LB- Evaluation Questions

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


Question 1
• Our opening sequence is seen as a conventional one for the thriller genre. As the titles we used were similar to those used in opening sequences like ‘Panic Room’. The form of my opening sequence is conventional as in panic room the titles are similar to our opening, as they are seen throughout the opening and the main titles is shown at the end.
• Our soundtrack is also conventional of the thriller genre as it creates suspense. Our opening sequence also introduces the main character in the first scene. We did this by using close up shots of him, which gave a clear identification of the characters exposition as being the main protagonist.
• We also used lighting to create suspense and mystery by having the first scene in black and white, which is something we saw from our genre research in the opening sequence of ‘Seven’ and decided to incorporate it into our own.

• We thought allot about costume for our main protagonist as we decided he had to look scruffy and run down in order for the character to fit in to the plot, because of this our main character wore tracksuit bottoms with a hooded top to show he was from the area.
• Our camera shots needed to show the scale of the estate; because of this we used a establishing long shot to show one of the building’s in the estate. Our music was chosen because it was quite fast paced and fitted into the tempo of the running scene.

• The genre choice of thriller meant that we had to create suspense in our 2 minute opening, we did this by having a mysterious deal in the first scene, followed by a running sequence of the main character, he also sees someone else who was involved in the deal dead, which gave a more dramatic feel to the sequence.
• From our genre research we looked at the opening sequence of ‘Shank’, which was filmed at the same location as ours. This showed us that we needed to incorporate the location in with the opening sequence as it was important to show the audience where he was living.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?


Question 2

• Our social group that is shown in our opening sequence is a young, white, working class adult, who lives in a council estate area. Our protagonist is represented negatively as he is involved in a drug deal which is seen as socially unacceptable due to it being illegal.
• This is seen as the traditional stereotype of a young working class male from a council estate area. Our mise-en-scene emphasises this stereotype by the costume our protagonist is wearing, like tracksuit bottoms and hooded top.
• In contemporary society these items of clothing are viewed as only being worn by juvenile delinquents. Our film is clearly trying to represent British culture and conforms to the tradition traits of masculinity.
• Our sequence shows the wider issues of London society, as it shows that illegal activity happens a lot in London especially with young male adults, our opening sequence shows how serious the problem is.

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

Question 3

• Our film opening would be distributed by a small independent company, as it is not the sort of film that is considered a tent pole. This is due to it being low budget and a British film. I think that Pathe UK would be a good distributor as it has a wide range of films from ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ to ‘Adulthood’.
• This would be a good distributor to use as it has done youth crime films before and has realised there is money to be made from it. I feel they would distribute our media as they have seen personally similar films succeed so would see our film as a good investment.










What have you learnt about technologies from the process of making your film opening?

Question 6
• I have learnt how to blog from this coursework. We used our blog effectively and collaboratively by using blogger.com to post individual blogs and group posts to display research into other films, our own ideas and thoughts on our film opening and PowerPoint presentation.
• As well as this we could scan questionnaires and also include pictures and video. This meant that we had a range of media on our blog. The blog helped to keep all of our independent and group work together in one place, which made it very easy to discuss our film opening. Through commenting on each others posts we discussed our research and agreed what we thought would work best for our own film opening.
• I was the camera man on our shoots, which meant I had to know how to use the camera and the tripod effectively. As well as getting the framing of the shot right, I also had to think about lighting. For the scene inside we used artificial lights to make it dark enough to seem mysterious, while still being able to see the protagonist.
• Continuity editing seamlessly puts the narrative together, we had to think about this a lot in our opening, as in the running scene we had to make it look like he was running continuously. This was a challenge and we had to work hard in order to achieve this.
• We tried zoom in our early shoots, which we then looked back on and realised it did not work well with our camera, we thought it made our film opening look tacky so we tried to not include much zoom in our final opening.

Our soundtrack was taken from a copyright free CD given to us by our media department.This was very useful as this meant we could get copyright free music to use as our soundtrack for our opening sequence.

I also used Premier to edit our footage. I used image manipulation to manipulate the image. I also used the cutting tool to cut out things from our footage we did not want in our final opening sequence. Also we used black and white which was easy to do in Premier. We used this to show the major difference between the two scenes, the one in black and white being a dark illegal activity, where as the running scene is in colour.