conventions of real media products?
In our project, we decided to film an opening of a mystery thriller involving, betrayal and murder in a Film-Noir style.
From research, we decided that the best decision for our group was to choose a piece of atmospheric music produced by 'Deep Focus' he is an up and coming DnB artist on YouTube and offers free music for his fans. So we didn't need any copyrights or anything as he said he would be pleased to get his music out there. I searched many different kind of music, and when i showed my group they all said it would reflect the mystery thriller of our project perfectly, and it did with many lessons used up by syncing the music and making it match to the shots we took, it went very well.Our group both liked the whole corruption of murders so we decided to base our synopsis on that. And from that we showed in our project different ways of how murder corruption could be achieved, we decided to use flash backs and memories. This will show an even more mysterious feel to the project.
As most noir films use first person voice over to narrate the story with flashbacks, our film opening also used these elements. This went well to show how Matt was feeling and was re-telling the story to the audience, but as we had to stick to a 2-3 minute limit we found it very hard to describe everything.
The murder that takes place in our film reflects the fact that noir films do not have happy endings, and the murder in our sequence is the enigma because Matt isn't the killer, and the audience never find out who actually 'dun it'. Just like a classic Film Noir.
(2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?
There are four characters in our final project, two having major parts and one minor. The two main characters are Matt and Caroline.
We wanted to show that Matt was an male adult between the ages of 18-25 and so we made deliberate choices about how he should be dressed and how he should act. A long balck jacket, light jeans and trainers were chosen. The cold, wintry weather added to the dark, shadowy mood of the film.
Noir films often contain a scene where one character isbetrayed and our Film Noir project represents that to. With Matt being set up for the murder of the femme-fatale possibly and ruining his life by getting caught by the police.We decided as a group that Matt should act in a stereotypical manner for this age group - unsmiling, moody and serious, and make him look like hitman. This also reflects the mood of a typical Noir thrillers, this adds alot of tension to the atmosphere and grips the audience more.
The second character of Caroline the femme fatale is deliberately shown to make her look a stand out and with the colour corrections this made it happen. Especially with the fur coat and the light hair colour this enabled us to show to the audience she was an important character.
We wanted to show that the two males should confront each other. Decided this should take place outdoors where it would make it feel like just another normal day. Noir films often take place in dark landscapes with very little lighting to create a sinister and gloomy atmosphere so we decided to set the confrontation in a glum place in the park. Here Leit hands the envelope which has details about the femme fatale and also how much the reward is for completing the task of killing her.
3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and
why?
Based on the opening sequence, its popularity would depend on the popularity of film noir at the time of making it and the demand for difference and choice. As teenagers are always looking for a choice of entertainment there will always be a market for films aimed at teenagers. For this reason, if we aimed our film at teenagers, then this shows that we would be aiming for a big major company to distribute our film, like Working Title as they would have the money to distribute our film, or maybe a televison channel like BBC Three or e4 and c4. However, the opening sequence to our film Under Cover Depression did not take up too much time to produce and there was hardly any money involved during production so it might appeal to smaller, independent film companies. An independent film like ours would need only a small budget for producing, marketing and distribution.
(4) Who would be the audience for your media product?
As a group we decided that the typical audience for our film would be around our age, in the regions of 15-25, Late teenage young aldults. The reason we have chosen this age range is because not only is it easier to know what people of our age are interested in, but we can add our knowledge of film noir from what we have learnt in theory, plus all the skills we have acquired through the Preliminary and Exchange Exercises, and combine these with our ideas and creativity skills to complete a film that teenagers are not going to get bored with after the first few seconds. Also we hope that this would attract to a wide as posible audience, and the most common ages where people are always looking into new media is late teens and young adults.
We have decided to rate our film a rating of '12'The reason why is because I think our film would be more a ‘12’ rating than an ‘15' or a '18' rating, as a lot more gore, drugs, violence, suicidal references, nudity, and possibly some exposed indecent [sexual] behaviour or sexual violence would have to be used to push the rating up to an '15' or ‘18’. And i would the BBCF would agre (Britsh board Classifcation of film)
(5) How did you attract/address your audience?
To attract an audience in our opening sequence, we cleverly used enigmas and mysterious circumstances, all of which would be revealed later in the full movie, yet the viewer would have to keep watching until the end of the film when all loose ends are tied up in the concluding stages of the movie. With egnima's attracting the audience we could tell that we had been sucessfull and we had positvie feedback.
We wanted to create a slow-paced opeining, with added slower paced music track which added a more noir-style effect to the project than what a fast paced track would. Plus, to slow the pace down even more, i edited the shots and slowed them down adding effects. The effects i used was the colour correction. I used it in the flashbacks to create a dreamy and much slower paced atmosphere.
We didn't keep the background music, because i feel that the music on it's own works a lot better than with background music. We made the music volume fade down to a lower level when the voiceovers came into use. This is so that Matt's voice was much clearer and louder.
Prior to this course, I had been used to windows computers, and have never used an Apple Mac before this was an unusual challenge for me to cope with it and i feel i have learnt a lot, but i still believe that windows computers are better and more practical. I am used to some begginer editing programmes and some professional editing software, this include Windows Movie Maker and Sony Vegas Pro 9, i still prefer Sony Vegas as i am used to it and it's has tons more effects than what Final Cut does on the Apple Mac.
During production, I used a DV-tape Camcorder. Prior to this course, I had only used a Tv to laptop recorder in my personal life. I have been used to using more complex, modern technologies so using an old-fashioned DV-cassette tape Camcorder was o.k but it was the first time using a good quality camcorder.
The editing software we used was “Final Cut Pro”.
(7) Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? (You can make reference to The Exchange too).
For our Preliminary Exercise, it was Me, Leit, Matt and Caroline, we had a problem with capturing the footage of the establishing shot of a person walking down a corridor and opening a door, because the corrider was to narrow but we over came this. We also had some issues with the sound and the microphone. We soon overcame this issue and resolved it.
We were set another task, to polish up our skills, where two characters were to exchange an item without talking. An easy to understand plot and a location that was best-suited to this type of story meant we had understood the interpretations of different actions within a sequence. Quick cuts between shots maintained rhythm and pace set by the chosen music. However their were some minor issues about placement of the characters and we have learnt not to do it again.When looking back at our pleminary exercise and what we have achieved with two people in our final project i think we have improved greatly and in some areas excelled other groups with only two people.
We discussed the job roles and made it equal,as a group we shared the pre production work, and i helped with the logging sheets, call sheets and shot list sheet also i helped with the camera work, and i did most of the editing whit help from the group.
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