film noir was and found it thrilling, but many from our survey didn’t quite understand. I would suggest that perhaps Blue Dolphin would be a possible distributor for us. www.bluedolphinfilms.com being an Independent distributor. Blue Dolphin has distributed films for over 25 years. The company also co-produces feature films and television drama.

'Blue Dolphin PR & Marketing is a division of Blue Dolphin Film & Video, one of the UK's longest running independent film distribution and production companies. We specialize in arts and entertainment publicity for feature films at cinemas, DVD and Video releases and for TV programmes and music PR.
Blue Dolphin first branched out into publicity and promotion in the mid 1980s. Our ethos is built around our passion for the entertainment business in general, our highly knowledgeable members of staff who bring various positive skills to client briefs, strong client servicing and formidable results that often exceed client expectations. That is why our clients include major film studios, terrestrial and non-terrestrial broadcasters and independent distributors and production companies in the film, music and TV business. They have included BMG, Island Records, MGM, Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers and BBC Worldwide.
Blue Dolphin PR & Marketing operates as a separate business from Blue Dolphin Film & Video and Blue Dolphin Productions but draws upon the invaluable experience, connections and contacts from its parent company's knowledge of the film, music and television business.'

4.Who would be the audience for your media product?

The typical demographics of our audience will be all genders, ethnicities and within the 15-25 age bracket. Initially our media was aimed at 15’s and over, as an age rating, but now looking at the video finished, it was quite advanced so it would be aimed at much of the public above fifteen too. Although I do not think many people below the age of 15 would have the strategic to work out what was going out, and would be able to settle down for long enough and figure out the film, the characters and the plot.

While learning about the BBFC we realised that the lower the age rating you put for your film the more likely it’s going to make more money due to the amount of people being able to come and watch it, older ages would restrict many of the audience viewing this film.

A passive audience sits back and observes while an active audience participates. I would say that aiming the film at fifteen year olds and above we would have a range of a passive audience the older they were, yet the younger ones would become more engrossed with the media product.

Our group created a survey of sorts on what film noir was, and the characteristics of noir, many of them had barely any knowledge on the subject meaning that they wouldn’t quite realise what a noir was unless the film was black and white. To find out how to make our film have a noir quality a lot of our research was done on the internet and reading up on history of previous film noir films.

5.How did you attract/address your audience?

To attract the audience, you must have a soundtrack which would complement the actors and how and what they are doing in the piece. Our feedback from the film was that the soundtrack was a big positive, relating to audience pleasure it made a few of them cry. It was almost like the audience was able to relate to what they were seeing on screen, and the song would help the atmosphere in the piece. Film noirs are tense, dark and ambiguous, this is what makes them a genre of their own and they create this effect by using shadows and noises. To attract the audience we used young people in our piece, a young couple who had just got married, now too people from 15-20 it may not appeal so much, but those above that age would appreciate a couple getting married. As I have said in the above our location was well suited to our story, yet it was set in a fairly old grand place. Not something of modern society, yet it is where a marriage takes place and you would think those of 15 and above would understand this. A percentage of the audience would have a thrill from watching film noirs on a screen, during a scene of action, as it has been proven too increase heart rate and adrenaline rush to the viewer; this is known as audience visual pleasures. This also offers escapism as a diversion and offers surveillance and voyeuristic pleasures.

Our piece wasn’t that which would attract teenagers off hand; if they could appreciate the characteristics and style of film noir I think they would have more positive opinions on the film.

Our main storyline will hopefully have attracted the crowd, it is a fairly complex story but one of which people would hopefully be interested in the sense that it has much too it.

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

During the research stage I have come to find a lot of information which has been useful to me during my making and coursework for our film noir project. I have used various websites such as YouTube, Google, MySpace just the internet in general along with the library.

These were all too finding initial ideas for the piece and were set as homework.

In the planning stage for our piece I used blogs to read up on how other people had gone about creating their film noir pieces, or things which were similar. Windows media came in handy, and although I didn’t have a lot to do with editing the movie, I was always there to watch what was going on, a lot of which seemed confusing. We used windows media to get our music from.

I was the main director for our project; I was using a Canon HV30 DV, a YOGN shotgun microphone, boom pole, headphones and a Velbon DV 7000 tripod. Using this equipment we created flashbacks will be used throughout our opening sequence, and we hope to achieve a cold and gloomy effect during the flashbacks to make it uncomfortable for the audience to look at, this is because traditional film noirs use effects to make the audience feel uncomfortable to create tension, this is one of the things you can do to get the audience glued to the film. So to make this happen I had to use the editing suite, but before this as we captured the footage we just did clips of 10 seconds along, perhaps a bit shorter, when put on the computer we used a dissolve effect to make the flashbacks merge into each other. We were able to create this using Adobe Premier pro, by compressing files from the camcorder. Using Adobe Premier Pro, Charlie was editing using transitions, cutting straight from one shot to the next directly replacing one shot for another, we used them during flashbacks, which were dissolves. The last scene was a fade, where it faded to black. The soundtrack we came to use was a track called ‘Snuff’ by slipknot, I would say this was parallel sound, reflecting the action in our film.

Have to use 3 point lighting was a lot harder than we had originally thought, in a small room, having oto much light can easily overwhelm it, not having enough you can’t quite make out the character.

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

From the last preliminary task I have seen vast improvements in what we have now created, I think being in a different groups really have made a difference, by working with people who are more willing to compromise. Although I do say this I will be slightly contridotory in the sense that I feel one member of our group didn't participate as much as he could have, and showing the will too, never acted upon it.

In our preliminary we hadn’t taken enough shots too put onto the computer. The performance throughout the opening sequence was subtle, there wasn’t an overwhelming large amount of faces being shown throughout but more, little parts of what they were wearing, such as the props. Realising we hadn’t taken enough shots and the preliminary exercise not flowing as much as well as we would have liked it too, we took this into consideration, although we may have done that, again, our shots were lacking in handles and lacking in shots altogether. It was a large flaw. This has happened because we didn’t manage our time efficiently, we paid more attention n collection props and deciding where too film our scenes rather than getting down to it, and ending up filming it, when we had gotten to the location we had to set up the camera and the actors has to get dressed.

Our preliminary exercise we has also lacked time, yet we were able to rush it more as it wasn’t so important we managed to add handles to it, but has a large lack of shots, this time we has improved it slightly. For our film noir piece we thought we had arranged the time in a suitable way, yet we were sadly mistaken, I think we could have added more to the ending of ours, but weren’t able to because of time. In our film noir project we has used a voiceover, this was something that we has never done before but the script I had wrote I was able to hear back, as someone spoke it. As the director and scriptwriter I wish we had been able to collect more shots, there was a lot of potential with our ideas, and we didn’t quite push it to the full extent. During my time of filming this I have learnt how to prepare for filming using the microphone and checking it’s the right sound level or if the sound is even working, and using the camera, there is a lot more detail too it than one might think.

There was a lot to dead space in the preliminary, and I made sure I was using all teh space I had in this. Although I had used many mid/close up shots, too many, I would have rather included some other shots as well.

The aim of this production was too create our own take on the contemporary film noir genre; I think our group successfully composed this, even if we could have made many improvements.