Our film incorporates generic conventions of gangster crime movies since we have used guns and fast cars in the start and end of our media product and also we have a poker game going on in the middle of our game which is classic in many gangster crime movies. Our film develops these conventions by having an old car in a modern setting and also old revolvers instead of modern hand guns. The conventions we used are taken by inspiration from such films as Snatch for the and Oceans 11/12/13 for the poker scene. Our film has the sam sort of characters and their roles as the film snatched, like in my 15 minute film analysis of Snatch i point out that there is a lot of non-diagetic sound from one of the characters explaining the backgrounds to other characters that are on the screen. Also with the freeze frames in the opening sequence showing a short clip with a brief insight into their role in the film, then the short clip is followed by a freeze frame with and edited colour background along with the characters name and/or nickname.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
In our media product, we have no women but this does not mean we are showing them as passive, but we are trying to represent a hierarchy of males showing that the four males who are sat inside the garage are lower down the hierarchy than the other males who are outside.
Our target audience is males above the age of 18 (since the age cerificate is an 18) so our representation of the males in our media product link together with the target audience since we are aiming this at males.
Characters from our opening sequence -
Characters form the opening sequence of Snatch -
Since we took our inspiration from the film Snatch we attempted to do our character introductions in our opening sequence similar to the ones in Snatch. Both are similar with a freeze frame of the character with and edited colour background including their name and/or nickname. The purpse of the freeze frames is to emphasise the character and show something about the character that is related to their role in the film. In both of the opening sequences they only have males as the main characters which shows male dominance in both opening sequences of the films.
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Our media product could be produced by a major Hollywood studio eg 20th Century Fox, Warnoer Bros ect, since it has many similar films in the genre that have been made and are successful. If it was produced by a major studio it would most likely be released by as a blockbuster film since there is a large audience for this genre of film. Our distribution company as it is stated in our research will be Metrodome Distrubtion.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
Considering the narrative and style of your media product and including that our age certificate is an 18 the age would be 18 and above and the target gender would be males as we have found out from our questionnaires that we have produced and sent out. Other films that are similar to ours are Snatch and The Departed both of these films have similar target audiences as our film does.
As i have just stated the most suitable ceritification criteria for our film would be an 18.
(http://www.bbfc.co.uk/)
5. How did you attract/address you audience?
Since our target audience are males over the age of 18, there are point in our film that would appeal to them. In our 2 minutes there is a poker scene that many people can refer to and also there are cars and guns involved which can be considered as a more male icon. In our ideas for the rest of the film if we could have filmed it would be more action sequences including robberies and possibly shoot outs between the police and our team, which would also appeal to a male audience.
We use a shot from inside the garage which is from the point of view of the poker players as the first 4 main characters open the garage and draw their guns, pointing them at the poker players and Chad Dawson and then we cut back to the poker players to see the expressions of them . We use this effect to show how shocked the poker players are to see the 4 main charcters.
6. What have you learnt about technology from the process of constructing the product?
The camera equipment we used was very advanced so there was a lot of strengths and only a few weaknesses, the strengths were mainly 20x optical zoom with high quality footage that can be recorded in HD and widescreen. Some weaknesses was that because it was an advanced camera it was very large which made it harder to transport to different locations. Some difficulties we had, besides the size of the camera, since we was doing outdoor and indoor scenes and a mixture of both, lighting and white balance was difficult to get right, we rsolved them by doing multiple takes on the same part untill the lighting and white balance was right, trial and error method. The editing software we used was Final Cut HD which allowed us to easily edit our film together and cut bits out that were not needed. The main efct that helped us create the overall look of our product where, black and white and fade in/fade out.
7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
During our planning stage to what we wanted to do in as our media product we had many ideas on what to film, so we wrote down all our ideas and short listed them and then voted which idea we thought would work the best and would have an easier flow of filming and editing. Before we filmed we had plan out the whole story of our 2 minutes before we filmed including sound, types of shots and locations, we had also planned out when to edit it and to edit what shots together. All of this made filming and editing our 2 minutes easy and it all ran smoothly. We used specific shots like, we have a few match-on-actions and shot reverse-shot, we also used wide angled shots close ups when we was introducing the characters at the start of our opening sequence. I feel that my end product will fulfill the task of the 2 minutes opening to the film since we have done everything that is needed of us and made the film the best we could we the equipment and time we had available to us. We have shown our 2 minute productions to a selection of our target audience and after they watched it we filmed them so that we could recieve feedback on their thoughts and comments of the introduction. A few things they said were:
- Good stylistic editing.
- Use of black and white effect was good.
- Good costumes - Shirt and tye etc.
- Good story.
- Use of props and setting was very good.
- Character introductions was good.
- Music brought the introduction up to date.
- Smooth transitions.
This is the video of the footage of the feedback that we recorded:
